1 ORIGINAL NEGATIVE BY PHOTOGRAPHER MORRIS ENGEL WITH ORIGINAL NEGATIVE ENVELOPE. EACH MEASURE APPROXIMATELY 4X5 INCHES. This negatives are from the DEFUNCT PM New York City Daily News active between 1940 - 1948.
Fine condition a vivid, sharp, high quality negative .
Morris Engel was an American photographer, cinematographer and filmmaker best known for making the first American film "independent" of Hollywood studios, Little Fugitive, in collaboration with his wife, photographer Ruth Orkin, and their friend, writer Raymond Abrashkin.
In the early days of cinema, before the rise of the Hollywood studios with their artificial, controlled environments in the form of sets and sound stages, movies took advantage of real locations as narrative backdrops. These could be cityscapes, as in some of the early work of D. W. Griffith, or the great outdoors, as in the innumerable westerns that were a staple of pre-modern cinema. While there was clearly an economic motive in shooting this way, there was also a sense of connecting with audiences in a realistic way as the stories they saw unfolded in recognizable environments.
In spite of the hypnotic power of the studio "look," which was often somehow plush even in gritty genres like film noir, it never entirely replaced the natural setting. (Even the studios continued to take advantage of the impact of some locations, for example, in a slum street in a Warner Bros. pre-code gangster film.) Italian neo-realism was one of several filmic styles that depended on reality for a sense of immediacy that could not be obtained otherwise. In the late 1950s, the nouvelle vague resurrected this approach as crucial in capturing the reality of people’s lives.
Between neorealism and the nouvelle vague stand Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, whose independent feature Little Fugitive (1953) has been credited — by Francois Truffaut, who ought to know — with providing both spiritual imprimatur and nuts-and-bolts strategies for the French New Wave. Engel and Orkin were both still photographers, with Engel particularly distinguished as a colleague of Paul Strand and a pioneer photojournalist with magazines like PM, Fortune, Collier’s. Orkin also had ties to Hollywood and cinema in general — she had worked for MGM, her mother was a silent star, and she had edited some experimental shorts, an experience that would be crucial in the pair’s future collaborations. Engel and Orkin provided a production template for future independent filmmakers by doing double and triple duty on their films. For their first feature, Engel, Orkin, and Ray Ashley are credited with direction, Engel and Ashley with production, Ashley with screenplay, Orkin and Lester Troob with editing, and Engel with photography.
The verite photographic style can be attributed to an unusual camera designed by Engel and produced by Charlie Woodruff. This camera was small and portable, attached by a single strap to the shoulder, allowing Engel to shoot unnoticed in crowds, from inside dicey spaces (like a baseball batting cage), and even from a moving amusement park ride — all the while maintaining a steady image indistinguishable from the professional tripod-style cameras. In this sense the device could be seen as a prototype for the steadicam.
Little FugitiveIt’s not hard to see why Little Fugitive, Engel and Orkin’s most famous and successful film, was so inspiring not only to the French but also to American auteurs like Cassavettes (Shadows) and Scorsese (Who’s That Knocking on My Door?). Like the two features that would follow it, Little Fugitive is a paean to the sights, smells, and sounds of New York, from the cramped but somehow comforting streets of Brooklyn to the dazzling chaos of Coney Island as seen through a child’s eyes. Engel and Orkin extrapolate the universal from the personal in this Homeric story of a little boy’s heroic trek alone through the vastness of an urban amusement park.
The "fugitive" of the title is Joey Norton (Richie Andrusco), a 7-year-old from Brooklyn who’s left in the care of his 12-year-old brother Lennie (Ricky Brewster) when their mother is called away on an emergency. Lennie and his friends are droll pranksters, and they pull what turns out to be a potentially deadly joke on Joey: they let him shoot a real gun and convince him that he’s killed Lennie and that they cops will soon be after him. Far from the cliché imagery of sweet, obedient 1950s children, these kids have a vicious black-comic edge: "They’ll sure give Joey the electric chair — he’ll fry!" one says. The terrorized boy grabs the money his mother left for him and Lennie, and runs off to Coney Island.
When Engel interviewed Richie Andrusco for the part of Joey, he noticed what he called an "animal strength" that made him right for the part. This quality is certainly evident as Joey, dwarfed by the teeming crowds, whirling neon, and boundless expanse of sand, moves through his ordeal with what can only be called aplomb. Not that there are overt threats — the crowds are mostly indifferent as he marches along collecting bottles to redeem for pony rides, or wriggles into a group of adults throwing balls at milk bottles, demanding his chance to play. Witty anecdotal touches abound. In a bathroom reference of a kind that was de rigeur in Italian neorealism, Joey drinks too much Pepsi and is desperate to relieve himself; when he comes upon a sign that says MEN, he gratefully traces each letter.
The film’s sometimes painterly visuals add resonance to the tiniest details — two toddlers grappling with each other on the beach; a couple making out on a blanket, their faces unseen; a mother spilling her baby’s milk. These shots seem at once casual, real, and artful, as if in recording the simple truth of an event the filmmakers have stumbled upon art. There’s a stunning sequence of a sudden, violent storm that clears the beach, and the filmmakers take great delight in observing the chaos. Among those scrambling toward shelter are a group of black kids delicately stepping through the huge puddles on the street just beyond the beach. In a lovely wordless passage, Joey wanders across the beach after the storm, at night, dwarfed by the enormity of the world around him and, one feels, by his own future.
During the film’s initial release, some reviewers compared Richie Andrusco to Jackie Coogan, another way of reminding us that Little Fugitive recalls silent film. His wonderfully affecting performance, surely one of the reasons the film won Venice’s Silver Lion award in 1953, showed that it was not only possible but desirable for filmmakers to seek out "amateur" talent without the tics and mannerisms of trained actors. This strategy is verified in the freshness of the other performers, particularly Ricky Brewster as Joey’s initially nasty but eventually redeemed brother, Lennie.
In spite of the commercial and critical success of Little Fugitive, the filmmakers had trouble getting financing for their next work but somehow managed. Anyone who saw Little Fugitive would recognize Lovers and Lollipops (1955) as the work of the same team, even without the credits. Again we see the milieu of New York, rendered in gorgeous black-and-white compositions, and again there’s a child at the center. This time it’s a girl, Peggy (Cathy Dunn), who recalls Joey Norton in her tenacity and willfulness. Both are imaginative kids with an active inner life who can entertain themselves and are well-equipped to deal with any adults who get in the way of their fun. Joey had no visible father, only brief, shadowy substitutes like the pony-ride man; Peggy’s father is dead, and she feels compelled to resist her mother Ann’s (Lori March) threat to replace him with a new one in the form of Larry (Gerald O’Louglin), an old friend who’s visiting. The story is an alternately sweet and sad triangle — Ann and Larry’s precarious relationship and Peggy’s simultaneous attempts to thwart it and find her place in it.
Lovers and LollipopsIn Little Fugitive, Joey’s interactions were mostly brief encounters with strangers on the beach. Lovers and Lollipops focuses closely on Peggy’s relationships with the adults in her life — her mother; Larry, a sarcastic babysitter; and a photographer who’s taking pictures of her for a book. In the process of coming to grips with her mother’s romantic life, she torments the indulgent Larry in the guise of spending "quality time" with him. During a scene where he reads to her, she crawls all over him, mimics and laughs at him, and interrupts him. This is a rehearsal for other, more cutting scenes where she causes endless grief by hiding from him in a parking lot (later she complains to her mother, "he lost me too!"). Any attempt at romance by Ann and Larry is usually met with force by Peggy, who eventually offers a litany of Larry’s "crimes" in the martyred mode of a child: "He gave me a rotten sandwich and made me eat all of it!" Peggy’s convention busting is at once enchanting and nerve-wracking; it filigrees the film, most notably in a scene where she insists on carrying her toy sailboat into a museum rather than checking it. She sneaks it in and sails it on one of the museum’s small pools, creating a poignant symbol of her own potential drifting away from her mother.
Naturalistic performances make Lovers and Lollipops as vivid and fresh today as when it was released, but the true star here, more even than in Little Fugitive, is the city. Engel and Orkin’s observations are again both casual and calculated, the camera unobtrusively recording images that seem unrelated to plot but hint at the imaginative life behind the faces and streets of the city. These take the form of detailed set-pieces, as in a long sequence on the Statue of Liberty; and of throwaway moments like the scene of a little Chinese boy spanking another one in the background. The filmmakers insist on the validity and fascination of everyone’s lives, even those whose details we never see.
Weddings and BabiesWeddings and Babies (1958) marked the end of a cycle — the third in what could loosely be called the filmmakers’ "New York Trilogy" — but also featured a second technological breakthrough that allowed Engel and Orkin to create a movie with an immediacy rarely seen in movies. In a September 1958 Harper’s article, noted documentarian Richard Leacock described it:
"Engel’s earlier films had been dubbed — that is, they had used a system perfected by the postwar Italian film-makers of shooting a scene with a silent camera and then fitting dialogue to it in the studio. This made it possible to photograph anywhere, without being chained to the big clumsy sound cameras or upset by `extraneous noise.’… To my amazement, Weddings and Babies was not dubbed… Here was a feature theatrical film, shot on regular 35-mm stock, with live spontaneous sound…. [it] is the first theatrical motion picture to make use of a fully mobile, synchronous sound-and-picture system."
Leacock theorizes that what spurred this invention was the fact that the filmmakers were used to taking their still cameras to various sites, a kind of mobility impossible with traditional equipment. They wanted to replicate this ease in their film, and the result, Weddings and Babies, is as remarkable as their earlier efforts, if not quite on par with Little Fugitive. Part of its freshness today is because of the "live spontaneous sound" — from the noises of a street fair to the rising voices in a domestic squabble. The sometimes clumsy effect of post-dubbed dialogue in the earlier films is absent here.
Weddings and Babies, like its predecessors, is a highly personal film, a kind of insider view of working-class life that resonates with the filmmakers’ sweet sensibility. Engel seems to have written himself discreetly into both Little Fugitive and Lovers and Lollipops in the form of minor characters who were photographers. In Weddings and Babies, the main male character can be read as a virtual double. Al (John Mhyers), like Engel, is a commercial photographer whose hunger to "do something important" is frustrated by the compromises of his business, which only survives because he’s willing to spend most of his time shooting "weddings and babies." Al’s girlfriend Bea (a radiant Viveca Lindfors) wants precisely the thing that he’s come to hate: a wedding and babies. Added to the mix is Al’s aged widowed mother, Mama (Chiarina Barile), who like him is restless, unsatisfied. Just as Al roams the streets with his camera, trying to find something that eludes him in the bustle of street crowds and fairs, his mother wanders away from her rest home and eventually disappears at a key moment in her son’s life — just as he’s resigned himself to marrying Bea. Mama embodies the film’s theme of the inability of people to communicate in the most literal way possible — she speaks not English but Italian, and in a low voice that’s barely audible.
In all these films, awesome natural forces are always nearby, waiting to remind the characters that there are larger elements of life that must be respected. In Little Fugitive, it’s the rainstorm that sends the beach revelers running, bringing a sense that happiness is short-lived and therefore precious. In Weddings and Babies, it’s more overt in an extended sequence in a cemetery, where a frantic Al finds his "lost" mother sitting glumly among the tombstones. These scenes assert the importance of noticing the pleasures of everyday life, of living in the moment. This is the lesson the "fully mobile, synchronous sound-and-picture system," wedded to the filmmakers’ gentle sensibility, brings home.
In a sense, these films are all about coming to grips with mortality and recognizing how important other people are. It’s only after a serious loss is threatened — the disappearances of Joey, Larry, and Bea in, respectively, Little Fugitive, Lovers and Lollipops, and Weddings and Babies — that the value of the individual is recognized and the recovery of something irreplaceable occurs. This is what Truffaut, Cassavettes, and Scorsese recognized, and what makes these films fresh, timeless works of art today.
Morris Engel, the New York photographer and filmmaker whose 1953 film, "The Little Fugitive," established a model for independent moviemaking that influenced directors like John Cassavetes and François Truffaut, died Saturday at his home on Central Park West. He was 86.
The cause was cancer, said his son, Andy Engel.
"The Little Fugitive" tells the story of a 7-year-old Brooklyn boy, played by Richie Andrusco, who mistakenly believes he has killed his older brother and runs away to hide at Coney Island. The movie was made on a budget of $30,000 using a lightweight 35-millimeter camera that Mr. Engel had developed with a friend, Charlie Woodruff. The small, unobtrusive camera allowed Mr. Engel to film his tale with an intimacy and realism that seemed revolutionary in a time when the Hollywood dream factory was functioning at its fantastic height.
The simple, disarming film, with its street-level views of ordinary New Yorkers going about their lives, proved to have an international appeal. It won the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, and its story, by Mr. Engel, his soon-to-be wife, Ruth Orkin, and Ray Ashley, a journalist who had been a colleague of Mr. Engel's at the newspaper PM, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1954.
The movie's success encouraged other young filmmakers to circumvent the Hollywood system and finance their own resolutely personal films. In 1957, the young actor John Cassavetes borrowed $40,000 to make "Shadows," a partly improvised drama whose success opened the door to other New York independent filmmakers.
In 1959, the French film critic François Truffaut drew on Mr. Engel's childhood themes and production techniques to create "The 400 Blows," the film that introduced the French New Wave. "Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn't been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie, 'Little Fugitive,"' Mr. Truffaut later told Lillian Ross in an interview for The New Yorker.
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Born in Brooklyn in 1918, Mr. Engel took courses as a teenager at the Photo League, a cooperative founded by a group of socially engaged photographers, where one his teachers was Berenice Abbott. He had his first show at the New School for Social Research in 1939, worked briefly for PM and then entered the Navy, where as a combat photographer he covered the Normandy landing. After the war, Mr. Engel became a busy photojournalist, working for a wide range of publications including McCall's and Collier's.
With Ms. Orkin, herself a gifted photographer, Mr. Engel made two more independent features: "Lovers and Lollipops" (1956), about a small girl struggling with the idea of her widowed mother's remarriage, and "Weddings and Babies" (1958), an autobiographical study of a photographer whose artistic ambitions are thwarted by his fiancée's dreams of domesticity. Neither enjoyed the success of "The Little Fugitive."
Mr. Engel returned to his work as a commercial photographer and did not make another feature until "I Need a Ride to California" in 1968, a drama about East Village hippies that remains unreleased. Later in life, he worked on video documentaries, including "A Little Bit Pregnant" (1993) and "Camelia" (1998).
"He was a street photographer his whole life," said his daughter, Mary Engel. "Through the 90's, he shot wide, color panoramas of the streets that have never really been exhibited, and we are working on that." The writer-director Joanna Lipper recently shot a remake of "The Little Fugitive," which Ms. Engel co-produced.
Besides his son and daughter, Mr. Engel is survived by two sisters, Pearl Russell and Helen Siemianowski, and a grandson. Ms. Orkin died in 1985.
Morris Engel (American, b. April 8, 1918 – d. March 5, 2005) was born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents from Lithuania. An early interest in photography led him to enroll in a class at New York’s Photo League, a group dedicated to raising social consciousness through modern photography. Some of the most influential photographers of the time were associated with the Photo League; Engel worked closely with Aaron Siskind on the project “Harlem Document” from 1936-40 and later assisted Paul Strand in filming Native Land.
Like many Photo League photographers, Engel documented life in New York City, producing and exhibiting photo essays on Coney Island, the Lower East Side and Harlem. In 1939 he had his first exhibition at New York’s New School. In 1940 he joined the staff of the newspaper PM, but he left the publication one year later to sign on with the U.S. Navy as a member of a combat photo unit. He participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
In 1951 Engel momentarily quit still photography to pursue a career in filmmaking. He made a series of low budget films with a custom 35 mm camera. His first feature film, Little Fugitive (made with his wife, the renowned photographer Ruth Orkin), earned an Academy Award nomination in 1953 for Best Original Screenplay and was screened in more than 5,000 theaters across the United States.
Engel’s photographs are widely exhibited and found in the collections of the International Center of Photography (New York), the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.). His films continue to be screened at venues such as the Whitney Museum of Art (New York), the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of the Moving Image (New York).
1918-2005
Morris Engel was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 8, 1918. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School and joined the Photo League in 1936, where he met Aaron Siskind, Berenice Abbott and Paul Strand, who invited him to work on his film "Native Land.”
Engel became a staff photographer on the newspaper "PM" before joining the Navy in 1941. As a member of Combat Photo Unit 8 that landed on Normandy on D-Day, he received a citation from Captain Edward Steichen.
After his return, Engel worked for many national magazines including "Ladies Home Journal", "McCall's", "Fortune", "Colliers" and others. His initial interest for motion pictures reached a new level when he built a lightweight hand-held 35mm camera with Charles Woodruff. This camera was a major factor in the production of his first film, Little Fugitive. One of the first successful American "independent films," Little Fugitive earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story and a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Engel was married to fellow photographer, Ruth Orkin. He died of cancer in 2005.
Post-WWII American independent cinema pioneer Morris Engel co-directed 1953 cinéma vérité-inspired classic Little Fugitive
More than any other post-World War II filmmaker, Morris Engel deserves the title of “father of the (non-avant-garde) American independent cinema.” The case rests on a single movie: the cinéma vérité-inspired, Coney Island-set 1953 boy’s tale Little Fugitive, whether directly or indirectly one of the most influential motion pictures ever made.
Of course, Little Fugitive wasn’t created in a cinematic vacuum. Morris Engel himself had been clearly influenced by predecessors in the United States and elsewhere. Among them:
Robert Flaherty’s faux documentary (“docufiction”) Louisiana Story (1948) and Sidney Meyers’ Academy Award-nominated naturalistic documentary The Quiet One (1949) – both centered on young boys.
