🇺🇸 United States · East Coast
There are cities you think you know before you arrive, from having seen them so often in the movies, and New York is the queen of them all. The 'Big Apple' is an experience that overflows any expectation: the roar of Times Square with its giant screens, the vertical mass of Manhattan's skyscrapers, the yellow cabs, the steam rising from the asphalt, the bustle of millions of people from every corner of the planet. It is probably the most iconic city in the world, and walking it is like stepping inside a film that never ends.
But New York is not only a postcard: it is one of humanity's great cultural capitals. It is the Met and the MoMA, the Broadway musicals, the jazz of Harlem, the most diverse food scene imaginable. It is Central Park, that enormous green lung in the heart of Manhattan; it is the Statue of Liberty welcoming those who arrive by sea; it is Wall Street and the money of the world; it is the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk. Every neighborhood —from SoHo to the Village, from Chelsea to Harlem, from the Bronx to Brooklyn— is almost a city in itself, with its own accent, its own food and its own people.
This guide walks you through the essentials of New York with a practical, warm eye: how to go up to the observation decks, which museums to choose, how to get around on a subway that never stops, which neighborhoods to visit and how to make the most of an enormous, inexhaustible city. New York can be overwhelming at first, but with a little planning it delivers some of the most vibrant and unforgettable days of any trip.
Before the Europeans, the island of Manhattan was inhabited by the Lenape, an Algonquian-speaking people who called it 'Mannahatta'. In 1609, the English explorer Henry Hudson, in the service of the Dutch East India Company, reached the area and explored the river that today bears his name. Around 1624 the Dutch founded a trading settlement and, in 1626, the director Peter Minuit 'bought' the island from the Lenape, founding New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan. In 1664, the English took the colony without a fight and renamed it New York in honor of the Duke of York. The city grew as a trading port and was briefly, between 1785 and 1790, the first capital of the United States: George Washington was sworn in as the first president at Federal Hall in 1789. In the 19th century, the opening of the Erie Canal (1825) confirmed it as a great port, and waves of immigrants —Irish, Germans, Italians, Eastern European Jews— arrived through Castle Garden and, from 1892, through Ellis Island, greeted by the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France inaugurated in 1886. In 1898, the five boroughs joined together as Greater New York. The 20th century made it the capital of the modern world: the skyscrapers, Wall Street, Broadway, the UN headquarters. On 11 September 2001, the attacks destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a wound the city turned into memory and reconstruction. The full story is on our history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the skyscrapers, the island we now call Manhattan was inhabited by the Lenape, an Algonquian-speaking people who lived in villages scattered across the region. They called it 'Mannahatta', a name usually translated as 'island of many hills'. The Lenape lived from hunting, the abundant fishing in the waters around the island, gathering and the cultivation of corn, beans and squash. The geography we know today as one of the most urbanized on the planet was then a landscape of forests, streams, marshes and hills, extremely rich in wildlife.
The first documented European contact with the area is attributed to the Florentine navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano, who in 1524, in the service of France, skirted the coast and briefly entered the bay. But it was the Englishman Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch East India Company in search of a passage to Asia, who in 1609 explored the region in detail aboard the Halve Maen ('Half Moon') and sailed up the great river that today bears his name. His reports on the region's wealth of furs awoke the commercial interest of the Dutch.
Within a few years, Dutch traders began frequenting the region for the lucrative fur trade with the Native peoples. And so, on Lenape land, the European settlement that would give rise to the city began to take shape. The encounter between the two worlds, as in so many places in the Americas, would bring trade, but also the diseases and conflicts that would decimate the indigenous population.
Around 1624, the newly created Dutch West India Company established the first permanent settlements in the region, as part of the colony of New Netherland ('Nieuw-Nederland'). The following year, in 1625, the town of New Amsterdam ('Nieuw-Amsterdam') was founded at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan, and it would be the original nucleus of the future New York.
In 1626, the colony's director, Peter Minuit, was the protagonist of one of the most celebrated and at the same time most controversial episodes in the city's history: the 'purchase' of the island of Manhattan from the Lenape, supposedly for goods valued at 60 guilders (popular legend speaks of 'trinkets' or of 24 dollars, a much later and disputed figure). Historians point out that there was probably a deep cultural misunderstanding: the Native peoples did not conceive of land as property that could be sold definitively, but as a shared right of use.
New Amsterdam grew as a cosmopolitan and disorderly trading port, with a population of very diverse origins and languages, devoted above all to commerce. Under the government of the last director, the energetic and authoritarian Peter Stuyvesant, a defensive palisade was built at the town's northern boundary, on the spot occupied today, precisely, by Wall Street (the 'street of the wall'). From that Dutch inheritance the present map keeps neighborhood names such as Brooklyn (from Breukelen), Harlem (from Haarlem) and the Bronx.
