New York City [antikvár]

New York City (pop. 7,422,800, metró, area 9,634,000; alt. to 430 ft.) NEW YORK is a city of superlatives, where everything is biggest, tallest, longest, gaudiest and fastest. The largest city in the Nation, New York is the financial, publishing and entertainment capital of the country and home of the United Nations. It is a teeming, busy city that is always in a hurry. It is a magnet that draws native Americans to its manmade canyons and it is the city most foreigners have in mind when they think of this country. New York is a city of contrasts where, with somé 26,303 people per square mile, more than 17 percent of the totál land area is devoted to parks and playgrounds; where the World Trade Center is only minutes away from the farmlands of Staten Island; where the glitter of Broadway is a 50c ride from the despair of the Bowery. A city with hundreds of museums and art galleries and millions of people, it still manages to contain two wildlife refuges and a bird sanctuary. It is a city of five boroughs—Brooklyn, The Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Richmond (Staten Island)—with each borough striving to retain its own identity lest it be swallowed up in the hectic pace of Manhattan. If the United States is the "melting pot" of the world, certainly New York City is the country's biggest kettle. Nearly 50 percent of the city's polyglot population is of foreign birth or parentage; radio stations broadcast in at least 16 languages and daily newspapers are printed in 6 foreign languages; the public library lends books in somé 30 languages. New York is a complex city with myriad problems. The solution to at least somé of these difficulties has been to cannibalize block after block and build something bigger, but not always better. At no time has this trend been under greater attack than at present. By its very location, New York was destined from the beginning to be one of the country's leading cities. Almost equidistant between the metropolitan areas of Boston and Washington, the city is situated at the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers, with easy access to the Atlantic Ocean. The opening of the Erié Canal in 1824 provided an inexpensive means of moving tonnage between the Great Lakes region and New York harbor. Thus New York City, with one of the finest natural har-bors in the world, became the export and import center for all goods moving on the canal. Today the port of New York, biggest in the world, clears more than 26,000 vessels a year and ships 40 percent of the Nation's trade. Continued