The Italian neorealist movement, minus the socially conscious themes, possibly in addition to Luciano Emmer’s Sunday in August / Domenica d’agosto (1950), a portrait of disparate people spending the day at the beach in Ostia, just outside of Rome.
Silent/dawn of the sound era releases like F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), which, however stylized and studio-bound, features a lengthy, plotless mid-section partly set at an amusement park; Paul Fejos’ Lonesome (1928), a thematically simple but technically ambitious, Coney Island-set love story; and Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer’s slice-of-life, Berlin-set People on Sunday / Menschen am Sonntag (1930).
Below is a brief overview of Morris Engle’s Little Fugitive and its lasting impact.
From photojournalist to filmmaker
Born in Brooklyn on April 8, 1918, at a young age Morris Engel began working as a bank clerk to help support his widowed mother. In 1936, he joined the Photo League, which combined the art of photography with social awareness, later landing a job as a photojournalist at the liberal New York City daily PM.
During World War II, Engel worked as a combat photographer for the U.S. Navy, being present at the D-Day Normandy landing. After the war, he returned to PM, where fellow photographer and future A Clockwork Orange director Stanley Kubrick became a friend, and worked on assignments for name publications like Collier’s and McCall’s.
Engel had become acquainted with filmmaking while helping out photographer Paul Strand create the pro-union documentary/fiction mix Native Land, released in 1942. His chance to finally make his own movie would materialize once he and fellow WWII combat photographer Charles Woodruff developed a portable 35mm camera.
The light, compact device prevented jittery images without the need for a tripod, at the same time giving its user the ability to film people without being noticed. Just as importantly, Engel would be able to make his own professional-caliber motion picture on a small budget and with a skeleton crew.
Little Fugitive: A big-city boy’s cinéma vérité story
Morris Engel conceived Little Fugitive with photographer Ruth Orkin, who became his wife during the 1952 shooting of the film, and former PM colleague Raymond Abrashkin (billed as Ray Ashley). The trio was credited for the film’s direction and story, with Abrashkin/Ashley named the author of the actual screenplay.
Engel and Abrashkin also wore producer hats, while Orkin shared editing duties with Lester Troob (who doubled as sound/music supervisor in his sole screen credit). Future Emmy nominee Eddy Manson (the DuPont Show of the Month episode “Harvey,” 1957) was responsible for the low-key, mood-enhancing harmonica score. Along the lines of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan, nonprofessionals were cast in the lead roles.
The simple plot – if it can be called that – revolves around a seven-year-old boy (Richie Andrusco, in his only film appearance) who runs away from home after mistakenly believing he has shot dead his 11-year-old brother (Richard Brewster, also in his film debut/swan song). With a little grocery money in his pocket, the boy eventually finds himself immersed in the sights and sounds of Coney Island.
Little Fugitive was produced for a reported $30,000 (one 1954 source pegged its cost at $87,000), raised from friends. Engel shot the film himself, with his portable camera strapped to his shoulder. Sound and dialogue were added in post-production.
Little Fugitive vs. Hollywood ‘realism’
Little Fugitive was hardly the first postwar American feature to take the action far away from Hollywood studio lots. At least partly influenced by Italian neorealism, Jules Dassin had filmed the cop drama The Naked City (1948) in the streets of New York while Elia Kazan had shot the thriller Panic in the Streets (1950) on location in New Orleans.
Yet The Naked City, Panic in the Streets, and other such “naturalistic” Hollywood productions were also traditional big-studio fare, featuring formal storylines, name actors, studio-schooled behind-the-scenes talent, and sizable budgets.
In that regard, the cheap, independently made, marque-nameless, loosely threaded Little Fugitive was a unique product that would require “specialty” handling.
That job fell to Polish-born indie distributor Joseph Burstyn, who previously had, at times in partnership with Arthur Mayer, brought to the United States European imports such as Jean Renoir’s slice-of-life A Day in the Country, and the neorealist works of Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan) and Roberto Rossellini (Open City, the polemical L’Amore).
Through Burstyn’s efforts, Little Fugitive was screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival, where it was one of the recipients of that year’s Silver Lion.[1]
Little Fugitive Richie Andrusco Little Fugitive with Richie Andrusco: Morris Engel’s landmark independent American film. Joanna Lipper’s Little Fugitive remake came out in 2006, the year after Engel’s death. In the cast: Peter Dinklage, Raquel Castro, Nicolas Salgado, and, as the little boy in Coney Island, David Castro.
‘Photographer’s triumph’
As expected, Little Fugitive didn’t break any box office records. Certainly not in a year heralding the arrival of CinemaScope (The Robe, How to Marry a Millionaire), the expansion of 3D (Kiss Me Kate, House of Wax), and the release of sumptuous standard-format color productions (Shane, Mogambo, Salome), all-star prestige titles (From Here to Eternity, Julius Caesar), and saucy comedies (The Moon Is Blue, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).
But unlike some of its bigger-budget competitors, the modest big-city boy’s tale was warmly received, even if with caveats in some quarters. Here’s the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther:
“The alertness and style of [the filmmakers’] photography are clearly reflective of the demands of the picture-magazine layout. And that is what they’ve mobilized in this film.
“We are not criticizing that, mind you. A day at Coney Island with a small boy, torn between curiosity and survival, can be – and is – a lot of fun….
“But the limits must be perceived and mentioned – there is little conception of drama in this trick, and the mere repetition of adventures tends eventually to grow dull. … [The young brothers’] anxieties are as mild as the summer rain, which pelts the beach and the boardwalk for a climactic moment in the film.
“All hail to Little Fugitive and to those who made it. But count it a photographer’s triumph with a limited theme.”
Not unexpected Oscar nomination
Little Fugitive was named one of the National Board of Review’s top ten films, while Raymond Abrashkin’s all-but-plotless screenplay became a Writers Guild of America Award contender for the year’s Best Written American Drama. (Abrashkin/Ashley lost to Daniel Taradash for From Here to Eternity.)
Additionally, in early 1954 Little Fugitive earned an Academy Award nomination in the Best Motion Picture Story category. That was likely not a major surprise; in previous years, both Louisiana Story and The Quiet One had also been shortlisted for their “story.” (The latter in the “Best Story and Screenplay” category.)
The winner turned out to be another tale about a runaway and an exemplar of slick Hollywood filmmaking: Paramount’s Roman Holiday, which traces the romantic adventures of a young princess (Best Actress Audrey Hepburn) as she promenades incognito throughout Rome.[2]
Little Fugitive influence: John Cassavetes + François Truffaut
In a 1960 interview with The New Yorker’s Lillian Ross, French New Wave filmmaker François Truffaut affirmed: “Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie Little Fugitive.”
All hyperbole aside, Little Fugitive’s no-frills, no-stars, little-to-no-plot approach to narrative cinema did exert a marked influence on filmmakers around the world.
In the United States, the most notable example among Morris Engel’s successors is John Cassavetes. Shot with a handheld 16 mm camera in New York City, his first feature, Shadows, came out in 1958.
However, in contrast to Engel, Cassavetes managed to keep cranking out movies over the ensuing three decades, receiving Oscar nominations for Faces (Best Original screenplay, 1968) and A Woman Under the Influence (Best Director, 1974)[3] – thus impacting on more generations of filmmakers, from Martin Scorsese (“It was after seeing [Shadows], I realized we could make films … nothing was forbidden anymore”) to Jim Jarmusch (“There’s a particular feeling I get when I’m about to see one of your films – an anticipation”).
Elsewhere, besides François Truffaut (The 400 Blows, 1959), the sway of Little Fugitive could be felt in the works of, among others, Albert Lamorisse (The Red Balloon, 1956), Jean-Luc Godard (whose 1960 crime drama Breathless was shot with a handheld camera through the streets of Paris), and, more recently, Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, 1995).
Regarding Truffaut’s claim that Little Fugitive was the Nouvelle Vague’s originator, Engel would counter decades later in a New York Times interview: “It’s ridiculous, but I am not going to argue.”
Weddings and Babies Viveca Lindfors John Myhers Weddings and Babies with Viveca Lindfors and John Myhers. In 2008, Kino released “The Films of Morris Engel,” including Little Fugitive, Lovers and Lollipops, and Weddings and Babies, plus the documentary short Morris Engel: The Independent, directed by his daughter, Mary Engel.
Lovers and Lollipops & Weddings and Babies
In spite of Little Fugitive’s critical success and awards season mentions, funding for other Morris Engel projects would prove hard to come by. Probably not helping matters was distributor Joseph Burstyn’s death in 1953.
Hollywood was out of the question. “It was exactly the kind of work that doesn’t appeal to me,” he would tell the Times. “I am happy I didn’t go.”
Engel would direct only two more features in the 1950s, the first one a joint directorial effort with Ruth Orkin:
Lovers and Lollipops (1956), the story of a widowed New York fashion model (Lori March) whose young daughter (Cathy Dunn, in her only film appearance) disturbs her budding liaison with an engineer (Gerald S. O’Loughlin).
Weddings and Babies (shot in 1957; released in 1960), supposed to be the first feature “made with a portable camera with synchronous sound attachment” and the only Engel effort to boast the presence of an actual movie star, Viveca Lindfors (Night Unto Night, Moonfleet). The partly autobiographical plot revolves around the relationship between a wedding photographer (John Myhers) and his marriage-and-family-focused assistant (Lindfors).
Later years
I Need a Ride to California (1968) was Morris Engel’s first color effort, and his fourth and final feature film. This tale of a young California woman enmeshed with troubled East Village hippies would remain undistributed until its October 2019 premiere at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.
In the 1990s, Engel worked on a couple of full-length video projects: A Little Bit Pregnant (1994), about an eight-year-old boy discovering the differences between the sexes, and Camellia (1998), centered on a two-year-old girl.
“People are always hunting for something,” he told the Times in 2002. “You only need one piece, one good movie. That’s enough fulfillment for a man’s life.”
Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin remained married until her death at age 63 in 1985. Engel died at age 86 in March 2005 in New York City.
“Morris Engel: Little Fugitive Director” notes
Six Silver Lion winners
[1] The Golden Lion was not awarded in 1953. Little Fugitive shared the Silver Lion with the following:
Marcel Carné’s The Adulteress / Thérèse Raquin.
Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu.
Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni.
Aleksandr Ptushko’s Sadko.
John Huston’s Moulin Rouge.
Dalton Trumbo front
[2] Ian McLellan Hunter, a front for blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, was originally credited for the Roman Holiday “story.” Hunter was also credited for the screenplay, alongside John Dighton.
William Wyler directed the romantic comedy; Gregory Peck and Eddie Albert were Audrey Hepburn’s co-stars.
Big-studio actor & director John Cassavetes
[3] Unlike Morris Engel, John Cassavetes also acted in mainstream Hollywood productions – e.g., Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City (1957), Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). He was a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee for Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967).
Also unlike Morris Engel, who had no interest in working within Hollywood’s studio system, Cassavetes would occasionally direct studio films.
Examples include United Artists’ Stanley Kramer-produced A Child Is Waiting (1962), starring Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland, and Columbia Pictures’ Gloria (1980), starring Cassavetes’ wife and frequent collaborator Gena Rowlands.
THE DAILY PIC (#1636): I’m ashamed that I’d never heard of the films of Morris Engel until just recently, given how wonderful and influential they are. Francois Truffaut said that the movies of the French New Wave would never have existed if their directors hadn’t had the example of Engel to follow, and the same can pretty clearly be said about John Cassavetes and similar American auteurs.
It soothes my ego just a touch to note that even my most cinephilic friends had also not heard of him.
Today’s Pic is the publicity shot for Weddings and Babies, the last of the three films that Engel made, all between 1953 and 1960 and all in collaboration with his wife the street photographer Ruth Orkin. (Engel too spent most of his career as a photojournalist.) It may be my favorite of his films. It tells the poignant story of a perpetually about-to-be-married couple who run a tiny weddings-and-babies photo studio in Little Italy in New York, and make extra money by filming the street life around them.
As in all of Engel’s films, he gives the streets of New York as important a role as any of his human characters. The gorgeous chaos he wanders through is wonderful to watch, and painful, too, from the vantage point of our ever more corporate, antiseptic and Dallas-ized city. Engel’s New York is made extra present because he films its streets with a handheld 35mm camera that he helped design. The cinematographers of the French New Wave owed some of their own hand-holding to him.
Engel’s human characters are also amazing. In Weddings and Babies there’s one old woman with dementia who, despite barely uttering a single line, is utterly compelling. That must be because she’s almost certainly more-or-less playing herself.
A few of Engel’s actors were pros, sometimes even well-known ones. But a lot of them were untrained, asked to improvise their way into their roles. Again, Truffaut and his pals were given extra license to cast “ordinary” people in their films because Engel had done it first.
There are flaws in Engel’s art – he was figuring it out as he went, and sometimes fell back on Hollywood sentiment. (His films’ scores are painfully full of it, despite the occasional moment of jazzy modernism.)
It was easier to get New Wave style right once you had the films of Engel as a reference point.
Morris Engel (April 8, 1918 – March 5, 2005) was an American photographer, cinematographer and filmmaker best known for making the first American film "independent" of Hollywood studios, Little Fugitive (1953), in collaboration with his wife, photographer Ruth Orkin, and their friend, writer Raymond Abrashkin.
Engel was a pioneer in the use of hand-held cameras and nonprofessional actors in his films, cameras that he helped design, and his naturalistic films influenced future prominent independent and French New Wave filmmakers.[1]
Contents
1 Career
2 Legacy
3 Filmography (complete)
4 Exhibitions (selection)
5 References
6 External links
Career
A lifelong New Yorker, Morris Engel was born in Brooklyn in 1918. After joining the Photo League in 1936, Engel had his first exhibition in 1939, at the New School for Social Research.[2] He worked briefly as a photographer for the Leftist newspaper PM[2] before joining the United States Navy as a combat photographer from 1941 to 1946 in World War II.[2] After the war, he returned to New York where he again was an active Photo League member, teaching workshop classes and serving as co-chair of a project group focusing on postwar labor issues.[3]
Richie Andrusco in Little Fugitive
In 1953, Engel, along with his girlfriend, fellow photographer Ruth Orkin, and his former colleague at PM, Raymond Abrashkin, made the feature film Little Fugitive for $30,000, shooting the film on location in Coney Island with a hand-held 35 millimeter camera Engel had designed himself. This camera was compact and lightweight so it would be unobtrusive shooting in public. As such, it did not allow simultaneous sound recording; the sound was dubbed later. The film, one of the first successful American "independent films" earned them an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story and a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The film told the story of a seven-year-old boy, played by Richie Andrusco, who runs away from home and spends the day at Coney Island. Andrusco never appeared in another film, and the other performers were mainly nonprofessionals.
A scene from Lovers and Lollipops
Though their first film was a critical success,[4] Engel and Orkin, who had since married, had a hard time finding funding [4] for their next film, Lovers and Lollipops, which was completed in 1956. The film was about a widowed mother dating an old friend, and how her young daughter complicates their budding relationship. Like the first one, Lovers and Lollipops was filmed with a hand-held compact 35 mm camera, with sound dubbed in post-production.
This was followed two years later by the more adult-centered Weddings and Babies, a film about an aspiring photographer than is often seen as autobiographical. This was Engel's first film to have live sound recorded at the time of filming, and is historically the first 35 mm fiction film made with a portable camera equipped for synchronized sound.[5]
In 1961, Engel directed three television commercials, including an award-winning one for Oreo cookies. The other two were for Ivory soap and Fab detergent.[6] A half-hour short film The Dog Lover was made the following year, a comedy about a shop merchant whose life is turned upside down by the stray dog his kid brings home.[6]
He made a fourth feature in 1968[2] called I Need a Ride to California, which followed a group of young hippies in Greenwich Village. Post-production was shelved until 1972 when it was finally completed, but for unknown reasons it was never released during his lifetime. It finally received its premiere in October 2019 at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); it was first released on home video in March 2021.[6]
In the 1980s, Engel began taking panoramic photographs on the streets of New York City.[6] Engel and Ruth Orkin remained married until Orkin's death in 1985. In the 1990s, he returned to filmmaking, this time working on video. He completed two feature-length documentaries: A Little Bit Pregnant[6] in 1994 and Camellia[6] in 1998, each revolving around a different child in the Hartman family. First, in A Little Bit Pregnant Engel focused on the 8-year-old Leon's reactions, anxiety and wonderment to the impending birth of his baby sister Camellia. For the second film, two years later Engel returned to the same family, who gave him a year of access to the now 2-year-old daughter Camellia, capturing her daily life and routines, and her relationships with her family and others. Both films were shown in private screenings, but never had a public release due likely to the Hartman family presumably holding the rights.[6][7]
Engel died of cancer in 2005.
Legacy
Engel and Orkin's work occupy a pivotal position in the independent and art film scene of the 1950s, and was influential on John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and François Truffaut,[1][4][8] and was frequently cited as an example by the influential film theorist Siegfried Kracauer.[9]
Writing in Cassavetes on Cassavetes, biographer Raymond Carney says that Cassavetes was familiar with the work of the New York-based independent filmmakers who preceded him, and was "particularly fond" of Engel's three films from the 1950s. Carney writes that "Commentators who regard [Cassavetes] as the 'first independent' are only displaying their ignorance of the history of independent American film, which goes back to the early 1950s."[10]
Truffaut was inspired by Little Fugitive 's spontaneous production style when he created The 400 Blows (1959), saying long afterwards: “Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with [this] fine movie.”[11]
Filmography (complete)
The Farm They Won (1951 short documentary film)
The Little Fugitive (1953 feature film)
Lovers and Lollipops (1956 feature film)
Weddings and Babies (1958 feature film)
One Chase Manhattan Plaza (1961 short documentary film)
The Dog Lover (1962 short film)
Little Girls Have Pretty Curls (1962 short documentary film)
I Need a Ride to California (1968 feature film) (released in 2019)
Peace Is (1968 short documentary film)
A Little Bit Pregnant (1994 feature documentary video)
Camellia (1998 feature documentary video)
Morris Engel Home Movies (various dates, short documentary) (released in 2021)
Pierrepont Burt Noyes (August 18, 1870 – April 15, 1959) was an American businessman and writer. He was brought up in the Oneida Community, a religious Utopian group. Noyes later became the head of Oneida Limited, a position he held for many years.
