New York City 101
Salutations to New York City,—or as its residents respectfully whisper with reverence more often reserved for sacrosanct objects, “The Big Apple.” What could be better appropriately likened with city-squealing chic than to give your steel-gray city of high-rises its name after a farm market delicacy?
This glittering monument to human hubris stretches grandly along a corridor of five boroughs as a shimmery disaster waiting to happen. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island—all jewels of astronomically outrageous rents and urbanscapes of barrenness. It looks as though city zoning commissioners drew a map, closed their eyes, threw darts at a map and yelled, “These randomly selected hunks of property shall be the glory of man!”
Just picture this utopian scene: 8.5 million human beings packed into 300 square miles to serve America’s most populous city. More human bodies per square inch than a Black Friday mall-goer throng! Room? Who needs room when you can luxuriate in the bliss of inhaling a nostril-full of your fellow human being’s pit with the added advantage of paying a tidy $4,000 a month for a closet Realtors call a “cozy studio with character”?
But hold on–still more human suffering to tell! More than 20 million live in this greater metropolitan area, heaven forbid 8.5 million wasn’t suffering enough in and of itself in a geographic region. The city shines with open-eyed 800 languages spoken within city limits that has led it to gain its reputation as the world’s most linguistically diverse city petri dish. Nothing speaks quite so movingly as not being able to communicate to 799 out of every 800 neighbors as you are crammed together on subway trains full of garbage smells as much as vapors and pee–summer months especially due to hot air and humidity making all of this city an olfactory petri dish of human suffering.
Let’s discuss those sweet humble beginnings of New York City because what every magnificent city needs is an appropriately tall-talesque mythos of beginnings. Dutch colonists passed by Manhattan Island as soon as 1624 and gazed upon one another and thought to themselves, “Just right! That’d be a cool place to set up a trading post!” And they re-named it Fort Amsterdam, with that sense of originality that comes with naming places after your home city. The colony was re-named New Amsterdam in 1626 and remained thus for a whole 38 years until English colonists passed by with their heavenly property entourage and re-named it after the Duke of York in 1664. There’s nothing that instills you with colonial superiority quite like a name switcheroo!
This city we know now was the brainchild of its 1898 consolidation of its original five founding boroughs—a experiment in politics which effectively shouted, “You know what this pile of an urban experiment needs? More mess!” Because what this city actually needed was to take five discrete municipalities and turn them into one big super-municipality catastrophe zone.
The heart of New York is on Wall Street nowadays, that sacrosanct shrine of capitalism where titans of finance from all corners of the world gather daily to play the most costly game of Monopoly the world can conceive. The city is the domain of the world of NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange, and while one ginormous financial casino wasn’t enough to satiate this casino paradise, those parties have proclaimed New York as “the world’s premier financial center” and “the most economically powerful city on Earth” with a gross metropolitan product of over $2.16 trillion. That’s richer than many countries are! Certainly all that glorious affluence has placed all of the city ailments in remission and enabled a utopia of city dwellers’ happiness, right? Right?
Well, just barely. Its 24/7 rapid transit (what’s more “rapid” than spending 20 minutes waiting for late subways filled with the stench of broken hopes seething in human juices), New York City has its highest traffic jam by car in the world. Who would ever have imagined there might be such unpleasant side effects of cramming million souls and cars into close spaces?
It’s even had the honor of being the “most expensive city on planet Earth for expats” in 2025. Fifth Avenue is still the most expensive store street on Earth, because of course whoever came up with that thought they could sell hot dogs for $50 each as they seek to comply with its tradition of being fiscally responsible.
More ultra high net worths, billionaires, and millionaires are located in New York City than anywhere else on Earth. The working class human beings are nonetheless only just about able to afford to rent tiny studios which to them are luxury prison cells. They at least get to be able to reside within proximity to wealth they never will ever even come into touch with or ever physically benefit from firsthand, though!
This city’s summer season this year is deserving of mention for putting Manhattan through an olfactory obstacle course. Just attempt this: trash rotting on sidewalks, exhaust smoke with humidity, and sweet pee aroma wafting out of each subway station, all combining to create an aromatic whole that will torment tourism all of forever. Not so blissfully. It is living in a giant terrarium of human ordure and squashed aspiration and splatters of tears by freshly minted college graduates discovering their $200,000 degree qualifies them for internshipships unpaid.
That’s New York City for you—all that wonderful chaos. The city that never sleeps, largely because sound pollution keeps no one asleep and rent that has everyone running around with three jobs just to stay afloat. It’s the greatest city on earth—if by great you mean giving your nose over to suffer along with 8.5 million other suffering souls who all swear on their lives that this is its zenith of achievement of human civilization.
Cheers to you for simply being present in New York City—even where dreams come to pricey crash, and everyone is too busy to be on time to bother appreciating that they are living an amazing pricey delusion which fooled everyone to believe that it is success.
Brief History of New York
Take this scenario: the most valuable tract of land on the planet is a mosquito-infested swamp. That is what New York City started out with—a story so absurd that TV reality shows are too mundane by comparison.
