New York

New York, City of, situated at the mouth of the Hudson River and formed of the five boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Richmond, and Queens, is the largest city of the U.S. The first white occupation occurred when Hudson established a trading post on Manhattan in 1609, and New Amsterdam was the capital of New Netherland long before Minuit's purchase of the island from the Indians (1626). The events of the Dutch occupation, until the British seized the colony in 1664, are widely known through Irving's burlesque Knickerbocker's History of New York. Despite the rebellion led by Leisler, New York grew rapidly during the century of English occupation, although it remained smaller and less important than Boston and Philadelphia. King's College (Columbia) was founded in 1754, and many of the city's theaters, newspapers, and educational institutions had already been established. It was a center of disaffection during the events that led up to the Revolution, and Washington made New York his headquarters after the British captured Boston. The Battle of Long Island was the city's chief event of the war, and as the national capital (1784–90) it was the scene of Washington's inauguration and Farewell Address.

It soon became the principal city of the U.S., having a population of 60,000 in 1800, over a half‐million in 1850 (surpassing all European cities except London and Paris), 3,347,202 in 1900, and 7,322,564 in 1990. The building of railroads, the opening of the Erie Canal (1825), and the importance of New York harbor contributed to the city's rise and to the increasing significance of Wall Street, while Tammany Hall maintained political domination for more than a century. The growth in population has been the result of three streams of immigration: (1) from many foreign countries, which gave rise to such settlements as those on the Lower East Side; (2) from the Southern states to the black community of Harlem; and (3) the influx from all parts of the U.S. of persons with careers in business, finance, and the arts, in all of which New York City is considered to be the national capital. As the home of the United Nations it is also a cosmopolitan international capital.

The city's many educational institutions include Columbia, the College of the City of New York, Fordham, New York University, the New School for Social Research, and a great number of specialized ones. Other major cultural institutions include Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts with buildings devoted to opera, symphony, and theater, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New York Public Library. The city's vitality in the arts and literature is not necessarily associated with such imposing institutions, for its distinction is often that created by individuals, who at one time made Greenwich Village a locale where bohemians lived, or who made up the Algonquin Round Table, a gathering of wits. Similarly, in recent times the little theater of off‐Broadway or off‐off‐Broadway has been more dynamic than that of the established stages.

During its long history the numerous literary movements, groups, and figures have been as diverse as the city itself. After the Dutch poet Steendam and such English colonial writers as Cadwallader Colden and the authors of Androboros, the significant authors include Freneau, Paine, Barlow, and Hamilton during the Revolution; such figures of the early 19th century as Dunlap, C.B. Brown, J.H. Payne, Irving, Paulding, the Knickerbocker Group, Cooper, Bryant, Poe, Bayard Taylor, and the Duyckincks; Whitman and the bohemian group at Pfaff's Cellar; other 19th‐century figures, including Parke Godwin, William Winter, Howells, Henry James Melville, Stedman, and Brander Matthews; Stephen Crane, Riis, Saltus, D.G. Phillips, Steffens, O. Henry, H.C. Bunner, R.H. Davis, Huneker, Edith Wharton, and other pre‐World War I authors; the Greenwich Village writers; and such modern figures as Mencken, Nathan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Christopher Morley, Dorothy Parker, Kaufman, Dos Passos, Van Vechten, the Harlem authors, Ernest Poole, James Oppenheim, Hart Crane, Odets, Irwin Shaw, F.P. Adams, Maxwell Bodenheim, Michael Gold, Kreymborg, Konrad Bercovici, some of whom are also to be included in writers from Brooklyn who interpreted Jewish culture. Other more recent New York authors include the so‐called New York school, Louis Auchincloss, Peter Beagle, Jane Bowles, E.L. Doctorow, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Frederick Morgan, Howard Moss, Jack Richardson, and Muriel Rukeyser. Tom Wolfe caught the spirit of the racial politics, financial maneuvering, and criminal justice system of the city in the 1980s in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.