Contents
1 Early life
2 Oneida Limited
3 Government Work
4 Literary works
4.1 Books
5 References
6 External links
Early life
Pierrepont "P.B." Noyes was born in the Oneida Community (1848–1880), a group of religious perfectionists who lived communally in New York State. The Community was led by John Humphrey Noyes.
In the early years of the Community, members practiced birth control in order to keep the birthrate low. By the late 1860s, Noyes and other Community members developed an interest in selective breeding. They hoped that religious devotion might be inheritable, and that they could pass on their own strong sense of spirituality to another generation. They called their eugenics experiment “stirpiculture” and the children born in the experiment were known as stirpicults. Between 1869 and 1879, forty-five "stirpicults" were born.[1] Pierrepoint was the son of John Humphrey Noyes and Harriet Maria Worden, and he was a product of their eugenic outlook.
Like all Community children, Noyes was raised in the children's wing of the group's home. He visited his mother occasionally, and in his autobiography recalled being closer to his mother than to his father: "I owe immensely more to my mother, in the warp and woof of character, than I do to my father. He never seemed a father to me in the ordinary sense. I revered him, but he was much too far away, too near to heaven and God."[2]
After the Community voted to disband in 1880, Noyes lived with his mother.
Oneida Limited
After studying at Colgate University, followed by Harvard University, P.B. Noyes joined Oneida Limited, the company which emerged from the commune after his father's death. He went on to become president of the company, steering it towards specialising in silverware and stainless steel cutlery.[3] In 1894, he married another stirpicult, Corinna Ackley Kinsley (Also his half-niece), and the couple had three children.
As the head of Oneida Limited, Noyes developed the company's ideology. He believed that "good wages were essential to good morale," and in 1904 proposed a policy of voluntary salary reductions for management whenever the company was in financial difficulties. The company followed this during economic troubles in 1921. Historian Maren Lockwood Carden wrote that, "Noyes halved his own salary, the directors took a one-third reduction, and the other officials took smaller ones in proportion to their regular salaries."[4]
Noyes also encouraged the development of Sherrill, New York as a community for employees. In 1905 the company laid out plans for the town, giving bonuses to those employees who built their own homes there.[5] The company also helped to fund athletic clubs, a golf course, and the building of a new elementary school and a new high school.[6]
Government Work
In 1917, Noyes resigned from the general manager role (he would return to Oneida Limited in 1921). During the First World War he worked for the Federal Government as an Assistant Fuel Administrator. As the war came to an end he was in France selling cutlery. In April 1919 he was persuaded to take up the role as the American Commissioner on the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission, a post he held until May 1920.[7] His experiences led him to write his first book, While Europe Waits for Peace. In the book he argued against the Allies punitive policy in the Treaty of Versailles. He believed it would lead to more warfare.[8]
Noyes returned to Oneida Limited in the 1920s, but eventually took on a more ceremonial role. In the 1930s, at the suggestion of Bernard Baruch, Noyes joined a six-man commission set up by the New York State Legislature. The Commission was responsible for developing a new spa at Saratoga Springs. Noyes remained on the commission until 1950.[9]
Literary works
Noyes continued to write throughout his career, including a science fiction book titled The Pallid Giant: A Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow. The Pallid Giant expressed Noyes' concerns about war, weapons, and the destruction of humanity. In the book, published in 1927, Noyes describes an ultimate super weapon that would "end all war by ending man."[10] The book was re-issued as Gentlemen, You are Mad! after the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Noyes also wrote two memoirs: My Father's House: An Oneida Boyhood, and A Goodly Heritage, a history of Oneida Limited, before his death in 1959.
Books
While Europe Waits for Peace: Describing the Progress of Economic and Political Demoralization in Europe during the Year of American Hesitation (1921)
The Pallid Giant: A Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow (1927)
My Father's House: An Oneida Boyhood (1937).[11]
Goodly Heritage (1958)
Business Executive. The son of Oneida Community founder John Humphrey Noyes, he studied at Colgate and Harvard Universities and joined Oneida Limited, the corporation formed from the Oneida Community commune after the death of John Humphrey Noyes. Pierrepont Noyes became the company's President and focused its effort on producing one product, and under his leadership Oneida Limited became the world's largest producer of silverware and stainless steel flatware. During World War I he worked for the federal government as Assistant Fuel Administrator, and afterwards served as the US Representative on the Allied Commission that administered the Rhineland after Germany's defeat. After returning home Noyes wrote books and articles on foreign affairs and current events, advocating more liberal reparations payments for Germany and US membership in the League of Nations. He was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress in 1928. In 1933 he was appointed President of the Saratoga Springs Authority and oversaw construction of a resort at the famous spa as part of a state-sponsored redevelopment plan. Noyes was also a writer, and in 1927 authored "Pallid Giant", a novel that anticipated the development of nuclear weapons, and was later republished as "Gentlemen: You Are Mad!". He also published two autobiographical volumes, 1937's "My Father's House" and 1958's "A Goodly Heritage".
Pierrepont Trowbridge Noyes, longtime head of Oneida Ltd., the company that started as a religious commune and today considers itself the world's largest tableware maker, died on Wednesday at his home in Oneida, N.Y. He was 78 years old.
He died of multiple natural causes, his family said.
Mr. Noyes led Oneida Ltd. through a period of robust growth. He retired in 1981 as chairman and chief executive after 45 years with the company, taking the title of honorary chairman. At the time of his death he remained vice chairman of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center and a member of the Saratoga-Capital District of the State Park, Recreation and Historic Preservation Commission.
He was the grandson of John Humphrey Noyes, who founded the Oneida Community in 1848. It began to manufacture flatware in 1877, disbanded three years later and evolved into Oneida Ltd. Mr. Noyes took the company into new fields, such as the food-service and industrial-wire industries.
A native of Kenwood, N.Y., he graduated from Colgate University and joined the company in 1936. Himself the son of a former company president, Pierrepont Burt Noyes, he underwent years of training in sales, production and management, gradually assuming greater responsibilities.
Mr. Noyes became president in 1960. He was elected chairman and re-elected president in 1967, resigned as president in 1978 and continued as chairman and chief executive until his retirement. Oneida products include stainless steel and silver-plated flatware, silver-plated holloware and items in sterling silver and gold plate. It also manufactures china for hotels, restaurants and others in the food-service sector.
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Mr. Noyes, who owned horses, was a past director of Mid-State Raceway. He was long active in community and business affairs, including the local Community Chest and WCNY Public Broadcasting. He was a former trustee of his alma mater, Colgate.
He is survived by his wife of 56 years, the former Phyllis Leland; a daughter, Melinda Noyes; a son, P. Geoffrey; a sister, Barbara Noyes Smith, all of Oneida, and five grandchildren.
In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two working class Jewish adolescents, created an
“interplanetary immigrant” who was dedicated to making the world better.2 This involved being
a champion of the underdog and in order to accomplish his tasks, they endowed him with
superhuman powers of strength and perception. This hero, “Superman,” was the most enduring
of many champions in the popular culture of the 1930s. His cover identity was that of a meek,
mildly mannered newspaper reporter at a metropolitan daily who possessed the ability to
transform himself at a moment’s notice whenever he was needed to further the cause of justice.
Such heroes appeared across different media, on radio shows as well as in comic books and pulp
fiction. As this super-hero was entering public awareness and photography was gaining
dominance as a way to convey news of the world, a new photography driven newspaper was
1 Roy Hoopes. Ralph Ingersoll: A Biography. New York: Atheneum, 1985, p. 404.
2 The character of Superman was originally introduced in 1933 in an illustrated short story; however, the
familiar heroic Superman first appeared in Action Comics No. 1 in June 1938 when the superhero was
associated with the slogan “Champion of the Oppressed.” In 1940, at approximately the time of PM’s
debut, The Adventures of Superman became a popular radio program. On that show he was granted the
ability to fly and the original slogan was dropped in favor of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”
This trajectory paralleled what was happening on the pages of PM and eventually, the country, as concern
for the downtrodden and ethnic identity gave way to creation of an American identity, celebration of
democracy and an all out effort to win the war. See Charles Moss, “Superman’s Dark Past”, The Atlantic,
accessed 3/16
2
being born in New York City, the real Gotham. The daily newspaper PM, which ran from June
1940 through 1948, was created from within the heart of the publishing empire of Henry Luce.
The idea for the new paper was the brainchild of Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, an experienced
publishing world insider who took the wildly successful formula of the mid-1930s weekly photo
magazines, such as Luce’s Life, and translated it into a daily paper. His new publication was
intended to represent political views that emphasized a sense of justice and advocated for social
improvement for the dispossessed. The “Superman” phenomenon was a perfect metaphor for
PM, which proclaimed its purpose as a crusading newspaper. In an early prospectus for PM,
Ralph Ingersoll stated,
We are against people who push other people around, just for the fun of pushing, whether
they flourish in this country or abroad. We are against fraud and deceit and greed and
cruelty and we will seek to expose their practitioners. We are for people who are kindly
and courageous and honest. We respect intelligence, sound accomplishment, openmindedness, religious tolerance. We do not believe all mankind’s problems are now being
solved successfully by any existing social order, certainly not our own, and we propose to
crusade for those who seek constructively to improve the way men live together. We are
Americans and we prefer democracy to any other principle of government.3
Photography was central to the conception of PM and a crucial element in its mission of
informing ordinary people, encouraging them to be a participating audience, and teaching them
to be literate about the photographic message. The editorial staff referred to their urban and
mainly proletarian readers as the “uncelebrated,” an expression that they purposely coined in
opposition to the prevailing celebrity culture of Hollywood running through the most popular
picture press. The term “uncelebrated” encompassed members of the working class as well as
minorities - racial, ethnic and religious - who were often subjected to discrimination. This was
3 Roy Hoopes, Ralph Ingersoll: A Biography, New York, Atheneum, 1985, p. 410. “PM is against people
who push other people around” became what Paul Milkman calls “the cornerstone slogan of the
newspaper” and was so important to the editors that they printed the slogan several times a week until
1946, when Ingersoll resigned. The full quote was published twice in the newspaper, followed by the
words “PM still feels this way.” Paul Milkman, PM: A New Deal in Journalism, 1940-1948, New
Brunswick, New Jersey and London, Rutgers University Press, 1997, p. 41.
3
significant at a time when prejudice, both blatant and subtle, was widespread in the United
States, and Fascism presented a growing threat from abroad. PM repeatedly printed its slogan
“we are against people who push other people around,” and the rapidly increasing possibilities of
war on the horizon gave greater urgency to its visual program. Daring like Superman, on the side
of the little guy, PM was also exceptional because it did not accept paid advertising. Instead, PM
was supported by millionaire department store heir, Marshall Field III, who, in accord with the
paper’s political views, stated, “I’m not supporting a newspaper, I’m supporting an idea.”4
Considered a left-liberal New York City daily newspaper, PM represented a milestone in
American journalism.5
Its photography was neither commercial nor sensational but aligned with
the views of the cultural left, widely known in the mid-1930s as the “Popular Front” – an
organization that had originally been created by the Communist International in 1935 in order to
fight the growth of fascism.
PM also reflected a meaningful chapter in the history of photojournalism that has been
little examined in comparison to the major mass circulation illustrated periodicals that emerged
during the 1930s, notably Life magazine. This was all the more important because the newspaper
was incubated in the crucible of Henry Luce’s publishing empire, in the offices of the photo
magazines, Fortune and Life, where Ralph Ingersoll, future PM editor and publisher, had initially
4 PM was originally supported by a group of funders but after a few months these were eventually bought
out by Field. Hoopes, cit., p. 236.
5 The meaning of the name PM is unknown. It could be short for p.m. and suggest the status of an
afternoon paper, but this interpretation is not convincing because it had a morning edition. The initials
coincidentally stand for Picture Magazine and they might have inspired the naming of the contemporary
AM subway tabloid. There are competing anecdotes regarding the paper’s naming. Some sources ascribe
this to syndicated columnist Walter Winchell, some to Ingersoll’s friend, author Lillian Hellman, or to
columnist Leonard Lyons. In some accounts, the name was arbitrary and there is conjecture that its
meaning was deliberately unclear. See Paul Milkman, cit., p. 43; Roy Hoopes, cit., p. 216.
4
held major positions.6
Ingersoll aimed to expand 1930s modernist photojournalism from the
great mass circulation picture magazines to the daily newspaper, and he set this goal at a time
when the dailies were extremely conservative in terms of both politics and form. They were also
parochial and unimaginative in sharp contrast with Ingersoll’s PM.7
In every aspect, PM bore the imprint of the flamboyant Ingersoll who had participated
intimately in the development of Life, the 1936 picture magazine that was instrumental in
shaping and disseminating modern visual culture, forging a particular image of a corporate
United States. Ingersoll’s own newspaper was also modernist in its embrace of photography as a
new form of visual narrative. PM’s agenda challenged Luce’s vision of a consumerist America
largely populated only by white, middle and upper classes, by explicitly representing and serving
ordinary citizens, and working actively on behalf of “the common man.”
8 PM’s editors saw in
FDR and the New Deal the best hope for the United States.
6 Luce hired Ingersoll to be managing editor at Fortune in 1930. Due to Fortune’s success, Ingersoll was
promoted to second in command at Time, Inc. In this capacity, he recognized the importance of the
dynamic use of high quality photography, pressured Luce to create a weekly picture magazine, and began
to work on plans for it. In 1936, when Luce personally took over what became the picture magazine, Life,
he sent Ingersoll back to Time as Vice President and General Manager. Ingersoll, whose views had
evolved leftwards, disagreed strongly with the politics at Time, Inc. Hoopes., pp. 81, 86, 139-154
7 New York City had nine papers in the late 1930s. Of these, The Daily News was a sensationalist tabloid
saturated with comics, celebrity gossip, crime, and sexual titillation. The Telegram provided a platform
for the viciously conservative critic, Westbrook Pegler. Other mainstream papers, including The New
York Times and The Herald Tribune, were instruments of the status quo. Only The New York Post
reflected the city’s diversity and did not attack the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration. No new
newspaper had appeared in the city since 1924 when the Mirror and The Graphic began. There were
numerous foreign language and leftist papers but these had relatively small circulations. Many papers had
also folded or merged in the wake of the Depression. According to Milkman, there had been almost no
innovation in newspaper publishing in five decades. The tabloid papers used badly reproduced
photographs and since the 1920s these publications provided fodder for those critics who saw
photographs as inferior to the written word and a threat associated with social decline. Milkman, cit., p.
10.
8 The term “the common man” derived from the famous speech known as the “Century of the Common
Man,” made by Henry Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This speech of May 8, 1942 was published in its entirety by PM. His words, "I say that the century on
which we are entering—the century which will come out of this war—can be and must be the century of
the common man," were critical of Henry Luce’s designation of the twentieth century as “The American
5
This study considers photojournalism in PM from June 1940 through July 1942, the
period during which Ralph Ingersoll had the greatest influence on the paper, prior to his
enlistment in World War II. This was the time when the paper was most vibrant, experimental,
and attractive. In the summer of 1942, following Ralph Ingersoll’s departure, other journalists
took over the editorial staff. At this time, Ralph Steiner, the paper’s photography critic who had
been essential in shaping PM’s unique message, also left, and photographer Morris Engel
departed to join the armed services and the war effort. Finally, by 1943, the programs of FDR
and the New Deal were superseded by an all out effort to win the war and PM, suffering through
war-time shortages in ink and paper, became less visually compelling.9
Many of the journalistic practices introduced in PM were decades ahead of their time and
in many respects, the paper’s influence changed American newspapers altogether. PM
introduced the weekend picture supplement, which still exists in the form of the syndicated
Parade Magazine. It encouraged a vivid, personal style of reporting, both written and visual, and
it served as a model for the “critical culture” of the alternative press that would evolve two
decades later with its adversarial style of crusading journalism and its break with the traditional
financial model of selling advertising.10 PM’s weekend edition, known as PM’s Weekly, was
partly derived in its form from a magazine, and is the focus of this study.
By the time he started his own publication, Ralph McAllister Ingersoll was one of the
most famous journalists in New York City and was known for his vigorous writing.
11 Ingersoll
9 The change in the visual appearance of PM began in late 1942 and was marked by the autumn of 1943
when wartime shortages necessitated thinner paper and no color ink.
10 Michael Schudson. “The Rise of a Critical Culture”, Discovering the News: A Social History of
American Newspapers, New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1978, pp. 176-194.
11 Ingersoll began his career in journalism at the offices of William Randolph Hearst’s New York
American, then worked for Harold Ross at the New Yorker where he is credited with starting the still
extant “Talk of the Town” column. In 1930, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time magazine, hired him to be
the Managing Editor of Fortune,, a luxury publication that addressed and celebrated corporate America
6
employed some of the best writing talent available for his new publishing venture and allowed
them the freedom to write according to their own choice.
12 The prevailing writing style at PM,
like Ingersoll’s own, tended to be vividly descriptive, deeply investigative, stylistically personal
and distinctly leftist in its bias.
