New York City

Munsee-speaking Lenape lived across what is now the city, in a homeland called Lenapehoking. In 1624 the Dutch founded a fur-trading post on Governors Island, began Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan the next year, and in 1626 Peter Minuit bought the island from the Canarsie, a small Lenape band, for goods worth 60 guilders. New Amsterdam grew slowly at the island's southern tip, protected from 1653 by a wooden stockade along what became Wall Street. In 1664 the English took it without a fight and renamed it after the Duke of York, the future James II.

After the Revolution the port boomed. The population rose from 60,000 to 3.43 million during the 19th century, and by 1860 Irish and German immigrants each made up about a quarter of it. From 1892 to 1954 about 12 million immigrants were processed at Ellis Island, welcomed by the Statue of Liberty. In 1898 Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island were consolidated into a single city, and the subway, opened in 1904, bound it together; by the early 1930s the metropolitan area had passed 10 million, the world's first megacity. In the Depression the reformer Fiorello La Guardia became mayor and Tammany Hall's long political dominance ended.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 brought the greatest loss of life and economic damage to the city; the World Trade Center site was rebuilt with a new tower, a memorial and a museum. Hurricane Sandy killed at least 43 people in the city in 2012, and in 2020 New York became an early global centre of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 census counted a record 8.8 million residents. Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat and democratic socialist elected in November 2025, became mayor on 1 January 2026.

New York is the country's capital of finance, publishing, theatre and art, and one of the most diverse cities on earth: an estimated 800 languages are spoken, and the metropolitan area has the largest foreign-born population of any in the world. Waves of immigration have given each borough its own character, from Chinatown and the Lower East Side to Little Italy on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx and the many Asian, Latin American and Caribbean communities of Queens and Brooklyn.

Broadway's forty-one large theatres make the city a world centre of English- language theatre, and the Tony Awards are presented here each year. Harlem was the centre of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and hip hop was born in the Bronx. Carnegie Hall, the Apollo in Harlem and countless clubs keep music alive at every level, while the Met, MoMA and the Guggenheim anchor one of the world's great concentrations of museums.

New Yorkers are known for speed, directness and a dry sense of humour, and the traditional local accent drops the "r" after vowels — "New Yawk". Sport divides loyalties between the Yankees and the Mets, and the Thanksgiving parade, the marathon and the New Year's Eve ball drop in Times Square are national rituals.

About 8.6 million people lived in the city in 2025, according to the latest estimate, making it by far the largest in the country and its most densely populated major city; more than 20 million live in the metropolitan area. Manhattan is the most densely populated of the five boroughs, while much of Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island is made up of rowhouses, apartment buildings and quieter residential streets.

Wall Street makes the city a global financial centre, alongside media, advertising, law, fashion, technology, health care and tourism; a record 66.6 million visitors came in 2019. The cost of living is the pressing issue: in 2025 New York was ranked the most expensive city in the world for expatriates, with the highest rents of any American city.

Life runs on the subway, which carries commuters around the clock, and on the corner deli or bodega. Many residents live in rented apartments, and parks such as Central Park and Prospect Park serve as shared back gardens. Traffic remains among the worst in the world, which the congestion toll on Manhattan south of 61st Street, introduced in January 2025, aims to reduce.

The city's classic foods came with its immigrants. Central and Eastern European Jews brought the New York bagel, cheesecake, hot dogs, knishes and the delicatessen, and with the Irish gave the city its pastrami and corned beef. Italian immigrants brought the large, thin-crusted pizza sold by the foldable slice, and the egg cream — milk, chocolate syrup and seltzer, with neither egg nor cream — is an old soda-fountain drink.

The bagel with cream cheese and lox, smoked salmon, is the city's signature breakfast, sold by bakeries and by the "appetizing" shops of the Lower East Side, which specialise in smoked fish. Delis serve towering pastrami sandwiches on rye, and street carts sell hot dogs.

Every cuisine of the world is somewhere in the five boroughs. Chinatown in Manhattan and Flushing in Queens are centres of Chinese cooking, Arthur Avenue in the Bronx keeps Italian delis and bakeries, and food halls such as Chelsea Market gather many kitchens under one roof. Neighbourhoods across Queens and Brooklyn offer Caribbean, Latin American, South Asian and West African food, often far from the tourist areas.