"[30][31] In April 1524, Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing in service of Francis I of France, became the first documented European to visit the area that would become New York City.[44] In August 1673, the Dutch reconquered the colony, renaming it "New Orange", but permanently relinquished it back to England the following year under the terms of the Treaty of Westminster that ended the Third Anglo-Dutch War.The city had strong commercial ties to the South, but anger around conscription, resentment against Lincoln's war policies and paranoia about free Blacks taking the jobs of poor immigrants[67] culminated in the three-day-long New York Draft Riots of July 1863, among the worst incidents of civil disorder in American history.[68] The rate of immigration from Europe grew steeply after the Civil War, and Manhattan became the first stop for millions seeking a new life in the United States, a role acknowledged by the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886.[91][17][92][16][93] In the 1970s, job losses due to industrial restructuring caused New York City, including Manhattan, to suffer from economic problems and rising crime rates.[94] While a resurgence in the financial industry greatly improved the city's economic health in the 1980s, New York's crime rate continued to increase through the decade and into the beginning of the 1990s.[98] By the late 1990s, led by efforts by the city and the Walt Disney Company, the area had been revived as a center of tourism to the point where it was described by The New York Times as "arguably the most sought-after 13 acres of commercial property in the world.[113][114][115][116] The storm and its profound impacts have prompted discussion of constructing seawalls and other coastal barriers around the shorelines of the borough and the metropolitan area to minimize the risk of destructive consequences from another such event in the future.[121] When building the World Trade Center in 1968, 1.2 million cubic yards (920,000 m3) of material excavated from the site[122] was used to expand the Manhattan shoreline across West Street, creating Battery Park City.The borough has many energy-efficient office buildings, such as the Hearst Tower, the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center,[177] and the Bank of America Tower—the first skyscraper designed to attain a Platinum LEED Certification.[183] In 1961, the struggling Pennsylvania Railroad unveiled plans to tear down the old Penn Station and replace it with a new Madison Square Garden and office building complex.[184] Organized protests were aimed at preserving the McKim, Mead & White-designed structure completed in 1910, widely considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style and one of the architectural jewels of New York City.[187] The historic preservation movement triggered by Penn Station's demise has been credited with the retention of some one million structures nationwide, including over 1,000 in New York City.[188] In 2017, a multibillion-dollar rebuilding plan was unveiled to restore the historic grandeur of Penn Station, in the process of upgrading the landmark's status as a critical transportation hub.[221] Verizon Communications, headquartered at 140 West Street in Lower Manhattan, was at the final stages in 2014 of completing a US$3 billion fiberoptic telecommunications upgrade throughout New York City.By mid-2014, Accelerator, a biotech investment firm, had raised more than US$30 million from investors, including Eli Lilly and Company, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, for initial funding to create biotechnology startups at the Alexandria Center for Life Science, which encompasses more than 700,000 square feet (65,000 m2) on East 29th Street and promotes collaboration among scientists and entrepreneurs at the center and with nearby academic, medical, and research institutions.The Village Voice, historically the largest alternative newspaper in the United States, announced in 2017 that it would cease publication of its print edition and convert to a fully digital venture.The phrase New York minute is meant to convey an extremely short time such as an instant,[281] sometimes in hyperbolic form, as in "perhaps faster than you would believe is possible," referring to the rapid pace of life in Manhattan.[286] Manhattan is well known for its street parades, which celebrate a broad array of themes, including holidays, nationalities, human rights, and major league sports team championship victories.[294] Ticker-tape parades celebrating sporting championships won as well as other national accomplishments march northward on Broadway from Bowling Green to City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, along the Canyon of Heroes.[333][334][335] The rise of immigration near the turn of the 20th century left major portions of Manhattan, especially the Lower East Side, densely packed with recent arrivals, crammed into unhealthy and unsanitary housing.[350] Congestion pricing was implemented in New York City in January 2025 and apply to most motor vehicular traffic using the central business district area of Manhattan south of 60th Street, in an effort to encourage commuters to use mass transit instead.[374] The metro region's commuter rail lines converge at Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal, on the west and east sides of Midtown Manhattan, respectively.Broadway, following the route of a Native American trail, is the most notable of many exceptions to the grid, starting at Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan and continuing north for 13 miles (21 km) into the Bronx.The trip is notoriously frustrating for drivers because of heavy congestion on narrow local streets; absence of express roads other than the Trans-Manhattan Expressway at the far north end of Manhattan Island; and restricted to very limited crosstown automobile travel within Central Park.[393][394] In New York City, all turns at red lights are illegal unless a sign permitting such maneuvers is present, significantly shaping traffic patterns in Manhattan.[404] The tunnel was built instead of a bridge to allow unfettered passage of large passenger and cargo ships that sail through New York Harbor and up the Hudson River to Manhattan's piers.[405] The Queens–Midtown Tunnel, built to relieve congestion on the bridges connecting Manhattan with Queens and Brooklyn, was the largest non-federal project in its time when it was completed in 1940;[406] President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first person to drive through it.[413] The bulk of the city's trash is disposed at mega-dumps in Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio (via transfer stations in New Jersey, Brooklyn and Queens) since the 2001 closure of the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.[415] There are many hospitals in Manhattan, including two of the 25 largest in the United States (as of 2017):[416] New York City is supplied with drinking water by the protected Catskill Mountains watershed.
The "Sanitary & Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York", commonly known as the Viele Map, developed by
Egbert Ludovicus Viele
in 1865