13 This tone and freedom extended to the paper’s staff of first- rate
photographers who were known in press circles for their originality. In addition, PM published
work by a wide array of noted freelancers, including Weegee, as well as images purchased from
photo agencies.
14
A picture paper such as PM was a consequence of the growing trend in visual
communication that capitalized on the public’s insatiable appetite for information about the
modern world via photojournalism. In many ways, it followed in the tradition of the great
European picture publications that arose in the preceding decades: BIZ, AIZ, VU, and the French
communist paper, Regards.
15 PM joined a number of U.S. left wing publications that also
and managed to become successful during Ingersoll’s tenure in spite of its high price and its introduction
at the height of the depression. At Fortune Ingersoll was responsible for bringing in talented photographer
Margaret Bourke-White as well as introducing the candid photography of European pioneer, Erich
Salomon who introduced a spontaneous look associated with smaller, lighter cameras including Leicas,
12 Among the writers whose talents PM could claim were I.F. Stone, James Wechsler, Max Lerner, James
Thurber, Erskine Caldwell, Ben Hecht, Penn Kimball, Hodding Carter, and the illustrious Ernest
Hemingway.
13 During his tenure at Fortune, Ingersoll came into contact with leftist intellectual writers Archibald
MacLeish and Dwight MacDonald who exposed him to the ideas of socialism and political dissent and
inspired him with their enthusiasm for Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was then running for president. As
his views evolved leftward, Ingersoll began to dislike the politics at Time, Inc where he was appointed
General Manager in 1936. At this time, he became increasingly involved with a circle of leftist friends
including writers Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett and began to work with a socialist
psychoanalyst who also saw Marshall Field. See Milkman, cit., p. 13, 41
14 The newspaper also maintained a roster of talented visual artists, illustrators and cartoonists: Theodor
Seuss Geisel, (Dr. Seuss), Leo Hershfield, Ad Reinhardt, Charles Martin, Jack Coggins, and Don
Freeman.
15 Richard Whelan. Robert Capa: a biography. New York: Ballantine Books, 1985, p. 218, claimed that
the French communist paper Ce Soir, 1937-1953 was a model for PM. This requires further research but it
is conceivable that the initials PM can be associated with a translation from the French, “this evening”.
However, according to both Paul Milkman and Ingersoll’s biographer, Hoopes, the choice of the initials
PM for the name of the paper was fairly arbitrary and may have been done to keep readers guessing and
talking about the new publication. Additionally, PM was not an afternoon paper, and had a morning
edition as well.
7
represented “Popular Front” views but these had smaller circulations and many, such as the
Daily Worker, were punctuated by advertising and the photography in these was neither of the
quantity or quality of that in PM.
16 Although PM used the methods of combining words and
photographs developed at Life, it translated these towards progressive ends and for the benefit of
its diverse working class readers. The picture of which Ingersoll’s newspaper presented
represented a sharp contrast to Life’s picture of a mythic, consumerist America based on equal
opportunity. In contrast, PM’s vision included the diverse fabric of New York City and PM
showed images of what Life left out: widespread poverty, deeply embedded racism, and
discrimination based on religion and ethnicity. Toward this end, the editors made a different
array of citizens visible, including labor’s “rank and file”, minority groups, blacks and women.
(Figs. 1-2) PM also demonstrated its considerable interest and commitment to children visually.
Pediatrician Benjamin Spock, who later became famous for writing what amounted to the bible
of post-war child rearing advice, contributed a weekly column, PM’s Baby, tracing the
development of a baby girl born at the time PM appeared. (Fig. 3) The paper was known for
waging highly vocal crusades against bias including several that exposed the coded
discrimination that was commonplace elsewhere in the daily press.17 However, PM did not
ignore popularly appealing imagery such as that of leggy young women in bathing suits. It just
presented this trope of the era, which PM called “Bathing Girl of the Week,” with what Paul
Milkman has referred to as “a proletarian slant”.
Henry Luce understood the power of photographs to affect public opinion and used his
16 Milkman, cit., p. 33.
17 PM was acutely aware of and opposed to the widespread anti-Semitism of the time. The early PM
waged a campaign exposing blatant discrimination in help wanted ads. See Milkman, cit., pp. 146.
8
publications to mold this in the name of what he referred to as “partisan objectivity”.18 Ingersoll
learned this while in Luce’s employ; however, besides their political differences, there was a
fundamental difference between the two publishers.
19 While Luce hid the mechanics of his
partisan manipulation by maintaining that photographs were factual records, Ingersoll and his
staff revealed the constructed nature of every image to his readers and that photographs were
made by human beings, by nature subjective, rather than by mechanical means. Together with
his editors, especially photo critic, Ralph Steiner, he used PM’s admission of its leftist bias as a
claim for its honesty.20
The most famous example of the openness with which the paper treated photographs as
human products was the inclusion of Weegee’s own colorful writing commenting on the process
of making his images along with his iconic photographs. On June 22, 1940, when the first of
Weegee’s Coney Island crowd shots appeared in PM, the accompanying text identified his real
name as Arthur Fellig and introduced his description of his experience: “Herewith is Weegee’s
own story of how he took this picture.” The text even described what Weegee had for lunch. As
he wrote, ”two kosher frankfurters and two beers at a Jewish delicatessen on the Boardwalk.
18 “partisan objectivity” was an acknowledgment that bias was inescapable. See James L. Baughman.
Henry Luce and the Rise of the American News Media. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001. Luce stated, “Show me a man who thinks he’s objective and I’ll show you a man
who’s deceiving himself.” See Michael Schudson. Discovering the News: A Social History of American
Newspapers. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1978, p. 149.
19 Ingersoll was exposed to Kurt Korff, the former editor of Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung who fled the
Nazi’s and came to work for Luce in 1934 on the creation of the new picture magazine which became
Life. Korff brought his skill in the construction of photo essays and it is difficult to belief that Ingersoll
would not have had close contacted with this talented editor. While in Luce’s employ, Ingersoll, memos
show, made the final decision about Life’s size and helped put together the layout of the first issue. See
Chris Vials, Realism For the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and U.S. Culture 1935-1947,
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009, p.180.
20PM recruited William McCleery, former features editor of the nationwide Associated Press, and gave
him complete freedom as picture editor and editor of the weekend magazine section. McCleery was lured
away from Life where he was unhappy with the elitist Ivy League atmosphere. He brought his
considerable experience using large amounts of photographic material in features rather than single news
storied to PM. See Milkman, cit., p. 18-19.
9
Later on for a chaser, I had five more beers, a malted milk, two root beers, three Coca Colas and
two glasses of Buttermilk. And five cigars costing 19 cents.”21 (Fig. 4) According to Jason Hill,
this shot was almost identical to one published by The Daily News five days later.
22 The
fundamental difference lies in the text accompanying this picture describing Weegee at work.
As more images depicting the hostilities in Europe appeared, PM editors pointed out how
these pictures were staged and faked. For example, on July 24, 1941:
The only thing missing from this Berlin propaganda shot is the camera director who so
obviously arranged it all. Notice the Nazi soldier, anything but camera shy, leading, not
following his prisoners toward the tank out of which they are supposed to have been
smoked. And toward the camera. The only thing that looks authentic is the countryside
that is as flat as the Russian steppes where Berlin said the picture was taken.23
A few pages further into the same issue, another comment revealed a staged shot: “This is the
actual invasion of Ningpo. Plunging into battle, flag-in-hand, went out with the Crimean War
and a charge under fire was never like this. This shot was staged for dramatic effect.”24
The deeply embedded stance regarding the status of the photographic image as something
constructed, and the willingness, even the urgency, with which the editorial staff instructed
readers, set PM apart from any other publication of its moment. This included other picture
magazines such as Look, which used a format similar to Life’s, but represented a more liberal
perspective. Friday, a privately funded Popular Front picture magazine, emulated the look of Life
including a red logo banner and full page photographs on its covers but was unapologetically
Stalinist and followed the staunch Communist Party line with regard to non-intervention in
21 Weegee, “Yesterday at Coney Island...Temperature 89...They Came Early, Stayed Late....”, PM, July
22, 1941, pp. 16-17.
22 Jason E. Hill. The Artist as Reporter: The PM News Picture, 1940-1948, Ph. D. Dissertation, University
of Southern California, 2013, pp. 306-329.
23 PM, July 24, 1941, p. 3.
24 “Out for Fresh Conquests, Japan Shows How It’s Done,” PM, July 24, 1941, pp. 16-17.
10
Europe.
25 Friday, while attractive, was relatively static, even conventional in its overall design.26
Both Look and Friday were punctuated by advertisements, which were carefully selected in the
case of Dan Gilmore’s Friday. Neither Look nor Friday specifically analyzed photographic
images for their audiences. The communist publications, The Daily Worker and The New
Masses, supported and reported on labor in photographs as well as words. Some of the same
photographers and artists also worked for these publications as well as PM. However, these
publications had much smaller circulations and none used photographs with as much
sophistication nor as extensively or engagingly as PM.
27 Even Earl Browder, the head of the
CPUSA who disagreed with the PM’s political position admitted that the paper was
compelling.28
Historian Jason E. Hill emphasizes that PM was a daily paper, not solely a magazine, and
must be considered as such although it arose in relation to, and partly in reaction to the prevailing
magazine culture of its time. The available literature on PM is relatively sparse compared to that
25 There were points of contact between PM and Friday, with several staff photographers occasionally
contributing to both. Work by PM photographers, Irving Haberman and Ray Platnik also appeared in
Friday and there were other connections to that magazine. Steiner, as did Roy Stryker, served as a judge
for a photo contest, “Youth in Focus”, sponsored by Friday, which presented work by young members of
the American Youth Congress on September 20, 1940, p. 26. Steiner mentioned his part in this contest in
a column.
26 A wealthy young radical, Dan Gilmore, who funded Friday, had been considered but rejected as a
backer for PM because of his insistence that PM adhere to the CPUSA party line. Gilmore had loaned
Ingersoll money ($25,000) for his initial research into a picture publication. This relationship between PM
and Gilmore’s publication bear further exploration. Hoopes, cit., pp. 187-88, 220, 234.
27 Several staff members, including artist Ad Reinhardt who did illustrations for PM, came to the paper
1930s, may have had a circulation as high as 35,000. It was one of the most influential publications of the
left, had a Sunday edition, serious sports coverage, counter cultural comic strips and other entertainment
28 Browder condemned PM for being reactionary but felt it presented news “in such a charming and
innocent and interesting fashion that even the members of our own Association, I am sorry to say, often
prefer PM rather than the Worker.” See David Margolick, “PM’s Impossible Dream,” Vanity Fair,
January 1999, p. 129.
11
on Time, Life, Look or other magazines. This literature either covers politics, as in Paul
Milkman’s thorough study dedicated to the full run and the demise of the newspaper in the
climate of the Cold War, or it deals with PM as a phenomenon in written journalism in periodic
articles devoted to the paper, such as that by David Margolick.29 These only briefly touch on
photography as part of the paper’s agenda. The only major visual analysis of PM to date has been
undertaken by Jason E. Hill who ably demonstrates the central role of photography. In his
dissertation and essays, which will be released shortly as a book, Hill downplays the importance
of the readers in PM’s mission, and how its visual program was directed towards educating them.
The first years of the paper’s existence, in the lead up to World War II, were tense and uncertain
and have tended to be somewhat historically overlooked. Whereas 1930s photography has been
treated by John Raeburn, William Stott, Maren Stange, and other American studies scholars, PM
has not been discussed. Recent meaningful historical work on the build-up to war and the
changes it wrought in American identity has been conducted by Lynn Olsen, whose book, Those
Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II 1939-1941,
delineates the depth of American isolationism and the resistance to war, encompassing this in
terms of visual culture.30 Such studies, including that edited by Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E.
Hirsch, War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness During World War II, show a
nation moving towards democracy, while transcending ethnic difference.31
This thesis argues that PM was intended to be entertaining as well as informative. Its
overriding purpose was to champion the plebian audience made up largely of urban union
29 David Margolick, “PM’s Impossible Dream,” Vanity Fair, January 1999.
30 Lynne Olsen. Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II 1939-
1941. New York: Random House, 2013.
31 Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, eds., War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness
During World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
12
workers, providing them with the most transparent information it could as well as imprint an
understanding of the seriousness of the growing threat of Fascism. To this end, I have divided
this study into three parts. The first will discuss PM in the context of other press developments of
its time, focusing on its intention to be both a popular and a dissident vehicle for news. In this
section, I analyze specifically how PM treated the photographic image differently from
contemporary illustrated periodicals. Part II will concentrate on the central role of weekend
photo editor and columnist Ralph Steiner in developing a singular understanding of photography.
Chapter III is dedicated to an analysis of the form of the photo-essay in PM. While PM is known
for some of its large, single photographs that tell complex stories in one image, I argue that it
also developed original narrative strategies, which incorporated elements borrowed from cinema.
The reason why there is still not a great deal of literature on the photographic work in PM
is partly due to what Jason E. Hill identifies as the difficulty inherent in studying a daily
newspaper which multiplies both the number of issues and the state of preservation of the
originals over other types of weekly, monthly or quarterly magazines. Most of what has been
written about PM comes from a perspective of journalism. However, there is relatively little on
the photographers, with the exception of Weegee, who was so central to the paper.32 I am
indebted to Jason Hill for what he has written on the matter. While there have been mentions of
photography in PM, especially in relation to the New York Photo League, notably by Michael
32 See Miles Barth, Weegee’s World. New York: Bullfinch Press, 1997; Daniel Morris, “Weegee’s
Nation”, After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photographers. Syracuse, New York:
Syracuse University Press, 2011; Miles Orvell, “Weegee’s Voyeurism and the Mastery of Urban
Disorder,” American Art, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1992), pp. 18-41; Luc Sante. “Weegee As Witness,” Art
in America, March, 2012, pp. 118-124; Louis Stettner. Weegee. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977;
Cynthia Young, ed., Unknown Weege. New York: ICP/Steidel, exh. cat., 2006.
13
Lesy, these are brief outlines in the context of the general picture press of the time.33
Jason Hill has done breakthrough studies describing the visual program of PM and the
editors’ transparent skepticism toward the photographic image. Hill has also examined the
relationship between photography and illustration in PM as it relates to the paper’s tendency to
elevate its photographic staff. His presentation of the “photojournalist as artist” is largely
accurate but can be easily misinterpreted as a view of the photographer/artist in the framework of
the modernist “genius” that may have begun in the 1930 but flowered only later. It is essential to
keep in mind that PM began as a product of the leftist milieu of the late Depression and that its
photographers were workers, who like others, were elevated by the paper. Despite the paper’s
promotion of stars such as Weegee and Margaret Bourke-White, the photographic staff was part
of a collaborative team that included writers and editorial staff. From 1940-1942, the
newspaper’s program showed evidence of the transition from a laboring culture which was
concerned with “the common man” and the equal rights of all religious, ethnic and racial groups,
to one in which separate identities gradually became incorporated into a general American
identity resolutely united to take on the enemies of democracy. Hill cautions that, despite its
beginnings in the milieu of picture magazines, PM was nevertheless a daily newspaper that was
intended to inform first and foremost. Above all, the ordinary working person was as important
and worthy of being pictured as the most famous and manufactured of Hollywood stars. In
keeping with the democratic spirit of the paper, and fulfilling philosopher John Dewey’s views
that like citizenship in a democracy, art was a triadic process which involved what was depicted,
the artist, and the viewers’ active participation for its completion, PM readers were regularly and
33 See Michael Lesy, “Paper World,” in Mason Klein and Catherine Evans eds., The Radical Camera:
New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951, New York, Columbus, New Haven, Yale University Press, The
Jewish Museum and Yale University, exh. cat., 2011, pp. 60-71.
14
specifically invited to submit their own photographs for critique, or possible paid publication.
This thesis examines how these liberal dynamics, occurring in this particular printed media, used
photography in order to focus on the “uncelebrated,” and what the significance of this operation
might be for the larger study of photography at this critical time for American culture.
15
Chapter I
The First Picture Paper Under the Sun
The physical paper, PM, measured a little over eleven by fourteen inches in a slightly
more square version than the standard tabloid format of the time. (Fig. 5) Its weekly edition ran
thirty-two pages and cost five cents. Both page count and price doubled for the weekend edition
to ten cents and sixty-four pages. This edition came in two sections and functioned like a
magazine meant to be read casually and at leisure over a longer period of time than the daily
paper. It carried regular features such as complete radio and cinema listings, lengthier stories,
more elaborate layouts, and more photographs. All editions were stapled to make the paper easy
to handle on public transportation. Ralph Ingersoll hired the noted illustrator and graphic
designer, Thomas M. Clelland, to give PM a modern look that made it as easy to read as it was to
handle. Clelland, who had been responsible for designing the sumptuous Fortune magazine
during Ingersoll’s tenure as managing editor of that publication, designed the custom Caledonia
typeface. The groundbreaking design used a slightly larger nine-point size replacing the difficult
to read seven-point type that prevailed in other papers. He gave PM a four-column layout set off
by borders of white instead of the cluttered six columns of other dailies. Called by Ingersoll “a
new kind of newspaper,” PM won the prestigious N.W. Ayer Award for typography and design
during each of its first four years.34 Its visual cohesiveness was in part due to the editor’s
decision not to accept outside advertising.
