Fast Facts about New York

Did You Know…?

• New York City was briefly the U.S. capital from 1789 to 1790!
• The world’s largest Gothic Cathedral is the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and it’s still under construction today as you read this. Its first stone was put in place in the year 1892. The cathederal was originally a Romanesque design and was converted Gothic later in 1911.
• There are 6,374.6 miles of streets in New York City.
• The Greenwich Village Halloween Parade is the country’s largest public Halloween parade.
• The New York Mercantile Exchange is world’s largest physical commodity futures exchange.
• Macy’s, the world’s largest retail store, covers 2.1 million square feet of space and stocks over 1/2 million different items.
• The New York Botanical Garden is home to the nation’s largest Victorian glasshouse, the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. This is a New York City landmark that has showcased plant collections since 1902.
• The Statue of Liberty’s index finger is eight feet long.
• The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is long enough (4,260 feet) that the towers are a bit “off parallel” to accommodate the curve of the earth.
• New York City has over 570 miles of waterfront property.
• Some of the immigrants who passed through Ellis Island and went on to illustrious careers are: Irving Berlin, musician, arrived in 1893 from Russia; Marcus Garvey, politician, arrived 1916 from Jamaica; Bob Hope, comedian, arrived in 1908 from England; Knute Rockne, football coach, arrived in 1893 from Norway; and the von Trapp family of “Sound of Music” fame, arrived in 1938 from Austria. (Source: “Ellis Island & Statue of Liberty,” Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island.
• The Consolidated Edison electrical substation (which was built in 1975), has a mural of the Brooklyn Bridge (painted by artist Richard Haas) on one side to help it blend in with the city scape.
• Queens, NY is the ‘home of jazz,’ and has been called that since the early 1920′s. Queens was home to many jazz musicians who turned into jazz legends.  Some of these legends include Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dizzie Gillespie.
• The Conference House (built around 1680 or so, also called the Billop House), was the actual meeting place where the British and our Continental Congress met in 1776 to try and avoid the American Revolution. British Admiral Lord Richard Howe met with Benjamin Franklin, Edward Rutledge, and John Adams to discuss diplomatic solutions, but this did not prevent the revolution from starting.
• The 2 mile boardwalk at Brooklyn’s South Beach is the fourth longest in the world.
• John Hertz, who founded the Yellow Cab Company in 1907, chose yellow because he read a survey by the University of Chicago that found yellow was the easiest color to spot.
• The triangular shape of the Flatiron Building (an early skyscraper on 23rd Street) produced wind currents that made women’s skirts blow around and caused police to create the term “23 skiddoo” when in the area.
• It is rumored that Dutch settlers bought Manhattan from Native American inhabitants for about $24 worth of trinkets.
• Broadway, originating from Lower Manhattan at Bowling Green and ending in Albany, is one of the world’s longest streets at 150 mi (241 km). This famous street is officially called NY Highway 9.
• Manhattan’s downtown southern tip area is mostly garbage and landfill. The actual “natural” Manhattan makes up the majority of the total area in the downtown region.
• Central Park in the middle of NYC’s Manhattan area covers a larger area than  the entire Monaco!
• Staten Island residents voted to secede from the city in 1993, and were not successful; this kind of legal action required approval from the state legislature.
• New York City is located on the Eastern Atlantic coast of the United States, at the mouth of the Hudson River.
• New York City is divided into five boroughs separated by water. Brooklyn and Queens are located along the western portion of Long Island. Staten Island and Manhattan have their own separate land, while the Bronx (in the northern part), remains attached to the mainland.
• By 1790, New York was the country’s largest city, and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, linked New York with the Great Lakes area, which in turn caused even more growth of the state.