Way before any human beings ever imagined packing 8 million people onto a tiny island, there were tranquil existences by folks who were known as Lenape. No $15 sandwiches. No subway angst. No overpriced bodegas at all. And then the Europeans showed up with maps, misplaced hubris, and an absolute conviction that finding populated land is “discovery.”
Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed as far as New York Harbor in 1524, took a look around, and proclaimed the entire shebang French property. What finer proof of ownership than arriving uninvited and staking a claim by planting a flag? Spanish navigator Estevao Gomes trumped him by giving the Hudson River the new name of “Rio de San Antonio” on his 1525 visit. Henry Hudson sailed into the harbor in 1609 in search of Asia—the very finest navigating at its finest—and claimed it all for the Dutch. The land by now had been “claimed” as much as a disputed Midtown parking meter.
The Dutch founded New Amsterdam in 1624, showing their fabled shrewdness by naming their New World colony. New Amsterdam. Revolutionary. Or take the most mythical real-estate transaction ever: Peter Minuit supposedly purchased Manhattan for 60 guilders—some $900 today. The same island upon which studio apartments today cost $3,000 a month was sold for less than the cost of a decent MetroCard. Real-estate agents today cry with envy.
Director-General Peter Stuyvesant ruled from 1647 and became infamous as history’s first fun police. He regulated the sale of booze, ran churches, and drained all the fun from colonial life. That’s close to treason in New York’s eyes.
The English arrived in 1664 and politely requested that Stuyvesant surrender. He did so with nary a fight, probably exhausted with trying to keep up with the swampy nightmare. They renamed it New York after the Duke of York, evidently because “New Amsterdam” was not exotic-sounding enough. The Dutch took it back for a little while in 1673 and re-named it “New Orange”—since what better demonstrates devotion than to rename a city every other Tuesday? They handed it back to England in 1674, sparing future tourism commissions the agita of explaining to visitors why their city had been named after a fruit.
It was not until 1730 that New York City was a slave center with 42% of its households owning Africans as slaves. The city that was now proudly multicultural was constituted on human bondage itself. But the later discovered African Burying Ground yielded 10,000-20,000 colonial remains—a gruesome reminder that under all those charming Dutch windmills lay brutal exploitation.
At the Revolution, New York did both sides at once—the ultimate preparation for political fluctuations to come. It was a British command following a disaster at Long Island for Continentals. New York was a refuge for Loyalists, evidence that New Yorkers were masters of supporting winners to begin with.
Following the Revolution, New York had a brief stint as national capital. Washington was inaugurated here, Congress met here, the Bill of Rights was drafted here. Naturally, New Yorkers never let anyone forget this fact, even when the capital relocated twice. It’s the equivalent of boasting about being valedictorian of summer school—technically true but kind of lacking in crucial background information.
The 19th century was marked by explosive population expansion from 60,000 to 3.4 million due to massive immigration. Irish famine refugees found out what millions still learn today: The city is pricey, crowded, and smug in being Earth’s finest achievement. The city itself became a commercial titan with the 1825 opening of the Erie Canal; political corruption was elevated to high art around Tammany Hall.
The Civil War uncovered New York’s fragile connection to power. Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that the city secede on its own—the height of New York swagger. The Draft Riots flared up during 1863, as prosperous men purchased war exemptions, with violent riots breaking out against Black citizens. More than 120 died at America’s worst civil disturbance, uncovering the city’s capacity for greatness as well as terror at once.
The late 1800s were New York swagger years at their best. The Statue of Liberty came in 1886–a gift from France to a nation they sympathized with for living there. Ellis Island received 14 million immigrants who wondered what they’d signed up for after glancing at rents. Brooklyn was consolidated out of protest in 1898 and became the present-day megalopolis. The subway came in 1904 and introduced New Yorkers to the finer art of evading eye contact.
The 20th century was pinnacle arrogance achievement. The city was the world’s biggest city in the 1920s by supplanting London. The Great Depression briefly had the residents deflated, but World War II filled them with swagger again. The UN headquarters opened in 1952, because nothing is more symbolic of “world peace” than relocating international diplomacy to the world’s most neurotic, expensive city.
And look at this—this strange conversion of swampland into self-proclaimed “Greatest City on Earth.” From $900 real estate transactions to $3,000 closet apartments, from Dutch patroons to Masters of the Universe, New York never misses a beat: sky-high prices, overpopulation to the extreme, and self-promotion steroids.
The amazing part? Even after centuries of dubious decisions, exorbitant costs, and group ego aplenty to power small countries, people just keep on coming. Maybe the finest magic trick of New York City is convincing millions that it’s privilege to pay $15 for sandwiches and reside in shoebox apartments. That is Madison Avenue-style advertising genius.
The Five Boroughs: A Guidebook to the Great Dysfunctional City of New York
New York City—the Big Apple, the City That Never Sleeps, the city in which dreams are priced in dollars but their exit is in credit card bills that can purchase a tiny country. It is this grand city laboratory that consists of five boroughs, all being some semblance of organized madness. You might consider them as five housemates that loathe each other but are bound by the world’s highest priced lease agreement.