Following other successful picture magazines, including Life and the French VU,
34 Hoopes, cit., p. 404
Manhattan (/mænˈhætən, mən-/) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state of New York. Located near the southern tip of the State of New York, Manhattan is based in the Eastern Time Zone and constitutes both the geographical and demographic center of the Northeast megalopolis and the urban core of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass.[6] Over 58 million people live within 250 miles (400 km) of Manhattan,[7] which serves as New York City's economic and administrative center, cultural identifier, center of glamor,[8] and historical birthplace.[9] Residents of the outer boroughs of New York City often refer to Manhattan as "the City".[10]
Manhattan has been described as the cultural, financial, media, and entertainment capital of the world,[11][12][13][14] and hosts the United Nations headquarters.[15] Manhattan also serves as the headquarters of the global art market, with numerous art galleries and auction houses collectively hosting half of the world's art auctions.[16]
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, the borough consists mostly of Manhattan Island, bounded by the Hudson, East, and Harlem rivers along with several small adjacent islands, including Roosevelt, U Thant, and Randalls and Wards Islands. The Borough of Manhattan also includes the small neighborhood of Marble Hill on the U.S. mainland, which was separated from Manhattan Island by construction of the Harlem Ship Canal and was later connected using landfill to the Bronx. Manhattan Island is divided into three informally bounded components, each cutting across the borough's long axis: Lower, Midtown, and Upper Manhattan.
Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial and fintech center of the world,[17][18][19][20] and Manhattan is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.[21][22] Many multinational media conglomerates are based in Manhattan, and the borough has been the setting for numerous books, films, and television shows. The value of Manhattan Island, including real estate, estimated to exceed US$4 trillion in 2021, and Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan commanded by a significant margin the highest retail rents in the world, at US$2,000 per square foot ($22,000/m2) per year in 2022.[23] In 2023, the average monthly apartment rent in Manhattan also outpaced that of other global city centers.[24]
The area of present-day Manhattan was originally part of Lenape territory,[25] used predominantly as a seasonal hunting ground[26] given that most of the land was seen as too hilly for permanent settlement. European settlement began with the establishment of a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan; the post was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The territory and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York.[27] New York, based in present-day Manhattan, served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790.[28] The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor greeted millions of immigrants as they came to America by ship in the late 19th century and is a world symbol of the United States and its ideals of liberty and peace.[29] Manhattan became a borough during the consolidation of New York City in 1898.
New York County is the smallest county by land area in the contiguous United States, as well as the most densely populated U.S. county.[30] Manhattan is one of the most densely populated locations in the world, with a 2020 census population of 1,694,251 living in a land area of 22.83 square miles (59.13 km2),[31][32][4] or 72,918 residents per square mile (28,154 residents/km2), one of the highest urban densities in the world and higher than the density of any individual U.S. city.[33] On business days, the influx of commuters increases this number to over 3.9 million,[34] or more than 170,000 people per square mile (66,000 people/km2). Manhattan has the third-largest population of New York City's five boroughs, after Brooklyn and Queens, and is the smallest borough in terms of land area.[35] If each borough were ranked as a city, Manhattan would rank as the sixth-most populous in the U.S.
Many districts and landmarks in Manhattan are well known, as New York City received a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017,[36] and Manhattan hosts three of the world's 10 most-visited tourist attractions in 2013: Times Square, Central Park, and Grand Central Terminal.[37] The Empire State Building has become the global standard of reference to describe the height and length of other structures.[38] Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan is the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere.[39] The borough hosts many prominent bridges, including the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Queensboro, Triborough, and George Washington Bridges; tunnels such as the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels; skyscrapers including the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and One World Trade Center;[40] and parks, such as Central Park. Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere,[41] and Koreatown is replete with karaoke bars.[42] The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, part of the Stonewall National Monument, is considered the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement, cementing Manhattan's central role in LGBT culture.[43][44] The City of New York was founded at the southern tip of Manhattan,[45] and the borough houses New York City Hall, the seat of the city's government.[46] Numerous colleges and universities are located in Manhattan,[47] including Columbia University, New York University, Cornell Tech, Weill Cornell Medical College, and Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top 40 in the world.[48][49] The Metropolitan Museum of Art is both the largest and most visited art museum in the United States and hosts the globally focused Met Gala haute couture fashion event annually.
History
Main article: History of Manhattan
See also: History of New York City
History of New York City
Lenape and New Netherland, to 1664
New Amsterdam
British and Revolution, 1665–1783
Federal and early American, 1784–1854
Tammany and Consolidation, 1855–1897
(Civil War, 1861–1865)
Early 20th century, 1898–1945
Post–World War II, 1946–1977
Modern and post-9/11, 1978–present
See also
Transportation
Timelines: NYC • Bronx • Brooklyn • Queens • Staten Island
Category
vte
Lenape settlement
Manhattan was historically part of the Lenapehoking territory inhabited by the Munsee Lenape[50] and Wappinger tribes.[51] There were several Lenape settlements in the area including Sapohanikan, Nechtanc, and Konaande Kongh that were interconnected by a series of trails. The primary trail on the island ran from what is now Inwood in the north to Battery Park in the south. There were various sites for fishing and planting established by the Lenape throughout Manhattan.[25] The name Manhattan originated from the Lenapes language, Munsee, manaháhtaan (where manah- means "gather", -aht- means "bow", and -aan is an abstract element used to form verb stems). The Lenape word has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the (wood to make) bows". According to a Munsee tradition recorded by Albert Seqaqkind Anthony in the 19th century, the island was named so for a grove of hickory trees at its southern end that was considered ideal for the making of bows.[52]
Colonial era
Main articles: New Netherland, New Amsterdam, and Province of New York
New Amsterdam centered in what eventually became Lower Manhattan in 1664, the year England took control and renamed it New York
In 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. Verrazzano entered the tidal strait now known as The Narrows and named the land around Upper New York Harbor New Angoulême, in reference to the family name of King Francis I; he sailed far enough into the harbor to sight the Hudson River, and he named the Bay of Santa Margarita – what is now Upper New York Bay – after Marguerite de Navarre, the elder sister of the king.[53][54]
Manhattan was first mapped during a 1609 voyage of Henry Hudson.[55] Hudson came across Manhattan Island and the native people living there, and continued up the river that would later bear his name, the Hudson River.[56] Manhattan was first recorded in writing as Manna-hata, in the logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on the voyage.[57]
A permanent European presence in New Netherland began in 1624, with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement on Governors Island. In 1625, construction was started on the citadel of Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, later called New Amsterdam (Nieuw Amsterdam), in what is now Lower Manhattan.[58][59] The establishment of Fort Amsterdam is recognized as the birth of New York City.[60] In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant was appointed as the last Dutch Director-General of the colony.[61] New Amsterdam was formally incorporated as a city on February 2, 1653.[62] In 1674, the English bought New Netherland, after Holland lost rentable sugar business in Brazil, and renamed it "New York" after the English Duke of York and Albany, the future King James II.[63] The Dutch Republic re-captured the city in August 1673, renaming it "New Orange". New Netherland was ultimately ceded to the English in November 1674 through the Treaty of Westminster.[64]
American Revolution and the early United States
Further information: American Revolution
Washington's statue in front of Federal Hall on Wall Street, where in 1789 he was sworn in as the first U.S. president[65]
Manhattan was at the heart of the New York Campaign, a series of major battles in the early stages of the American Revolutionary War. The Continental Army was forced to abandon Manhattan after the Battle of Fort Washington on November 16, 1776. The city, greatly damaged by the Great Fire of New York during the campaign, became the British military and political center of operations in North America for the remainder of the war.[66] British occupation lasted until November 25, 1783, when George Washington returned to Manhattan, as the last British forces left the city.[67]
From January 11, 1785, to the fall of 1788, New York City was the fifth of five capitals of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, with the Continental Congress meeting at New York City Hall (then at Fraunces Tavern). New York was the first capital under the newly enacted Constitution of the United States, from March 4, 1789, to August 12, 1790, at Federal Hall.[68] Federal Hall was where the United States Supreme Court met for the first time,[69] the United States Bill of Rights were drafted and ratified,[70] and where the Northwest Ordinance was adopted, establishing measures for adding new states to the Union.[71]
19th century
New York grew as an economic center, first as a result of Alexander Hamilton's policies and practices as the first Secretary of the Treasury and, later, with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which connected the Atlantic port to the vast agricultural markets of the Midwestern United States and Canada.[72][73] By 1810, New York City, then confined to Manhattan, had surpassed Philadelphia as the largest city in the United States.[74] The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 laid out the island of Manhattan in its familiar grid plan.
Tammany Hall, a Democratic Party political machine, began to grow in influence with the support of many of the immigrant Irish, culminating in the election of the first Tammany mayor, Fernando Wood, in 1854. Central Park, which opened to the public in 1858, became the first landscaped public park in an American city.[75][76]
New York City played a complex role in the American Civil War. The city had strong commercial ties to the South, but anger around conscription, resentment against Lincoln's war policies and fomenting paranoia about free Blacks taking the poor immigrants' jobs[77] culminated in the three-day-long New York Draft Riots of July 1863, among the worst incidents of civil disorder in American history.[78] 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.[79][80] This immigration brought further social upheaval. In a city of tenements packed with poorly paid laborers from dozens of nations, the city became a hotbed of revolution (including anarchists and communists among others), syndicalism, racketeering, and unionization.
In 1883, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge established a road connection to Brooklyn. In 1898 New York City consolidated with three neighboring counties to form "the City of Greater New York", and Manhattan was established as a borough.
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
20th century
Further information: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and Stonewall riots
Manhattan's Little Italy on the Lower East Side, c. 1900
The construction of the New York City Subway, which opened in 1904, helped bind the new city together, as did additional bridges to Brooklyn. In the 1920s Manhattan experienced large arrivals of African-Americans as part of the Great Migration from the southern United States, and the Harlem Renaissance, part of a larger boom time in the Prohibition era that included new skyscrapers competing for the skyline. Manhattan's majority white ethnic group declined from 98.7% in 1900 to 58.3% by 1990.[81] On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village killed 146 garment workers, leading to overhauls of the city's fire department, building codes, and workplace regulations.
Despite the Great Depression, some of the world's tallest skyscrapers were completed in Manhattan during the 1930s, including numerous Art Deco masterpieces that are still part of the city's skyline, most notably the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the 30 Rockefeller Plaza.[82] Returning World War II veterans created a postwar economic boom, which led to the development of huge housing developments targeted at returning veterans, the largest being Peter Cooper Village-Stuyvesant Town, which opened in 1947.[83] In 1951–1952, the United Nations relocated to a new headquarters the East Side of Manhattan.[84][85] The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent protests by members of the gay community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. They are widely considered to constitute the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement[86][87] and the modern fight for LGBT rights.[88][89]
In the 1970s, job losses due to industrial restructuring caused New York City, including Manhattan, to suffer from economic problems and rising crime rates.[90] 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.[91] The 1980s saw a rebirth of Wall Street, and Manhattan reclaimed its role at the center of the worldwide financial industry. The 1980s also saw Manhattan at the heart of the AIDS crisis, with Greenwich Village at its epicenter.
By the 1990s, crime rates started to drop dramatically and the city once again became the destination of immigrants from around the world, joining with low interest rates and Wall Street bonuses to fuel the growth of the real estate market.[92] Important new sectors, such as Silicon Alley, emerged in Manhattan's economy.
21st century
See also: September 11 attacks
United Airlines Flight 175 hits the South Tower on September 11, 2001.
On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center were struck by hijacked aircraft and collapsed in the September 11 attacks launched by al-Qaeda terrorists. The collapse caused extensive damage to surrounding buildings and skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, and resulted in the deaths of 2,606 people, in addition to those on the planes. Since 2001, most of Lower Manhattan has been restored, although there has been controversy surrounding the rebuilding. In 2014, the new One World Trade Center, at 1,776 feet (541 m) and formerly known as the Freedom Tower, became the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.[93]
The Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan began on September 17, 2011, receiving global attention and spawning the Occupy movement against social and economic inequality worldwide.[94]
On October 29 and 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused extensive destruction in the borough, ravaging portions of Lower Manhattan with record-high storm surge from New York Harbor,[95] severe flooding, and high winds, causing power outages for hundreds of thousands of city residents[96] and leading to gasoline shortages[97] and disruption of mass transit systems.[98][99][100][101] 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.[102]
On October 31, 2017, a terrorist deliberately drove a truck down a bike path alongside the West Side Highway in Lower Manhattan, killing eight.[103]
Geography
See also: Geography of New York City
Satellite image of Manhattan, bounded by the Hudson River to the west, the Harlem River to the north, the East River to the east, and New York Harbor to the south, with rectangular Central Park prominently visible. Roosevelt Island, in the East River, belongs to Manhattan.
Detailed map of Manhattan in 2023, from OpenStreetMap
Location of Manhattan (in red) and the rest of New York City (in yellow)
Components
The borough consists of Manhattan Island, Marble Hill, and several small islands, including Randalls Island and Wards Island, and Roosevelt Island in the East River, and Governors Island and Liberty Island to the south in New York Harbor.[104]
According to the United States Census Bureau, New York County has a total area of 33.6 square miles (87 km2), of which 22.8 square miles (59 km2) is land and 10.8 square miles (28 km2) (32%) is water.[1] The northern segment of Upper Manhattan represents a geographic panhandle. Manhattan Island is 22.7 square miles (59 km2) in area, 13.4 miles (21.6 km) long and 2.3 miles (3.7 km) wide, at its widest (near 14th Street).[105] Icebergs in both Earth's Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere are often compared in size to the area of Manhattan.[106][107][108]
Manhattan Island
Manhattan Island is loosely divided into Downtown (Lower Manhattan), Midtown (Midtown Manhattan), and Uptown (Upper Manhattan), with Fifth Avenue dividing Manhattan lengthwise into its East Side and West Side. Manhattan Island is bounded by the Hudson River to the west and the East River to the east. To the north, the Harlem River divides Manhattan Island from the Bronx and the mainland United States.
Early in the 19th century, landfill was used to expand Lower Manhattan from the natural Hudson shoreline at Greenwich Street to West Street.[109] When building the World Trade Center in 1968, 1.2 million cubic yards (917,000 m3) of material was excavated from the site.[110] Rather than being dumped at sea or in landfills, the fill material was used to expand the Manhattan shoreline across West Street, creating Battery Park City.[111] The result was a 700-foot (210 m) extension into the river, running six blocks or 1,484 feet (452 m), covering 92 acres (37 ha), providing a 1.2-mile (1.9 km) riverfront esplanade and over 30 acres (12 ha) of parks;[112] Hudson River Park was subsequently opened in stages beginning in 1998.[113] Little Island opened on the Hudson River in May 2021, connected to the western termini of 13th and 14th Streets by footbridges.[114]
Marble Hill
One neighborhood of New York County, Marble Hill, is contiguous with the U.S. mainland. Marble Hill at one time was part of Manhattan Island, but the Harlem River Ship Canal, dug in 1895 to improve navigation on the Harlem River, separated it from the remainder of Manhattan as an island between the Bronx and the remainder of Manhattan.[115] Before World War I, the section of the original Harlem River channel separating Marble Hill from the Bronx was filled in, and Marble Hill became part of the mainland.[116]
Marble Hill is one example of how Manhattan's land has been considerably altered by human intervention. The borough has seen substantial land reclamation along its waterfronts since Dutch colonial times, and much of the natural variation in its topography has been evened out.[117]
Smaller islands
See also: List of smaller islands in New York City
A tall green statue on an island in a harbor.
Liberty Island, an exclave of Manhattan, New York City, and New York state, that is surrounded by New Jersey waters
Within New York Harbor, there are three smaller islands:
Ellis Island, shared with New Jersey
Governors Island
Liberty Island
Other smaller islands, in the East River, include (from north to south):
Randalls and Wards Islands, joined by landfill
Mill Rock
Roosevelt Island
U Thant Island (legally Belmont Island)
Geology
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A schist outcropping in Central Park
The bedrock underlying much of Manhattan is a mica schist known as Manhattan schist[118] of the Manhattan Prong physiographic region. It is a strong, competent metamorphic rock that was produced when Pangaea formed. It is well suited for the foundations of tall buildings. In Central Park, outcrops of Manhattan schist occur; Rat Rock is one rather large example.[119][120][121]
Geologically, a predominant feature of the substrata of Manhattan is that the underlying bedrock base of the island rises considerably closer to the surface near Midtown Manhattan, dips down lower between 29th Street and Canal Street, then rises toward the surface again in Lower Manhattan. It has been widely believed that the depth to bedrock was the primary reason for the clustering of skyscrapers in the Midtown and Financial District areas, and their absence over the intervening territory between these two areas.[122][123] However, research has shown that economic factors played a bigger part in the locations of these skyscrapers.[124][125][126]
According to the United States Geological Survey, an updated analysis of seismic hazard in July 2014 revealed a "slightly lower hazard for tall buildings" in Manhattan than previously assessed. Scientists estimated this lessened risk based upon a lower likelihood than previously thought of slow shaking near New York City, which would be more likely to cause damage to taller structures from an earthquake in the vicinity of the city.[127]
Locations
Places adjacent to Manhattan
Bergen County,
New Jersey Bronx County
(The Bronx) Bronx County
(The Bronx)
Hudson County,
New Jersey
New York County
Queens County
(Queens)
Richmond County
(Staten Island) Kings County
(Brooklyn) Kings County
(Brooklyn)
National protected areas
African Burial Ground National Monument
Castle Clinton National Monument
Federal Hall National Memorial
General Grant National Memorial
Governors Island National Monument
Hamilton Grange National Memorial
Lower East Side Tenement National Historic Site
Statue of Liberty National Monument (part)
Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site
Neighborhoods
Main articles: Neighborhoods in New York City and List of Manhattan neighborhoods
The Empire State Building (in foreground) looking south from the top of Rockefeller Center with One World Trade Center (in background); the Midtown South Community Council acts as a civic caretaker for much of the neighborhood between the skyscrapers of Midtown and Lower Manhattan.
