(and if by some chance you disagree that it is THE greatest city on earth, you’re wrong, but fine, whatever… you have to agree it’s one of the top 5)
It’s TINY TINY TINY. CRAMPED as hell. Expensive in every era of its existence. Dirty. CRAMPED. Dirty. Clogged, cramped, noisy. Hot as hell in summer, cold and wet in winter.
Now, it’s established, so in spite of the fact that it has such obvious downsides, it’s NEW YORK! so you deal.
But why and how did it become what it is?
And I ask this as someone who is thoroughly and completely entranced by everything about NYC, including the noise and the dirt, so don’t mistake me. I just think it’s strange that it became such a great city.
Your whole cause-and-effect equation is completely ass-about.
New York isn’t the greatest city DESPITE its downsides; its downsides are, in most cases, the direct result of the fact that it’s so awesome and so many people want to live there.
It’s cramped because so many people want to live there. It’s noisy because so many people live there. It’s expensive because so many people want to live there and demand for space is high. If it’s dirty (and i don’t think it’s especially dirty for such a big city), that’s also because that many people create an awful lot of waste.
As for the weather, it’s no worse than plenty of other places. Cleveland also has warm summers and cold winters. But it’s Cleveland.
Blame it on the Erie Canal and the westward expansion. Before the Erie Canal was built, Philadelphia was the largest city in the US and the center of business and finance. As the US expanded westward, the area now known as the midwest was opened to settlers who were mostly farmers. Farmers need a way to get their crops to market and need to get supplies. New York state built the Erie Canal to link the great lakes with the Hudson River. This gave a convenient water route to much of the midwest.
After the canal opened, lower Manhattan became a teaming port as the sea gateway to this inland water highway. Finance is necessary for trading, so the US financial industry grew up around the port.
The railroads soon made the canal obsolete. But so much infrastructure was in place that New York City continued to be a commercial and industrial hub.
As for why they picked this particular location NYC had an abundance of beavers and other animals that were prized for their pelts so the fur traders loved the area. Fur trading and the fact that NYC was an incredible place for a port led to it being extremely popular among the rich and powerful. Because of that popularity lots of different industries set up shop here and the city quickly became a cultural icon. It was also extremely popular politically and was actually the very first place to be chosen as the capital of our nation. If you come here on vacation you can go to services at the very same church that George Washington attended and view Alexander Hamilton’s grave, you can take the A train to the Apollo and follow it up with lunch at Sylvia’s, you can go to the spot where John Lennon was shot and see the hotel where Arthur Miller lived and choose between Tibetan food and world renound pizza for dinner. There is quite literally something for everyone here which is part of why it is such a popular travel destination.
I always hanker for NYC in the fall… Damn I love that city.
It cripples me though…I obsessively walk. I just walk and walk and walk and walk. I keep walking until I get to the point, very literally, where I have to keep walking because it’s less painful than stopping. It’s sick but I can’t help it.
This map shows New York’s unique situation with regard to trade routes.
First of all, it’s one of the largest and best harbors on the eastern seaboard. Second, the Hudson provides a wide and easily navigable route to a large, fertile valley suitable for agriculture. Third, the Mohawk Valley is the easiest route through the Appalachians anywhere along their length. And most important of all, the Mohawk led to the Great Lakes, which were the gateway to the entire interior of the continent. No other locality on the east coast combined these advantages.
New York naturally became a nexus for shipping and trade. Trade brought banks, banks brought finance, and finance brought everything else including culture and the arts.
OK, assuming that I agree with your premise (which I don’t), it comes down to what it always comes down to: location location location. A good natural harbor almost always turns into a metropolis.
I think Central Park played a large role. That was just an all around brilliant (if tremendously expensive) masterpiece of urban planning and unlike anything else in America at that time, keeping a bit of nature (or something like it, Victorian style- the idealized gardens and all) in the midst of a metropolis. By the time CP was built NYC was old enough to have some history but young enough that some urban planning was still possible.
I don’t know whether this is cause or effect, but New York - unlike, say, Boston - always seemed to lack a unified, insular ruling class. Maybe this derives from early tensions between Dutch founders and British overlords, but for whatever reason, NY was always more accepting of “new money” than other major cities, which made it a magnet for entrepreneurs.
Because when you are there, you know you are there. Seriously. When you say “New York is the greatest city in the world,” you are really referring to the island of Manhattan. An insulated community unlike any other, filled with so much you could not possibly get to all of it in two lifetimes.
I think I’ve said here before that I certainly think New York has the greatest PR machine on earth - if enough people, movies and songs proclaim it so, after a whie people start to believe it.
I don’t think there is a single ‘greatest city’ as everyone has different ideas about what makes it so, but if ‘greatest’ consists of a richness in some or all of the following things, then New York is certainly up there:
Depth/diversity of cultural experiences
Favoured by global commerce
Trail blazer in arts/entertainment/creativity
Famous history
Pivotal in world events
Global meeting point
Celebrated in popular culture
Politically significant.
I think by these definitions, only a few cities really qualify. Probably New York, London and Paris.
We should be careful of too much insularity, here. New York certainly does all those things in the anglo-european sphere, but what in Chinese-, Indian- or Russian-influenced areas?
I wonder if things would look different from there – maybe Tokyo, Shanghai, Xi’an, Beijing, Calcutta, Moscow, Petersburg should make the list?
Several million inhabitants of New York City decided that the standard of judging how great a city is was “How much does this city resemble New York City?”
I get what you mean, but i don’t completely agree. I’ve spent time in Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx (never Staten Island), and they all feel very much like New York to me.