Manhattan: The Overachieving Golden Child
Manhattan is the Harvard alumni you bring up in every second sentence and speak of purchasing a cup of coffee as if purchasing companies. New Yorkers born and bred call it in hushed, soft tones “The City” as other cities call notable landmarks, as if those other four boroughs were tacky parking lots with pretentious ambitions.
This little-by-land island is home to 70,450 per square mile—not people on the train ride to work in the morning, but regular and suit-wearing business-people that more than most make in a whole year. There’s Central Park, the green box you can preen that nature is still alive while strolling over finance bros having existential crises by the pond with the ducks.
These towers reach for the sky like middle fingers, residences for multinational conglomerates that probably have your data, your debt, and probably your FIRST CHILD!!! Wall St moves in the shadows like some economic vampire, draining life from world economies while still somehow having the audacity to convince the world at large that it’s somehow performing the world a PUBLIC SERVICE!!! The United Nation buildings sit neatly in the proximate location, because there’s nothing that screams “world peace” like making foreign dignitaries have to wade thorugh the hassliest, most costly city in the world while still being expected to pay $25 for a sandwich that you can have for $3 elsewhere!!!
Brooklyn: The Hipster Who Discovered Capitalism
Brooklyn transformed from street-smart upstart to poster child for gentrification quicker than you can say “vintage-furniture artisanal pickle emporium.” It’s like your eccentric aunt inherits some unexpected bequest in crypto-currency—it’s great, but completely sus and highly, highly likely to be unsustainable.
It has more inhabitants than some nations, all of whom can boast that they were there “before it was cool” just in case they got in yesterday or during the Carter administration. Coney Island, the first amusement park in America, has been open since 1870 and continues to offer patrons that odd mixture of nostalgia, cotton candy, and fear of the meaning of life in the form of rides that in the good ol’ days no one had any notion about safety regulations.
Fort Hamilton is the only operational army facility in the city, dating all the way to 1825. According to one Pentagon official, it comes down to this: “New York City requires more individuals trained in weapons as well as-close proximity to very expensive property.” It’s likely the only place in Brooklyn the rent has not gone up by a factor of three in the past decade, just because the structure is owned by the government.
Downtown Brooklyn is eager to be a more complete business district, and it is endearing in contrast to the manner in Manhattan dominates the shoreline like a premed majored big brother. It’s the summer-school valedictorian—a technically proficient accomplishment, but all about context.
Queens: The World’s Least Organized Cultural Experiment
Queens is the world’s most racially diverse place aside from a United Nations convention, essentially, if there was tasty food surrounding every corner. It’s like you’re channel-surfing foreign television because there’s always someone messing around with language settings and sometimes they have a street festival going on in there, too.
It’s where the US Open tennis games are played and where the wealthy individuals toss soft little balls at each other as other wealthy individuals sit about snacking on $15 pretzels. New York Mets home games are played at Citi Field in Queens, and that must just be fitting because in Queens, baseball fantasies are most likely conceived and leave needing therapy.
Queens is the location of JFK and LaGuardia airports, and thus is necessarily the gateway for most visitors to the Big Apple’s initial exposure to: “Why is everything so darn expensive, and why is this taxi-scent like broken dreams and air freshener?”
The Bronx: culture in commerce
It has the strange distinction of being the only ‘brough that is, all practical purposes and intents, all the way on the mainland proper, and so is geographically, dead center—a attribute that’s not typical for New York. It’s also the location the whole hip-hop thing began, demonstrating that revolutionarily great art is possible anywhere, including somewhere whose main tourist attraction is viewing grown men whack around round things with bats that are made from wood and aided by $50,000 and overpriced beer is consumed.
Yankee Stadium looms over the horizon like a monument to sports capitalism and $15 hot dogs. The Bronx Zoo occupies 265 acres and supports over 6,000 animals–the same number of people in the average Manhattan apartment building, but the people have nicer digs and space to throw elbows.
America’s biggest coop-owner residential development is Co-op City, a quaint utopia until you find out that 50,000 have to vote on all that impacts homes you live in. It’s voting for pizza toppings, but for, quite literally, all that occurs in home life.
Staten Island
The Suburban Stepchild Staten Island is the Big Apple’s venture into the suburbs and subsequent change of heart. It’s connected to Brooklyn by the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge—a costly way of saying “we’re cousins, but let’s have some space between us, please.” The Staten Island Ferry provides you with a zero-carfare journey into Manhattan, the only place in the entire city that you still get something for zero dollars and so darn suspiciously. The island’s also home to the Staten Island Greenbelt: 2,500 acres of conserved natural habitat with 28 miles of trails and “one of the last undisturbed forests in the city.” Translation: they found some trees that weren’t exactly condos yet and immediately put some fences up around them to save them. Staten Island peaks at this height of suburbarism that New Jersey can only be green with envy over—something in the same ballpark as making the participation trophy nervous about its qualifications.