Manhattan's many neighborhoods are not named according to any particular convention, nor do they have official boundaries. Some are geographical (the Upper East Side), or ethnically descriptive (Little Italy). Others are acronyms, such as TriBeCa (for "TRIangle BElow CAnal Street") or SoHo ("SOuth of HOuston"), or the far more recent vintages NoLIta ("NOrth of Little ITAly").[128][129] and NoMad ("NOrth of MADison Square Park").[130][131][132] Harlem is a name from the Dutch colonial era after Haarlem, a city in the Netherlands.[133] Alphabet City comprises Avenues A, B, C, and D, to which its name refers. Some have simple folkloric names, such as Hell's Kitchen, alongside their more official but lesser used title (in this case, Clinton).
Some neighborhoods, such as SoHo, which is mixed use, are known for upscale shopping as well as residential use. Others, such as Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, Alphabet City and the East Village, have long been associated with the Bohemian subculture.[134] Chelsea is one of several Manhattan neighborhoods with large gay populations and has become a center of both the international art industry and New York's nightlife.[135] Chinatown has the highest concentration of people of Chinese descent outside of Asia.[136][137] Koreatown is roughly bounded by 6th and Madison Avenues,[138][139][140] between 31st and 33rd Streets, where Hangul signage is ubiquitous. Rose Hill features a growing number of Indian restaurants and spice shops along a stretch of Lexington Avenue between 25th and 30th Streets which has become known as Curry Hill.[141] Washington Heights in Uptown Manhattan is home to the largest Dominican immigrant community in the United States.[142] Harlem, also in Upper Manhattan, is the historical epicenter of African American culture. Since 2010, a Little Australia has emerged and is growing in Nolita, Lower Manhattan.[143]
In Manhattan, uptown means north (more precisely north-northeast, which is the direction the island and its street grid system are oriented) and downtown means south (south-southwest).[144] This usage differs from that of most American cities, where downtown refers to the central business district. Manhattan has two central business districts, the Financial District at the southern tip of the island, and Midtown Manhattan. The term uptown also refers to the northern part of Manhattan above 72nd Street and downtown to the southern portion below 14th Street,[145] with Midtown covering the area in between, though definitions can be fluid.
Fifth Avenue roughly bisects Manhattan Island and acts as the demarcation line for east/west designations (e.g., East 27th Street, West 42nd Street); street addresses start at Fifth Avenue and increase heading away from Fifth Avenue, at a rate of 100 per block on most streets.[145] South of Waverly Place, Fifth Avenue terminates and Broadway becomes the east/west demarcation line. Although the grid does start with 1st Street, just north of Houston Street (the southernmost street divided in west and east portions), the grid does not fully take hold until north of 14th Street, where nearly all east–west streets are numerically identified, which increase from south to north to 220th Street, the highest numbered street on the island. Streets in Midtown are usually one-way, with the few exceptions generally being the busiest cross-town thoroughfares (14th, 23rd, 34th, and 42nd Streets, for example), which are bidirectional across the width of Manhattan Island. Typically odd-numbered streets run west, while even-numbered streets run east.[105]
Climate
Central Park in autumn
Under the Köppen climate classification, using the 0 °C (32 °F) isotherm, New York City features both a humid subtropical climate (Cfa) and a humid continental climate (Dfa);[146] it is the northernmost major city on the North American continent with a humid subtropical climate. The city averages 234 days with at least some sunshine annually.[147] The city lies in the USDA 7b plant hardiness zone.[148]
Winters are cold and damp, and prevailing wind patterns that blow offshore temper the moderating effects of the Atlantic Ocean; yet the Atlantic and the partial shielding from colder air by the Appalachians keep the city warmer in the winter than inland North American cities at similar or lesser latitudes such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. The daily mean temperature in January, the area's coldest month, is 32.6 °F (0.3 °C);[149] temperatures usually drop to 10 °F (−12 °C) several times per winter,[149][150] and reach 60 °F (16 °C) several days in the coldest winter month.[149] Spring and autumn are unpredictable and can range from chilly to warm, although they are usually mild with low humidity. Summers are typically warm to hot and humid, with a daily mean temperature of 76.5 °F (24.7 °C) in July.[149] Nighttime conditions are often exacerbated by the urban heat island phenomenon, which causes heat absorbed during the day to be radiated back at night, raising temperatures by as much as 7 °F (4 °C) when winds are slow.[151] Daytime temperatures exceed 90 °F (32 °C) on average of 17 days each summer[152] and in some years exceed 100 °F (38 °C). Extreme temperatures have ranged from −15 °F (−26 °C), recorded on February 9, 1934, up to 106 °F (41 °C) on July 9, 1936.[152]
Manhattan receives 49.9 inches (1,270 mm) of precipitation annually, which is relatively evenly spread throughout the year. Average winter snowfall between 1981 and 2010 has been 25.8 inches (66 cm); this varies considerably from year to year.[152] Governors Island in New York Harbor is planned to host a US$1 billion research and education center with the intention of making New York City the global leader in addressing the climate crisis.[153]
vte
Climate data for New York (Belvedere Castle, Central Park), 1991–2020 normals,[b] extremes 1869–present[c]
Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year
Record high °F (°C) 72
(22) 78
(26) 86
(30) 96
(36) 99
(37) 101
(38) 106
(41) 104
(40) 102
(39) 94
(34) 84
(29) 75
(24) 106
(41)
Mean maximum °F (°C) 60.4
(15.8) 60.7
(15.9) 70.3
(21.3) 82.9
(28.3) 88.5
(31.4) 92.1
(33.4) 95.7
(35.4) 93.4
(34.1) 89.0
(31.7) 79.7
(26.5) 70.7
(21.5) 62.9
(17.2) 97.0
(36.1)
Average high °F (°C) 39.5
(4.2) 42.2
(5.7) 49.9
(9.9) 61.8
(16.6) 71.4
(21.9) 79.7
(26.5) 84.9
(29.4) 83.3
(28.5) 76.2
(24.6) 64.5
(18.1) 54.0
(12.2) 44.3
(6.8) 62.6
(17.0)
Daily mean °F (°C) 33.7
(0.9) 35.9
(2.2) 42.8
(6.0) 53.7
(12.1) 63.2
(17.3) 72.0
(22.2) 77.5
(25.3) 76.1
(24.5) 69.2
(20.7) 57.9
(14.4) 48.0
(8.9) 39.1
(3.9) 55.8
(13.2)
Average low °F (°C) 27.9
(−2.3) 29.5
(−1.4) 35.8
(2.1) 45.5
(7.5) 55.0
(12.8) 64.4
(18.0) 70.1
(21.2) 68.9
(20.5) 62.3
(16.8) 51.4
(10.8) 42.0
(5.6) 33.8
(1.0) 48.9
(9.4)
Mean minimum °F (°C) 9.8
(−12.3) 12.7
(−10.7) 19.7
(−6.8) 32.8
(0.4) 43.9
(6.6) 52.7
(11.5) 61.8
(16.6) 60.3
(15.7) 50.2
(10.1) 38.4
(3.6) 27.7
(−2.4) 18.0
(−7.8) 7.7
(−13.5)
Record low °F (°C) −6
(−21) −15
(−26) 3
(−16) 12
(−11) 32
(0) 44
(7) 52
(11) 50
(10) 39
(4) 28
(−2) 5
(−15) −13
(−25) −15
(−26)
Average precipitation inches (mm) 3.64
(92) 3.19
(81) 4.29
(109) 4.09
(104) 3.96
(101) 4.54
(115) 4.60
(117) 4.56
(116) 4.31
(109) 4.38
(111) 3.58
(91) 4.38
(111) 49.52
(1,258)
Average snowfall inches (cm) 8.8
(22) 10.1
(26) 5.0
(13) 0.4
(1.0) 0.0
(0.0) 0.0
(0.0) 0.0
(0.0) 0.0
(0.0) 0.0
(0.0) 0.1
(0.25) 0.5
(1.3) 4.9
(12) 29.8
(76)
Average precipitation days (≥ 0.01 in) 10.8 10.0 11.1 11.4 11.5 11.2 10.5 10.0 8.8 9.5 9.2 11.4 125.4
Average snowy days (≥ 0.1 in) 3.7 3.2 2.0 0.2 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.2 2.1 11.4
Average relative humidity (%) 61.5 60.2 58.5 55.3 62.7 65.2 64.2 66.0 67.8 65.6 64.6 64.1 63.0
Average dew point °F (°C) 18.0
(−7.8) 19.0
(−7.2) 25.9
(−3.4) 34.0
(1.1) 47.3
(8.5) 57.4
(14.1) 61.9
(16.6) 62.1
(16.7) 55.6
(13.1) 44.1
(6.7) 34.0
(1.1) 24.6
(−4.1) 40.3
(4.6)
Mean monthly sunshine hours 162.7 163.1 212.5 225.6 256.6 257.3 268.2 268.2 219.3 211.2 151.0 139.0 2,534.7
Percent possible sunshine 54 55 57 57 57 57 59 63 59 61 51 48 57
Average ultraviolet index 2 3 4 6 7 8 8 8 6 4 2 1 5
Source 1: NOAA (relative humidity and sun 1961–1990; dew point 1965–1984)[152][149][147]
Source 2: Weather Atlas[155]
See Climate of New York City for additional climate information from the outer boroughs.
Sea temperature data for New York[155]
Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year
Average sea
temperature °F (°C) 41.7
(5.4) 39.7
(4.3) 40.2
(4.5) 45.1
(7.3) 52.5
(11.4) 64.5
(18.1) 72.1
(22.3) 74.1
(23.4) 70.1
(21.2) 63.0
(17.2) 54.3
(12.4) 47.2
(8.4) 55.4
(13.0)
Boroughscape
Ten-mile Manhattan skyline panorama from 120th Street to the Battery, taken February 21, 2018, from across the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey.
Riverside ChurchTime Warner Center220 Central Park SouthCentral Park TowerOne57432 Park Avenue53W53Chrysler BuildingBank of America TowerConde Nast BuildingThe New York Times BuildingEmpire State BuildingManhattan Westa: 55 Hudson Yards, b: 35 Hudson Yards, c: 10 Hudson Yards, d: 15 Hudson Yards56 Leonard Street8 Spruce StreetWoolworth Building70 Pine Street30 Park Place40 Wall StreetThree World Trade CenterFour World Trade CenterOne World Trade Center
Demographics
Main article: Demographics of Manhattan
Looking at crowds down Broadway
Broadway in Midtown Manhattan. As of the 2020 U.S. census, Manhattan was the most densely populated municipality in the United States.
In 2020, 1,694,251 people lived in Manhattan. At the 2010 U.S. census, there were 1,585,873 people living in Manhattan, an increase of 3.2% since 2000. Since 2010, Manhattan's population was estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau to have increased 2.7% to 1,628,706 as of 2018, representing 19.5% of New York City's population of 8,336,817 and 8.4% of New York State's population of 19,745,289.[31][156] As of the 2020 census, the population density of New York County was 74,870.7 inhabitants per square mile (28,907.7/km2), the highest population density of any county in the United States.[31]
Racial composition 2020[157] 2010[158] 2000[159] 1990[160] 1950[160] 1900[160]
White 50.0% 57.4% 54.3% 58.3% 79.4% 97.8%
—Non-Hispanic 46.8% 48% 45.7% 48.9% n/a n/a
Black or African American 13.5% 15.6% 17.3% 22.0% 19.6% 2.0%
Hispanic or Latino (of any race) 23.8% 25.4% 27.1% 26.0% n/a n/a
Asian 13.1% 11.3% 9.4% 7.4% 0.8% 0.3%
Historical population
Manhattan is one of the highest-income places in the United States with a population greater than one million. As of 2012, Manhattan's cost of living was the highest in the United States.[163] Manhattan is also the United States county with the highest per capita income, being the sole county whose per capita income exceeded $100,000 in 2010.[164] However, from 2011–2015 Census data of New York County, the per capita income was recorded in 2015 dollars as $64,993, with the median household income at $72,871, and poverty at 17.6%.[165] In 2012, The New York Times reported that inequality was higher than in most developing countries, stating, "The wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites made more than 40 times what the lowest fifth reported, a widening gap (it was 38 times, the year before) surpassed by only a few developing countries".[166]
Religion
In 2010, the largest organized religious group in Manhattan was the Archdiocese of New York, with 323,325 Catholics worshiping at 109 parishes, followed by 64,000 Orthodox Jews with 77 congregations, an estimated 42,545 Muslims with 21 congregations, 42,502 non-denominational adherents with 54 congregations, 26,178 TEC Episcopalians with 46 congregations, 25,048 ABC-USA Baptists with 41 congregations, 24,536 Reform Jews with 10 congregations, 23,982 Mahayana Buddhists with 35 congregations, 10,503 PC-USA Presbyterians with 30 congregations, and 10,268 RCA Presbyterians with 10 congregations. Altogether, 44.0% of the population was claimed as members by religious congregations, although members of historically African-American denominations were underrepresented due to incomplete information.[167] In 2014, Manhattan had 703 religious organizations, the seventeenth most out of all US counties.[168] There is a large Buddhist temple in Manhattan located at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown.[169]
Languages
As of 2010, 59.98% (902,267) of Manhattan residents, aged five and older, spoke only English at home, while 23.07% (347,033) spoke Spanish, 5.33% (80,240) Chinese, 2.03% (30,567) French, 0.78% (11,776) Japanese, 0.77% (11,517) Russian, 0.72% (10,788) Korean, 0.70% (10,496) German, 0.66% (9,868) Italian, 0.64% (9,555) Hebrew, and 0.48% (7,158) spoke African languages at home. In total, 40.02% (602,058) of Manhattan's population, aged five and older, spoke a language other than English at home.[170]
As of 2015, 60.0% (927,650) of Manhattan residents, aged five and older, spoke only English at home, while 22.63% (350,112) spoke Spanish, 5.37% (83,013) Chinese, 2.21% (34,246) French, 0.85% (13,138) Korean, 0.72% (11,135) Russian, and 0.70% (10,766) Japanese. In total, 40.0% of Manhattan's population, aged five and older, spoke a language other than English at home.[171]
Landmarks and architecture
Main article: Architecture of New York City
See also: List of skyscrapers in New York City
Estonian House, a main center of Estonian culture among Estonian Americans
Points of interest on Manhattan Island include the American Museum of Natural History; the Battery; Broadway and the Theater District; Bryant Park; Central Park, Chinatown; the Chrysler Building; The Cloisters; Columbia University; Curry Hill; the Empire State Building; Flatiron Building; the Financial District (including the New York Stock Exchange Building; Wall Street; and the South Street Seaport); Grand Central Terminal; Greenwich Village (including New York University; Washington Square Arch; and Stonewall Inn); Harlem and Spanish Harlem; the High Line; Koreatown; Lincoln Center; Little Australia; Little Italy; Madison Square Garden; Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art); Penn Station, Port Authority Bus Terminal; Rockefeller Center (including Radio City Music Hall); Times Square; and the World Trade Center (including the National September 11 Museum and One World Trade Center).
There are also numerous iconic bridges across rivers that connect to Manhattan Island, as well as an emerging number of supertall skyscrapers. The Statue of Liberty rests on a pedestal on Liberty Island, an exclave of Manhattan, and part of Ellis Island is also an exclave of Manhattan. The borough has many energy-efficient, environmentally friendly office buildings, such as the Hearst Tower, the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center,[172] and the Bank of America Tower—the first skyscraper designed to attain a Platinum LEED Certification.[173][174]
Architectural history
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Alexander Turney Stewart on 9th Street in Manhattan in 1870
Many tall buildings have setbacks on their facade due to the 1916 Zoning Resolution, exemplified at Park Avenue and 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan.