The commercial and naval rivalry between the United Provinces (Holland) and England ended up reaching the small American colony. In 1664, amid those tensions, an English fleet sent by the Duke of York (brother of King Charles II) arrived off New Amsterdam and demanded its surrender. Governor Peter Stuyvesant wanted to resist, but the inhabitants, unwilling to fight and unhappy with his authoritarian rule, persuaded him to capitulate without firing a shot. The colony changed hands peacefully.
The English renamed the city New York, in honor of its new owner, the Duke of York, who would later reign as James II. Apart from a brief interlude when the Dutch recovered it for a few months (1673-1674, when they called it 'New Orange'), the city remained definitively in the British orbit. Under English rule, New York kept growing as a trading port and gained importance within the Thirteen Colonies.
The 18th century brought revolutionary ferment. New York was a key setting of the War of Independence: after the patriot defeat at the Battle of Long Island (1776), the city was occupied by the British for almost the whole war, and was only evacuated in 1783. A few years later, in the new independent country, New York lived through one of its most solemn moments: between 1785 and 1790 it was the first capital of the United States, and on 30 April 1789 George Washington was sworn in there, at Federal Hall on Wall Street, as the nation's first president.
The 19th century turned New York into the great metropolis of America. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which connected the port with the Great Lakes and the interior of the continent, sent its commercial growth soaring and confirmed it as the country's main port. The city filled with people, with trade and with opportunities, and became the dream destination of millions of Europeans fleeing poverty, hunger and persecution.
That role as gateway to the 'New World' was symbolized forever in two monuments. In 1886 the Statue of Liberty was inaugurated, a colossal gift from the people of France designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, with the internal structure by Gustave Eiffel. 'Liberty Enlightening the World' rose in the bay with her torch aloft, and she was the first thing seen by the immigrants who arrived after weeks at sea. On her pedestal was engraved the Emma Lazarus poem that immortalized her as a beacon for those seeking a new life: "Give me your tired, your poor...".
From 1892, and until 1954, nearby Ellis Island served as the country's main federal immigration station. Through its halls passed more than twelve million people —Italians, Irish, Eastern European Jews, Germans, Greeks, Poles and people of so many other origins—, who were there registered, medically examined and authorized (or not) to enter. It is reckoned that an enormous proportion of present-day Americans have at least one ancestor who came through Ellis Island. That mass immigration forged New York's deepest character: that of a city built by people from all over the world.
In 1898 came a decisive event for the urban geography: the 'Great Consolidation', by which the city of New York —until then limited to Manhattan and part of the Bronx— joined with the neighboring cities and towns to form the metropolis of five boroughs we know today: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. At a stroke, New York became one of the largest and most populous cities in the world.
The 20th century was that of its vertical transformation. The invention of the elevator and steel structures made it possible to build ever higher, and New York filled with skyscrapers competing to touch the sky: the Flatiron Building, the Woolworth, the Chrysler (1930), with its unmistakable art deco crown, and the Empire State Building (1931), which held the title of tallest building in the world for almost forty years. The Manhattan skyline became one of the most iconic images on the planet and the symbol of American modernity and economic power.
The city was also the cultural and financial heart of the nation: Wall Street as the world center of finance (whose crash of 1929 unleashed the Great Depression), Broadway as the capital of theater, Harlem as the cradle of the African American 'Renaissance' and of jazz, and, after the Second World War, the seat of the United Nations. New York established itself as one of the capitals of the world, a magnet for artists, immigrants, dreamers and the ambitious from everywhere.
On the morning of 11 September 2001, New York —and the whole world— lived through one of the most tragic days in contemporary history. In a coordinated terrorist attack, two hijacked commercial airliners were crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, in Lower Manhattan. The two towers, symbols of the city, collapsed within hours. In that day's attacks (which also included the strike on the Pentagon and a fourth plane brought down in Pennsylvania) almost three thousand people died. It was a deep wound in the heart of the city.
The New York response combined mourning with a remarkable will to rebuild. On the site of the towers rose the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, with its two enormous pools set on the footprints of the buildings and the names of the victims engraved in bronze, a place of memory and reflection. And, beside it, rose One World Trade Center, the tallest skyscraper in the country, with a symbolic height of 1.776 feet in memory of the year of independence: a gesture of resilience in the face of tragedy.
In the following decades, New York kept reinventing itself. The port area and former industrial neighborhoods were transformed: the elevated High Line park was born on abandoned tracks, the Hudson Yards development with its skyscrapers and observation decks, and the renewal of the Brooklyn waterfront. The city also went through the hard blow of the covid-19 pandemic at the start of the 2020s, from which it recovered with its characteristic energy. Today New York remains what it has been for more than a century: one of the great cultural, financial and symbolic capitals of the planet, a city made by people from all over the world and in perpetual transformation.