New York City

New York City is a city at the mouth of the Hudson River in the state of New York, built around a natural harbor on the Atlantic coast. Its nickname, the Big Apple, spread from horse racing writers of the 1920s to the whole city. The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, has stood at the entrance to the harbor since the 1880s.

The Dutch West India Company founded New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan in the 1620s. England took the colony in 1664 and renamed it after the Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II. George Washington took his oath as the first president of the United States in the city in 1789, when it was the national capital. The Erie Canal of the 1820s linked the port with the Great Lakes, and millions of immigrants arrived through its harbor over the following century. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island were joined into one city at the end of the 19th century, and the first subway line opened in the early 20th century.

Pfizer, the drug maker behind Lipitor and Viagra, has its headquarters in Manhattan, as do Colgate-Palmolive, known for its toothpaste and soap, and Estée Lauder, which sells cosmetics and perfumes under its own name and the Clinique brand. The Port of New York and New Jersey handles container ships at terminals on both sides of the harbor.

Central Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the 1850s as a landscape of meadows, lakes and woods in the middle of Manhattan. The Metropolitan Museum of Art on its eastern edge holds collections from ancient Egypt to modern America. Broadway gave its name to the theaters of the Theater District around Times Square, where musicals such as The Phantom of the Opera set records for long runs. The Empire State Building, finished in the 1930s, was the tallest building in the world for four decades.