The skyscraper, which has shaped Manhattan's distinctive skyline, has been closely associated with New York City's identity since the end of the 19th century. From 1890 to 1973, the title of world's tallest building resided continually in Manhattan (with a gap between 1894 and 1908, when the title was held by Philadelphia City Hall), with eight different buildings holding the title.[175] The New York World Building on Park Row, was the first to take the title in 1890, standing 309 feet (94 m) until 1955, when it was demolished to construct a new ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge.[176] The nearby Park Row Building, with its 29 stories standing 391 feet (119 m) high, became the world's tallest office building when it opened in 1899.[177] The 41-story Singer Building, constructed in 1908 as the headquarters of the eponymous sewing machine manufacturer, stood 612 feet (187 m) high until 1967, when it became the tallest building ever demolished.[178] The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, standing 700 feet (210 m) at the foot of Madison Avenue, wrested the title in 1909, with a tower reminiscent of St Mark's Campanile in Venice.[179] The Woolworth Building, and its distinctive Gothic architecture, took the title in 1913, topping off at 792 feet (241 m).[180] Structures such as the Equitable Building of 1915, which rises vertically forty stories from the sidewalk, prompted the passage of the 1916 Zoning Resolution, requiring new buildings to contain setbacks withdrawing progressively at a defined angle from the street as they rose, in order to preserve a view of the sky at street level.[181]
The Roaring Twenties saw three separate buildings pursuing the world's tallest title in the span of a year. As the stock market soared in the days before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, two developers publicly competed for the crown.[182] At 927 feet (283 m), 40 Wall Street, completed in May 1930 in only eleven months as the headquarters of the Bank of Manhattan, seemed to have secured the title.[183] At Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street, auto executive Walter Chrysler and his architect William Van Alen developed plans to build the structure's trademark 185-foot (56 m) spire in secret, pushing the Chrysler Building to 1,046 feet (319 m) and making it the tallest in the world when it was completed in 1929.[184] Both buildings were soon surpassed with the May 1931 completion of the 102-story Empire State Building with its Art Deco tower reaching 1,250 feet (380 m) at the top of the building. The 203-foot (62 m) high pinnacle was later added bringing the total height of the building to 1,453 ft (443 m).[185][186]
The former Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were located in Lower Manhattan. At 1,368 and 1,362 feet (417 and 415 m), the 110-story buildings were the world's tallest from 1972 until they were surpassed by the construction of the Willis Tower in 1974 (formerly known as the Sears Tower, located in Chicago).[187] One World Trade Center, a replacement for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, is currently the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.[188]
In 1961, the Pennsylvania Railroad unveiled plans to tear down the old Penn Station and replace it with a new Madison Square Garden and office building complex. 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.[189] Despite these efforts, demolition of the structure began in October 1963. The loss of Penn Station—called "an act of irresponsible public vandalism" by historian Lewis Mumford—led directly to the enactment in 1965 of a local law establishing the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which is responsible for preserving the "city's historic, aesthetic, and cultural heritage".[190] 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.[191] 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.[192]
Parkland
Central Park
Parkland composes 17.8% of the borough, covering a total of 2,686 acres (10.87 km2). The 843-acre (3.41 km2) Central Park, the largest park comprising 30% of Manhattan's parkland, is bordered on the north by West 110th Street (Central Park North), on the west by Eighth Avenue (Central Park West), on the south by West 59th Street (Central Park South), and on the east by Fifth Avenue. Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, offers extensive walking tracks, two ice-skating rinks, a wildlife sanctuary, and several lawns and sporting areas, as well as 21 playgrounds and a 6-mile (9.7 km) road from which automobile traffic is banned.[193] While much of the park looks natural, it is almost entirely landscaped: the construction of Central Park in the 1850s was one of the era's most massive public works projects, with some 20,000 workers crafting the topography to create the English-style pastoral landscape Olmsted and Vaux sought.[194]
The remaining 70% of Manhattan's parkland includes 204 playgrounds, 251 Greenstreets, 371 basketball courts, and many other amenities.[195] The next-largest park in Manhattan, the Hudson River Park, stretches 4.5 miles (7.2 km) on the Hudson River and comprises 550 acres (220 ha).[196] Other major parks include:[197]
Bowling Green
Bryant Park
City Hall Park
DeWitt Clinton Park
East River Greenway
Fort Tryon Park
Fort Washington Park
Harlem River Park
Holcombe Rucker Park
Imagination Playground
Inwood Hill Park
Isham Park
J. Hood Wright Park
Jackie Robinson Park
Madison Square Park
Marcus Garvey Park
Morningside Park
Randall's Island Park
Riverside Park
Sara D. Roosevelt Park
Seward Park
St. Nicholas Park
Stuyvesant Square
The Battery
The High Line
Thomas Jefferson Park
Tompkins Square Park
Union Square Park
Washington Square Park
Economy
Main article: Economy of New York City
By a significant margin, the New York Stock Exchange is the world's largest stock exchange; the market capitalization of its listed companies[198][199] is US$23.1 trillion as of April 2018, the largest of any stock exchange in the world[200]
Manhattan is the economic engine of New York City, with its 2.3 million workers in 2007 drawn from the entire New York metropolitan area accounting for almost two-thirds of all jobs in New York City.[201] In the first quarter of 2014, the average weekly wage in Manhattan (New York County) was $2,749, representing the highest total among large counties in the United States.[202] Manhattan's workforce is overwhelmingly focused on white collar professions, with manufacturing nearly extinct.[citation needed] Manhattan also has the highest per capita income of any county in the United States.
In 2010, Manhattan's daytime population was swelling to 3.94 million, with commuters adding a net 1.48 million people to the population, along with visitors, tourists, and commuting students. The commuter influx of 1.61 million workers coming into Manhattan was the largest of any county or city in the country,[203] and was more than triple the 480,000 commuters who headed into second-ranked Washington, D.C.[204]
Financial sector
Main article: Wall Street
The Financial District of Lower Manhattan, seen from Brooklyn
Manhattan's most important economic sector lies in its role as the headquarters for the U.S. financial industry, metonymously known as Wall Street. Manhattan is home to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), at 11 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, and the Nasdaq, now located at 4 Times Square in Midtown Manhattan, representing the world's largest and second-largest stock exchanges, respectively, when measured both by overall share trading value and by total market capitalization of their listed companies in 2013.[22] The NYSE American (formerly the American Stock Exchange, AMEX), New York Board of Trade, and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) are also located downtown. Financial technology (fintech) and cryptocurrency have emerged as more recent constituents of the financial sector as well as the tech sector.
Corporate sector
Manhattan contains over 520 million square feet (48,000,000 m2) of office space. During the COVID-19 pandemic, hybrid work prompted consideration of commercial-to-residential conversion in Manhattan.[205]
New York City is home to the most corporate headquarters of any city in the United States, the overwhelming majority based in Manhattan.[206] Manhattan contained over 520 million square feet (48.3 million m2) of office space in 2022,[207] making it the largest office market in the United States; while Midtown Manhattan, with over 400 million square feet (37.2 million m2) is the largest central business district in the world.[208] New York City's role as the top global center for the advertising industry is metonymously reflected as "Madison Avenue".
Tech and biotech
Further information: Tech companies in Manhattan, Biotech companies in Manhattan, Silicon Alley, and Tech:NYC
The Flatiron District, the birthplace and center of Silicon Alley[209]
Manhattan has driven New York's status as a top-tier global high technology hub.[210] Silicon Alley, once a metonym for the sphere encompassing the metropolitan region's high technology industries,[211] is no longer a relevant moniker as the city's tech environment has expanded dramatically both in location and in its scope. New York City's current tech sphere encompasses a universal array of applications involving artificial intelligence, the internet, new media, financial technology (fintech) and cryptocurrency, biotechnology, game design, and other fields within information technology that are supported by its entrepreneurship ecosystem and venture capital investments.As of 2014, New York City hosted 300,000 employees in the tech sector.[212][213] In 2015, Silicon Alley generated over US$7.3 billion in venture capital investment,[214] most based in Manhattan, as well as in Brooklyn, Queens, and elsewhere in the region. High technology startup companies and employment are growing in Manhattan and across New York City, bolstered by the city's emergence as a global node of creativity and entrepreneurship,[214] social tolerance,[215] and environmental sustainability,[216][217] as well as New York's position as the leading Internet hub and telecommunications center in North America, including its vicinity to several transatlantic fiber optic trunk lines, the city's intellectual capital, and its extensive outdoor wireless connectivity.[218] 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.[219] As of October 2014, New York City hosted 300,000 employees in the tech sector,[213] with a significant proportion in Manhattan. The technology sector has been expanding across Manhattan since 2010.[220]
The biotechnology sector is also growing in Manhattan based upon the city's strength in academic scientific research and public and commercial financial support. 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 New York City Economic Development Corporation's Early Stage Life Sciences Funding Initiative and venture capital partners, including Celgene, General Electric Ventures, and Eli Lilly, committed a minimum of US$100 million to help launch 15 to 20 ventures in life sciences and biotechnology.[221] In 2011, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had announced his choice of Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to build a US$2 billion graduate school of applied sciences on Roosevelt Island, Manhattan, with the goal of transforming New York City into the world's premier technology capital.[222][223][needs update]
Tourism
Main article: Tourism in New York City
Times Square is the hub of Broadway's theater district and a major Manhattan cultural venue with 50 million tourists annually, making it one of the world's most popular tourist destinations.[37]
Tourism is vital to Manhattan's economy, and the landmarks of Manhattan are the focus of New York City's tourists, enumerating an eighth consecutive annual record of approximately 62.8 million visitors in 2017.[36] According to The Broadway League, for the 2018–2019 season (which ended May 26, 2019) total attendance was 14,768,254 and Broadway shows had US$1,829,312,140 in grosses, with attendance up 9.5%, grosses up 10.3%, and playing weeks up 9.3%.[224]
Real estate
Real estate is a major force in Manhattan's economy. Manhattan has perennially been home to some of the nation's, as well as the world's, most valuable real estate, including the Time Warner Center, which had the highest-listed market value in the city in 2006 at US$1.1 billion,[225] to be subsequently surpassed in October 2014 by the Waldorf Astoria New York, which became the most expensive hotel ever sold after being purchased by the Anbang Insurance Group, based in China, for US$1.95 billion.[226] When 450 Park Avenue was sold on July 2, 2007, for US$510 million, about US$1,589 per square foot (US$17,104/m²), it broke the barely month-old record for an American office building of US$1,476 per square foot (US$15,887/m²) based on the sale of 660 Madison Avenue.[227] In 2014, Manhattan was home to six of the top ten zip codes in the United States by median housing price.[228] In 2019, the most expensive home sale ever in the United States occurred in Manhattan, at a selling price of US$238 million, for a 24,000-square-foot (2,200 m2) penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park,[229] while Central Park Tower, topped out at 1,550 feet (472 m) in 2019, is the world's tallest residential building, followed globally in height by 111 West 57th Street and 432 Park Avenue, both also located in Midtown Manhattan.
Manhattan had approximately 520 million square feet (48.1 million m²) of office space in 2013,[230] making it the largest office market in the United States.[231] Midtown Manhattan is the largest central business district in the nation based on office space,[232] while Lower Manhattan is the third-largest (after the Chicago Loop).[233][234]
As of the fourth quarter of 2021, the median value of homes in Manhattan was $1,306,208. It ranked second among US counties for highest median home value at the time, second to Nantucket.[235]
Media
Main articles: Media in New York City and New Yorkers in journalism
Manhattan has been described as the media capital of the world.[236][237] A significant array of media outlets and their journalists report about international, American, business, entertainment, and New York metropolitan area-related matters from Manhattan.
News
The headquarters of The New York Times at 620 Eighth Avenue
Manhattan is served by the major New York City daily news publications, including The New York Times, which has won the most Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and is considered the U.S. media's "newspaper of record";[238] the New York Daily News; and the New York Post, which are all headquartered in the borough. The nation's largest newspaper by circulation, The Wall Street Journal, is also based in Manhattan. Other daily newspapers include AM New York and The Villager. The New York Amsterdam News, based in Harlem, is one of the leading Black-owned weekly newspapers in the United States. 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.[239]
Television, radio, film
See also: List of films set in New York City and List of television shows set in New York City
The television industry developed in Manhattan and is a significant employer in the borough's economy. The four major American broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, as well as Univision, are all headquartered in Manhattan, as are many cable channels, including CNN, MSNBC, MTV, Fox News, HBO, and Comedy Central. In 1971, WLIB became New York City's first Black-owned radio station and began broadcasts geared toward the African-American community in 1949. WQHT, also known as Hot 97, claims to be the premier hip-hop station in the United States. WNYC, comprising an AM and FM signal, has the largest public radio audience in the nation and is the most-listened to commercial or non-commercial radio station in Manhattan.[240] WBAI, with news and information programming, is one of the few socialist radio stations operating in the United States.[citation needed]
The oldest public-access television cable TV channel in the United States is the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, founded in 1971, offers eclectic local programming that ranges from a jazz hour to discussion of labor issues to foreign language and religious programming.[241] NY1, Time Warner Cable's local news channel, is known for its beat coverage of City Hall and state politics.
Education
See also: Education in New York City, List of high schools in New York City, and List of colleges and universities in New York City
The notable architectural design of Butler Library at Columbia University, an Ivy League university in Manhattan[242]
Stuyvesant High School in Tribeca[243]
New York Public Library Main Branch at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue
Education in Manhattan is provided by a vast number of public and private institutions. Non-charter public schools in the borough are operated by the New York City Department of Education,[244] the largest public school system in the United States. Charter schools include Success Academy Harlem 1 through 5, Success Academy Upper West, and Public Prep.
Several notable New York City public high schools are located in Manhattan, including A. Philip Randolph Campus High School, Beacon High School, Stuyvesant High School, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, High School of Fashion Industries, Eleanor Roosevelt High School, NYC Lab School, Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, Hunter College High School, and High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College. Bard High School Early College, a hybrid school created by Bard College, serves students from around the city.
Many private preparatory schools are also situated in Manhattan, including the Upper East Side's Brearley School, Dalton School, Browning School, Spence School, Chapin School, Nightingale-Bamford School, Convent of the Sacred Heart, Hewitt School, Saint David's School, Loyola School, and Regis High School. The Upper West Side is home to the Collegiate School and Trinity School. The borough is also home to Manhattan Country School, Trevor Day School, Xavier High School and the United Nations International School.
Based on data from the 2011–2015 American Community Survey, 59.9% of Manhattan residents over age 25 have a bachelor's degree.[245] As of 2005, about 60% of residents were college graduates and some 25% had earned advanced degrees, giving Manhattan one of the nation's densest concentrations of highly educated people.[246]
Manhattan has various colleges and universities, including Columbia University (and its affiliate Barnard College), Cooper Union, Marymount Manhattan College, New York Institute of Technology, New York University (NYU), The Juilliard School, Pace University, Berkeley College, The New School, Yeshiva University, and a campus of Fordham University. Other schools include Bank Street College of Education, Boricua College, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Manhattan School of Music, Metropolitan College of New York, Parsons School of Design, School of Visual Arts, Touro College, and Union Theological Seminary. Several other private institutions maintain a Manhattan presence, among them Mercy College, St. John's University, Adelphi University, The King's College, and Pratt Institute. Cornell Tech, part of Cornell University, is developing on Roosevelt Island.
The City University of New York (CUNY), the municipal college system of New York City, is the largest urban university system in the United States, serving more than 226,000 degree students and a roughly equal number of adult, continuing and professional education students.[247] A third of college graduates in New York City graduate from CUNY, with the institution enrolling about half of all college students in New York City. CUNY senior colleges located in Manhattan include: Baruch College, City College of New York, Hunter College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the CUNY Graduate Center (graduate studies and doctorate granting institution). The only CUNY community college located in Manhattan is the Borough of Manhattan Community College. The State University of New York is represented by the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York State College of Optometry, and Stony Brook University – Manhattan.
Manhattan is a world center for training and education in medicine and the life sciences.[248] The city as a whole receives the second-highest amount of annual funding from the National Institutes of Health among all U.S. cities,[249] the bulk of which goes to Manhattan's research institutions, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Weill Cornell Medical College, and New York University School of Medicine.
Manhattan is served by the New York Public Library, which has the largest collection of any public library system in the country.[250] The five units of the Central Library—Mid-Manhattan Library, 53rd Street Library, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, and the Science, Industry and Business Library—are all located in Manhattan.[251] More than 35 other branch libraries are located in the borough.[252]
Culture
See also: Culture of New York City
Further information: Broadway theatre, LGBT culture in New York City, List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City, Music of New York City, Met Gala, New York Fashion Week, NYC Pride March, and Stonewall Riots
The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Manhattan is the borough most closely associated with New York City by non-residents; regionally, residents within the New York City metropolitan area, including natives of New York City's boroughs outside Manhattan, will often describe a trip to Manhattan as "going to the City".[253] Journalist Walt Whitman characterized the streets of Manhattan as being traversed by "hurrying, feverish, electric crowds".[254]
In 1912, about 20,000 workers, a quarter of them women, marched upon Washington Square Park to commemorate the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 workers on March 25, 1911. Many of the women wore fitted tucked-front blouses like those manufactured by the company, a clothing style that became the working woman's uniform and a symbol of women's liberation, reflecting the alliance of the labor and suffrage movements.[255]
Manhattan has been the scene of many important global and American cultural movements. The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s established the African-American literary canon in the United States and introduced writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Manhattan's visual art scene in the 1950s and 1960s was a center of the pop art movement, which gave birth to such giants as Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. The downtown pop art movement of the late 1970s included artist Andy Warhol and clubs like Serendipity 3 and Studio 54, where he socialized.
Broadway theatre is considered the highest professional form of theatre in the United States. Plays and musicals are staged in one of the 39 larger professional theatres with at least 500 seats, almost all in and around Times Square. Off-Broadway theatres feature productions in venues with 100–500 seats.[256][257] Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, anchoring Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is home to 12 influential arts organizations, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, and New York City Ballet, as well as the Vivian Beaumont Theater, the Juilliard School, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Alice Tully Hall. Performance artists displaying diverse skills are ubiquitous on the streets of Manhattan.
Manhattan is also home to some of the most extensive art collections in the world, both contemporary and classical art, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Frick Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum. The Upper East Side has many art galleries,[258][259] and the downtown neighborhood of Chelsea is known for its more than 200 art galleries that are home to modern art from both upcoming and established artists.[260][261] Many of the world's most lucrative art auctions are held in Manhattan.[262][263]
The Empire State Building displays the colors of the Rainbow Flag as an LGBT icon, top. The annual NYC Pride March in June (seen here in 2018) is the world's largest LGBT event, imaged below.[264][265]
Manhattan is the epicenter of LGBT culture and the central node of the LGBTQ+ sociopolitical ecosystem.[266] The borough is widely acclaimed as the cradle of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, with its inception at the June 1969 Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan – widely considered to constitute the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement[87][267][268] and the modern fight for LGBT rights in the United States.[88][269] Brian Silverman, the author of Frommer's New York City from $90 a Day, wrote the city has "one of the world's largest, loudest, and most powerful LGBT communities", and "Gay and lesbian culture is as much a part of New York's basic identity as yellow cabs, high-rise buildings, and Broadway theatre"—[270] radiating from this central hub, as LGBT travel guide Queer in the World states, "The fabulosity of Gay New York is unrivaled on Earth, and queer culture seeps into every corner of its five boroughs".[271] Multiple gay villages have developed, spanning the length of the borough from the Lower East Side, East Village, and Greenwich Village, through Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen, uptown to Morningside Heights.
