Hi, this is probably going to be seen as the stupidest question ever by the Americans here, but I want to be less ignorant about your fine country.
What is the difference between;
New York City
New York State
New Jersey
Manhatten
Newark
*edit: *I’ve heard Gotham a few times in the real world too, are people just making a superman joke?
If there is a difference, how do you you distinguish them?
Which area does the NYPD cover?
Who is more senior, the mayor of New York or the governor of New York？Or are they in a seperate hierarchy?
New York City is a city at the southern end of New York State. You can find a map of the whole state here. About 8 million people live in New York City. The total population of the state is 19 million.
New York City itself is divided into five subdivisions called boroughs. Manhattan is one of these, and is the economic and cultural center of the city. The other four boroughs are Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island. For complicated historical reasons, these boroughs are coterminous with five counties of New York State. They are New York County (Manhattan), Kings County (Brooklyn), Queens County, Bronx County, and Richmond County (Staten Island).
The NYPD covers New York City only. Other municipalities have their own local police forces. There is also a state police department whose job consists mostly of patrolling the highways and policing in sparsely populated areas of the state that don’t have their own local or county forces.
The state and city governments have separate hierarchies, but in terms of precedence, the governor of New York State is higher. The mayor of New York City is one of the most prominent and powerful politicians in the country, though, due to the huge influence that New York City has on the whole country.
ETA: Oh, and Newark is an entirely separate city in the state of New Jersey, about 15 miles across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
ETA2: Gotham is an unofficial nickname for Manhattan which is of uncertain origin. Gotham City in the comic books is named after that.
New York State and New Jersey are two of the fifty states that make up the United States of America. New York City is a city, located in New York state, near New Jersey. Manhattan is an island that makes up part of New York City. It is one of five “boroughs” into which the city is divided, the others being The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Newark is a city in New Jersey that is very close to New York City. Gotham is just a nickname, and it comes from Batman rather than Superman. It just refers to the fact that New York City is big and sort of like Gotham in the comics. The NYPD is responsible for New York City itself. Other police departments cover other jurisdictions, like Newark. The mayor of New York is in charge of just New York City. The governor is over New York State, including New York City.
Google should provide you with a good map of all this pretty easily.
This is actually backwards; Gotham as a nickname for Manhattan predates the comics by quite a bit. I’ve found usages back to the mid-19th century at least.
Note that New York City was once only Manhattan. New York and Brooklyn were two of the largest cities in the U.S.A., so it was likely a big deal when they merged into a single city in 1898.
There is much interesting detail at History of New York City - Wikipedia
and the history-by-period pages it links to. (I sure didn’t know that New York was named Nouvelle-Angoulême before it was renamed Nieuw Amsterdam.)
“Gotham”, from the Anglo-Saxon “got” meaning goat and “ham” meaning town or village (essentially, “goatville”) was by legend an extremely rural village in England that managed to avoid a royal visit by bad King John by either being entirely populated by idiots, or acting as though it were. This term for a backward and unsophisticated rural village was applied satirically to New York in 1807 by Washington Irving.
Ironically, this has caused the term to reverse its meaning over the past two centuries so that it singifies the largest of cities, with virtually nobody realizing it means a goat-farming village.
One possible reason for the confusion regarding Newark, especially among non-USA types, is that there is a major international airport at Newark. Normally travel agents etc refer to it as “New York Newark” airport, even though it’s not actually in New York.
Just think of it like Stansted Airport, which is not actually in London.
Sure but Stantsted- Liverpool st on the express train is 46 mins… considering the JFK-manhatten airtain is around 50 mins, its kind of fair enough to call standsted a London airport. I don’t think most tourists care about the politcial boundaries of the airport they fly into.
Incidentally, Gatwick and Heathrow aren’t located in London either, by the strict terms of London City political makeup.
People tend to think of NYC as Manhattan, but the majority of NYC residents don’t actually live there. Brooklyn has 2.5 million residents, which would make it the third largest city in the US if you separate the boroughs. Here’s what the top ten US cities would look like if we split the boroughs into separate cities.
1 Los Angeles 3.8 million
2 Chicago 2.7 million
** 3 Brooklyn 2.5 million**
** 4 Queens 2.3 million**
5 Houston 2.1 million
** 6 Manhattan 1.6 million**
7 Philadelphia 1.5 million
8 Phoenix 1.4 million
** 9 Bronx 1.4 million**
10 San Antonio 1.3 million
Staten Island would be #38, ahead of Kansas City, Atlanta and Miami (among others).
Manhattan is also pretty small, about 23 square miles. Compare that to say, London at 600 square miles or Tokyo at ~850. End to end the island is about 13 miles long, and a little over 2 miles at its widest point.
Don’t feel stupid. You’ll find many AMERICANS seem to assume the entirety of New York State is located within that one little strip of land on the Atlantic Ocean.
Also, there is a village in New York called Newark, coincidentally. It is in the town of Arcadia and was once the home of some professional minor league baseball teams.
Sure, yes, but I think it works as analogy - we refer to London Stansted and it’s perfectly fair to do so, just as referring to Newark as a New York airport is also fair. But to someone wanting to understand the geography of the area, the fact that it’s in New Jersey is relevant.
I could have used Gatwick as an example instead, of course. Probably wouldn’t have used Heathrow, although I know it’s actually in Middlesex, not London. It’s part of the general metro area, whereas you need to pass through green fields to get to the other two.
And just to add confusion, there’s also a village called Nyack in the suburbs of NYC. I was in my 20’s before I learned that it was a separate village, and not just slang for New York.
To be fair, I was born and raised on the west coast.
