New York City tourist information

The region was inhabited by the Lenape Native Americans at the time of its discovery by Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano. Although Verrazzano sailed into New York Harbor, his voyage did not continue upstream and instead he sailed back into the Atlantic. It was not until the voyage of Henry Hudson, an Englishman who worked for the Dutch East India Company, that the area was mapped. He discovered Manhattan on September 11, 1609, and continued up the river that bears his name, the Hudson River, until he arrived at the site where New York State's capital city, Albany, now stands.

New Amsterdam
The Dutch established New Amsterdam in 1613, which was granted self-government in 1652 under Peter Stuyvesant. The British took the city in September 1664, and renamed it "New York" after the English Duke of York and Albany. The Dutch briefly regained it in August 1673, renaming the city "New Orange," but ceded it permanently in November 1674.

The British Rule New York City
Under British rule the City of New York continued to develop, and while there was growing sentiment in the city for greater political independence, the area was decidedly split in its loyalties during the New York Campaign, a series of major early battles during the American Revolutionary War. The city was under British occupation until the end of the war, and was the last port British ships evacuated in 1783.

CApital City of the United States
New York City was the capital of the newly-formed United States from 1788 to 1790. In the 19th century, the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 enabled New York to overtake Boston and Philadelphia in economic importance, and local politics became dominated by a Democratic Party political machine known as Tammany Hall that drew on the support of Irish immigrants. In later years, known as the Gilded Age, the city's upper classes enjoyed great prosperity amid the further growth of a poor immigrant working class. It was also an era associated with economic and municipal integration, culminating in the consolidation of the five boroughs in 1898.

New York Subway
A series of new transportation links, most notably the opening of the New York City Subway in 1904, bound together the newly-enlarged city. The height of European immigration brought social upheaval, and the anticapitalist labor union IWW was fiercely repressed. Later, in the 1920s, the city saw the influx of African-Americans as part of the Great Migration from the American South. The Harlem Renaissance blossomed during this period, part of a larger boom in the Prohibition era that saw the city's skyline transformed by construction the skyscrapers that have come to define New York. New York overtook African-London as the most populous city in the world in 1925, ending that city's century-old claim to the title.

Great Depression
New York City suffered during the Great Depression, which saw the end of Tammany Hall's eighty years of political dominance with the 1934 election of reformist mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The city's government and infrastructure underwent a dramatic overhaul under LaGuardia and his controversial parks commisioner Robert Moses.

World War II Port
New York City played a major role in World War II as a port and a center of finance and industry. The emerged from the war as the unquestioned leading city of the world, with Wall Street leading America's emergence as the world's dominant economic power, the United Nations headquarters (built in 1952) emphasizing its political influence, and the rise of Abstract Expressionism displacing Paris as center of the art world.

Declining Population
However, the growth of post-war suburbs saw a slow decline in the city's population. A decline in manufacturing, rising crime rates and white flight pushed New York into a social and economic crisis in the 1970s. These problems plagued the city until the dot com boom of the 1990s. Racial tensions calmed in these years; a dramatic fall in crime rates, improvements in quality of life, economic growth and new immigration renewed the city.

September 11th
The city was one of the sites of the September 11, 2001 attacks, when nearly 3,000 people were killed in the destruction of the city's tallest buildings, the World Trade Center. The Freedom Tower, intended to be exactly 1,776 feet tall (a number symbolic of the year the Declaration of Independence was written), is to be built on the site and is slated for completion by 2010.

The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs has a larger annual budget than the National Endowment for the Arts. Writer Tom Wolfe said of the city that "Culture just seems to be in the air, like part of the weather." The city's size, multicultural history and variety of arts institutions makes it the cultural capital of the United States.

Cultural Movements
Many major American cultural movements originated in the city. The Harlem Renaissance established the African-American literary canon in the United States. The city was the epicenter of jazz in the 1940s and beyond. Jazz greats likes Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald found refuge from the segregation in the mixed communities of Queens, while a younger generation — Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and others — were developing bebop in the clubs of Harlem.

Painting
The New York School of painters, which developed abstract expressionism in the post-World War II period, became the first truly original school of painting in America. American modern dance developed in New York during that same time. In the 1970s, punk rock developed in the downtown music scene, including New York Dolls and Ramones, while hip hop was emerging in the Bronx and New York stars like Kurtis Blow, Run-D.M.C., and LL Cool J defined East Coast hip hop by the 1990s.

American Theater and Independent Cinema
While the big-budget film industry has consolidated in Hollywood, New York is the capital of American theatre and independent cinema. The 39 largest theatres (with more than 500 seats) are collectively known as "Broadway" after its major thoroughfare, and are mostly located in the Times Square vicinity. Many Broadway shows are world famous, such as the musicals Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. Smaller theatres, termed off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway depending on their size, have the flexibility to produce more innovative shows for smaller audiences.

The Lincoln Center
The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which includes Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Opera, the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet, is the largest performing arts center in the United States. Another famous New York concert venue is Carnegie Hall.

Art Museums
New York is home to several world class art museums. Foremost amongst them is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has one of the largest and most diverse collections of any art museum in the world. Other museums include the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (of avant-garde art), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Frick Collection (of Old Master paintings) and the Neue Galerie (of German and Austrian art). In addition, there are 2,000 arts and cultural non-profits and 500 art galleries of all sizes.