Inside New York [antikvár]

2-3 Upper Manhattan seen frvmiJew Jersey. 4 Times Square, which opens out at the intersection of Broadway and 7ih Avenue, owes its name to the Hew Yortt Times which moved here in 1905. 6-7 Up to the 1970s, Padi Avenue was an enormous area covered with factories, raitmad tractis, rubbish dumps and maishaiiing yards. With the construction of Grand Central station, the area became the site of luxury apartments and office blocks. /s there anything left to say about New York? Certainly the secrets of Manhattan seem to have been almost completely revealed by numerous guide-books, thousands of feature articles and hundreds of stories related by those who live there. Yet those who know New York well claim that there is no other city in the world which is changing so rapidly Such changes are not limited to places to visit such as restaurants and shops: the way of life in the city is also changing. To give just one example, a guide-book published a few years ago would never have mentioned the lower part of Harlem, the eastern part of the Village or the neighborhood near Colombia University as places to visit. And who could ever have imagined that luxury shops, boutiques and antique dealers would have abandoned their traditional sites in Fifth, Madison or Park Avenue to move elsewhere? Today, even the most casual visitor quickly becomes aware that in New York, constant change is a way of life. Certainly New York is not only Manhattan, and this is something which is all too often forgotten. The tour organizers forget it and probably many New Yorkers have never been to Coney Island or Long Island. Butthe real "explorers" of this city prefer places which are less traditional and less well-known by foreigners. Twenty minutes by ferry takes one to Staten Island, for example, where one can dine overlooking the sea and enjoying one of the most fascinating views in the world. The other outer boroughs of New York - Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx - can all be glimpsed from a Circle Line cruise around Manhattan. Yet, New York City is still a place to live and to enjoy to the full, even though one realizes, right from the start, that one can never really get to know and understand it. There are too many realities, too many different situations for one to adapt to. New York is continually changing and her inhabitants are constantly searching anxiously for something or someone. One piece of advice could, however, be given and that is to try to discover the city on foot. Walking can be tiring, but public transport and taxis can rescue the footsore. Every visitor finds his own way of tracking down his own version of New York. "The present is so important in New York that one tends to forget the past", wrote John Jay Chapman as far back as 1909, and it might therefore not be superfluous to steal a glance at the history of a place which, for each of us, has always represented the future. The first men who fought for that land which was to become the state of New York were North American Indians. Some Algonquin tribes lived on Long Island and in the southern valleys of the Hudson. The Algonquin people were soon overcome by war-mongering Iroquois tribes under the leadership of their great chief Hiawatha who established an advanced culture in New York state. The Iroquois nations had just finished organizing a system of social order when the whites arrived. In 1524 Giovanni da Verazzano first set eyes on what was to become New York. It was a fleeting visit and a storm forced the Italian navigator to move out to sea again. Almost a century went by before another explorer crossed the strait which leads from Lower Hudson Bay to present-day Manhattan. With a crew of 18, Henry Hudson re-discovered Manhattan Island and