The annual NYC Pride March (or gay pride parade) traverses southward down Fifth Avenue and ends at Greenwich Village; the Manhattan parade is the largest pride parade in the world, attracting tens of thousands of participants and millions of sidewalk spectators each June.[265][264] Stonewall 50 – WorldPride NYC 2019 was the largest international Pride celebration in history, produced by Heritage of Pride. The events were in partnership with the I ❤ NY program's LGBT division, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, with 150,000 participants and five million spectators attending in Manhattan.[272]
The borough is represented in several prominent idioms. The phrase New York minute is meant to convey an extremely short time such as an instant,[273] sometimes in hyperbolic form, as in "perhaps faster than you would believe is possible," referring to the rapid pace of life in Manhattan.[274][275] The expression "melting pot" was first popularly coined to describe the densely populated immigrant neighborhoods on the Lower East Side in Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot, which was an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet set in New York City in 1908.[276] The iconic Flatiron Building is said to have been the source of the phrase "23 skidoo" or scram, from what cops would shout at men who tried to get glimpses of women's dresses being blown up by the winds created by the triangular building.[277] The "Big Apple" dates back to the 1920s, when a reporter heard the term used by New Orleans stablehands to refer to New York City's horse racetracks and named his racing column "Around The Big Apple". Jazz musicians adopted the term to refer to the city as the world's jazz capital, and a 1970s ad campaign by the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau helped popularize the term.[278] Manhattan, Kansas, a city of 53,000 people,[279][importance?] was named by New York investors after the borough and is nicknamed the "little apple".[280]
Clockwise, from upper left: the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the world's largest parade;[281] the annual Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village, the world's largest Halloween parade, with millions of spectators annually, and with its roots in New York's queer community;[282] the annual Philippine Independence Day Parade, the largest outside the Philippines; and the ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts
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. The majority of higher profile parades in New York City are held in Manhattan. The primary orientation of the annual street parades is typically from north to south, marching along major avenues. The annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is the world's largest parade,[281] beginning alongside Central Park and processing southward to the flagship Macy's Herald Square store;[283] the parade is viewed on telecasts worldwide and draws millions of spectators in person.[281] Other notable parades including the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade in March, the New York City Pride Parade in June, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in October, and numerous parades commemorating the independence days of many nations. Ticker-tape parades celebrating championships won by sports teams as well as other heroic accomplishments march northward along the Canyon of Heroes on Broadway from Bowling Green to City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan. New York Fashion Week, held at various locations in Manhattan, is a high-profile semiannual event featuring models displaying the latest wardrobes created by prominent fashion designers worldwide in advance of these fashions proceeding to the retail marketplace.
Sports
The skating pond in Central Park in 1862
Madison Square Garden, home to the New York Rangers of the National Hockey League and the New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association
Manhattan is home to the NBA's New York Knicks and the NHL's New York Rangers, both of which play their home games at Madison Square Garden, the only major professional sports arena in the borough. The Garden was also home to the WNBA's New York Liberty through the 2017 season, but that team's primary home is now the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The New York Jets proposed a West Side Stadium for their home field, but the proposal was eventually defeated in June 2005, and they now play at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.[284]
While Manhattan does not currently have a professional baseball franchise, three of the four Major League Baseball teams to have played in New York City played in Manhattan. The original New York Giants played in the various incarnations of the Polo Grounds at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue from their inception in 1883—except for 1889, when they split their time between Jersey City, New Jersey and Staten Island, and when they played in Hilltop Park in 1911—until they headed to California with the Brooklyn Dodgers after the 1957 season.[285] The New York Yankees began their franchise as the Highlanders, named for Hilltop Park, where they played from their creation in 1903 until 1912. The team moved to the Polo Grounds with the 1913 season, where they were officially christened the New York Yankees, remaining there until they moved across the Harlem River in 1923 to Yankee Stadium.[286] The New York Mets played in the Polo Grounds in 1962 and 1963, their first two seasons, before Shea Stadium was completed in 1964.[287] After the Mets departed, the Polo Grounds was demolished in April 1964, replaced by public housing.[288][289]
The first national college-level basketball championship, the National Invitation Tournament, was held in New York in 1938 and remains in the city.[290] The New York Knicks started play in 1946 as one of the National Basketball Association's original teams, playing their first home games at the 69th Regiment Armory, before making Madison Square Garden their permanent home.[291] The New York Liberty of the WNBA shared the Garden with the Knicks from their creation in 1997 as one of the league's original eight teams through the 2017 season,[292] after which the team moved nearly all of its home schedule to White Plains in Westchester County.[293] Rucker Park in Harlem is a playground court, famed for its streetball style of play, where many NBA athletes have played in the summer league.[294]
Although both of New York City's football teams play today across the Hudson River in MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, both teams started out playing in the Polo Grounds. The New York Giants played side-by-side with their baseball namesakes from the time they entered the National Football League in 1925, until crossing over to Yankee Stadium in 1956.[295] The New York Jets, originally known as the Titans of New York, started out in 1960 at the Polo Grounds, staying there for four seasons before joining the Mets in Queens at Shea Stadium in 1964.[296]
The New York Rangers of the National Hockey League have played in the various locations of Madison Square Garden since the team's founding in the 1926–1927 season. The Rangers were predated by the New York Americans, who started play in the Garden the previous season, lasting until the team folded after the 1941–1942 NHL season, a season it played in the Garden as the Brooklyn Americans.[297]
The New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League played their home games at Downing Stadium for two seasons, starting in 1974. The playing pitch and facilities at Downing Stadium were in unsatisfactory condition, however, and as the team's popularity grew they too left for Yankee Stadium, and then Giants Stadium. The stadium was demolished in 2002 to make way for the $45 million, 4,754-seat Icahn Stadium, which includes an Olympic-standard 400-meter running track and, as part of Pelé's and the Cosmos' legacy, includes a FIFA-approved floodlit soccer stadium that hosts matches between the 48 youth teams of a Manhattan soccer club.[298][299]
Government
Main article: Government of New York City
Manhattan Municipal Building
Since New York City's consolidation in 1898, Manhattan has been governed by the New York City Charter, which has provided for a strong mayor–council system since its revision in 1989.[300] The centralized New York City government is responsible for public education, correctional institutions, libraries, public safety, recreational facilities, sanitation, water supply, and welfare services in Manhattan.
The office of Borough President was created in the consolidation of 1898 to balance centralization with local authority. Each borough president had a powerful administrative role derived from having a vote on the New York City Board of Estimate, which was responsible for creating and approving the city's budget and proposals for land use. In 1989, the Supreme Court of the United States declared the Board of Estimate unconstitutional because Brooklyn, the most populous borough, had no greater effective representation on the Board than Staten Island, the least populous borough, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause pursuant to the high court's 1964 "one man, one vote" decision.[301] Since 1990, the largely powerless Borough President has acted as an advocate for the borough at the mayoral agencies, the City Council, the New York state government, and corporations. Manhattan's current Borough President is Mark Levine, elected as a Democrat in November 2021. Levine replaced Gale Brewer, who went on to represent the sixth district of the New York City Council.
Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, is the District Attorney of New York County. Manhattan has ten City Council members, the third largest contingent among the five boroughs. It also has twelve administrative districts, each served by a local Community Board. Community Boards are representative bodies that field complaints and serve as advocates for local residents.
As the host of the United Nations, the borough is home to the world's largest international consular corps, comprising 105 consulates, consulates general and honorary consulates.[302] It is also the home of New York City Hall, the seat of New York City government housing the Mayor of New York City and the New York City Council. The mayor's staff and thirteen municipal agencies are located in the nearby Manhattan Municipal Building, completed in 1914, one of the largest governmental buildings in the world.[303]
Politics
See also: Community boards of Manhattan
¶ The presidential election results below for the years 1876–1912 are not strictly comparable with the earlier and later ones because New York County included the West Bronx after 1874 and all of what is now the Borough of the Bronx (Bronx County, New York) from 1895 until The Bronx became a separate borough in 1914.
United States presidential election results for New York County, New York[304][305][306][excessive detail?]
Year Republican / Whig Democratic Third party
No. % No. % No. %
2020 85,185 12.21% 603,040 86.42% 9,588 1.37%
2016 64,930 9.71% 579,013 86.56% 24,997 3.74%
2012 89,559 14.92% 502,674 83.74% 8,058 1.34%
2008 89,949 13.47% 572,370 85.70% 5,566 0.83%
2004 107,405 16.73% 526,765 82.06% 7,781 1.21%
2000 82,113 14.38% 454,523 79.60% 34,370 6.02%
1996 67,839 13.76% 394,131 79.96% 30,929 6.27%
1992 84,501 15.88% 416,142 78.20% 31,475 5.92%
1988 115,927 22.89% 385,675 76.14% 4,949 0.98%
1984 144,281 27.39% 379,521 72.06% 2,869 0.54%
1980 115,911 26.23% 275,742 62.40% 50,245 11.37%
1976 117,702 25.54% 337,438 73.22% 5,698 1.24%
1972 178,515 33.38% 354,326 66.25% 2,022 0.38%
1968 135,458 25.59% 370,806 70.04% 23,128 4.37%
1964 120,125 19.20% 503,848 80.52% 1,746 0.28%
1960 217,271 34.19% 414,902 65.28% 3,394 0.53%
1956 300,004 44.26% 377,856 55.74% 0 0.00%
1952 300,284 39.30% 446,727 58.47% 16,974 2.22%
1948 241,752 32.75% 380,310 51.51% 116,208 15.74%
1944 258,650 33.47% 509,263 65.90% 4,864 0.63%
1940 292,480 37.59% 478,153 61.45% 7,466 0.96%
1936 174,299 24.51% 517,134 72.71% 19,820 2.79%
1932 157,014 27.78% 378,077 66.89% 30,114 5.33%
1928 186,396 35.74% 317,227 60.82% 17,935 3.44%
1924 190,871 41.20% 183,249 39.55% 89,206 19.25%
1920 275,013 59.22% 135,249 29.12% 54,158 11.66%
1916 113,254 42.65% 139,547 52.55% 12,759 4.80%
1912 63,107 18.15% 166,157 47.79% 118,391 34.05%
1908 154,958 44.71% 160,261 46.24% 31,393 9.06%
1904 155,003 42.11% 189,712 51.54% 23,357 6.35%
1900 153,001 44.16% 181,786 52.47% 11,700 3.38%
1896 156,359 50.73% 135,624 44.00% 16,249 5.27%
1892 98,967 34.73% 175,267 61.50% 10,750 3.77%
1888 106,922 39.20% 162,735 59.67% 3,076 1.13%
1884 90,095 39.54% 133,222 58.47% 4,530 1.99%
1880 81,730 39.79% 123,015 59.90% 636 0.31%
1876 58,561 34.17% 112,530 65.66% 289 0.17%
1872 54,676 41.27% 77,814 58.73% 0 0.00%
1868 47,738 30.59% 108,316 69.41% 0 0.00%
1864 36,681 33.23% 73,709 66.77% 0 0.00%
1860 33,290 34.83% 62,293 65.17% 0 0.00%
1856 17,771 22.32% 41,913 52.65% 19,922 25.03%
1852 23,124 39.98% 34,280 59.27% 436 0.75%
1848 29,070 54.51% 18,973 35.57% 5,290 9.92%
1844 26,385 48.15% 28,296 51.64% 117 0.21%
1840 20,958 48.69% 21,936 50.96% 153 0.36%
1836 16,348 48.42% 17,417 51.58% 0 0.00%
1832 12,506 40.97% 18,020 59.03% 0 0.00%
1828 9,638 38.44% 15,435 61.56% 0 0.00%
James A. Farley Post Office
The Democratic Party holds most public offices. Registered Republicans are a minority in the borough, constituting 9.88% of the electorate as of April 2016. Registered Republicans are more than 20% of the electorate only in the neighborhoods of the Upper East Side and the Financial District as of 2016. Democrats accounted for 68.41% of those registered to vote, while 17.94% of voters were unaffiliated.[307][308]
No Republican has won the presidential election in Manhattan since 1924, when Calvin Coolidge won a plurality of the New York County vote over Democrat John W. Davis, 41.20%–39.55%. Warren G. Harding was the most recent Republican presidential candidate to win a majority of the Manhattan vote, with 59.22% of the 1920 vote.[citation needed] In the 2004 presidential election, Democrat John Kerry received 82.1% of the vote in Manhattan and Republican George W. Bush received 16.7%.[309][importance?] The borough is the most important source of funding for presidential campaigns in the United States; in 2004, it was home to six of the top seven ZIP codes in the nation for political contributions.[310] The top ZIP code, 10021 on the Upper East Side, generated the most money for the United States presidential election for all presidential candidates, including both Kerry and Bush during the 2004 election.[311][needs update]
Representatives in the U.S. Congress
In 2018, four Democrats represented Manhattan in the United States House of Representatives.[312]
Nydia Velázquez (first elected in 1992) represents New York's 7th congressional district, which includes the Lower East Side and Alphabet City. The district also covers central and western Brooklyn and a small part of Queens.[312][313][314]
Jerry Nadler (first elected in 1992) represents New York's 10th congressional district, which includes the West Side neighborhoods of Battery Park City, Chelsea, Chinatown, the Financial District, Greenwich Village, Hell's Kitchen, SoHo, Tribeca, and the Upper West Side. The district also covers southwestern Brooklyn.[312][315][316]
Carolyn Maloney (first elected in 1992) represents New York's 12th congressional district, which includes the East Side neighborhoods of Gramercy Park, Kips Bay, Midtown Manhattan, Murray Hill, Roosevelt Island, Turtle Bay, Upper East Side, and most of the Lower East Side and the East Village. The district also covers western Queens.[312][317][318]
Adriano Espaillat (first elected in 2016) represents New York's 13th congressional district, which includes the Upper Manhattan neighborhoods of East Harlem, Harlem, Inwood, Marble Hill, Washington Heights, and portions of Morningside Heights, as well as part of the northwest Bronx.[312][319][320]
Federal offices
The United States Postal Service operates post offices in Manhattan. The James Farley Post Office at 421 Eighth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, between 31st Street and 33rd Street, is New York City's main post office.[321] Both the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit are located in Lower Manhattan's Foley Square, and the U.S. Attorney and other federal offices and agencies maintain locations in that area.
Crime and public safety
Main article: Crime in New York City
An 1885 sketch of Five Points
Starting in the mid-19th century, the United States became a magnet for immigrants seeking to escape poverty in their home countries. After arriving in New York, many new arrivals ended up living in squalor in the slums of the Five Points neighborhood, an area between Broadway and the Bowery, northeast of New York City Hall. By the 1820s, the area was home to many gambling dens and brothels, and was known as a dangerous place to go. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited the area and was appalled at the horrendous living conditions he had seen.[322] The area was so notorious that it even caught the attention of Abraham Lincoln, who visited the area before his Cooper Union speech in 1860.[323] The predominantly Irish Five Points Gang was one of the country's first major organized crime entities.
As Italian immigration grew in the early 20th century many joined ethnic gangs, including Al Capone, who got his start in crime with the Five Points Gang.[324] The Mafia (also known as Cosa Nostra) first developed in the mid-19th century in Sicily and spread to the East Coast of the United States during the late 19th century following waves of Sicilian and Southern Italian emigration. Lucky Luciano established Cosa Nostra in Manhattan, forming alliances with other criminal enterprises, including the Jewish mob, led by Meyer Lansky, the leading Jewish gangster of that period.[325] From 1920 to 1933, Prohibition helped create a thriving black market in liquor, upon which the Mafia was quick to capitalize.[325]
New York City as a whole experienced a sharp increase in crime during the post-war period.[326] The murder rate in Manhattan hit an all-time high of 42 murders per 100,000 residents in 1979.[327] Manhattan retained the highest murder rate in the city until 1985 when it was surpassed by the Bronx. Most serious violent crime has been historically concentrated in Upper Manhattan and the Lower East Side, though robbery in particular was a major quality of life concern throughout the borough. Through the 1990s and 2000s, levels of violent crime in Manhattan plummeted to levels not seen since the 1950s.[328]
Today crime rates in most of Lower Manhattan, Midtown, the Upper East Side, and the Upper West Side are consistent with other major city centers in the United States. However, crime rates remain high in the Upper Manhattan neighborhoods of East Harlem, Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, and NYCHA developments across the borough despite significant reductions. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, there has been an increase in violent crime, particularly in Upper Manhattan.[329]
Housing
Tenement houses in 1936
At the time of its construction, London Terrace in Chelsea was the largest apartment building in the world.
During Manhattan's early history, wood construction and poor access to water supplies left the city vulnerable to fires. In 1776, shortly after the Continental Army evacuated Manhattan and left it to the British, a massive fire broke out destroying one-third of the city and some 500 houses.[330]
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. Tenements were usually five stories high, constructed on the then-typical 25 by 100 feet (7.6 by 30.5 m) lots, with "cockroach landlords" exploiting the new immigrants.[331][332] By 1929, stricter fire codes and the increased use of elevators in residential buildings, were the impetus behind a new housing code that effectively ended the tenement as a form of new construction, though many tenement buildings survive today on the East Side of the borough.[332] Conversely, there were also areas with luxury apartment developments, the first of which was the Dakota on the Upper West Side.[333]
Manhattan offers a wide array of public (NYCHA) and private housing options. Affordable rental and co-operative housing units throughout the borough were created under the Mitchell–Lama Housing Program. There were 852,575 housing units in 2013[31] at an average density of 37,345 units per square mile (14,419/km2). As of 2003, only 20.3% of Manhattan residents lived in owner-occupied housing, the second-lowest rate of all counties in the nation, behind the Bronx.[334] Although the city of New York has the highest average cost for rent in the United States, it simultaneously hosts a higher average of income per capita. Because of this, rent is a lower percentage of annual income than in several other American cities.[335]
Manhattan's real estate market for luxury housing continues to be among the most expensive in the world,[336] and Manhattan residential property continues to have the highest sale price per square foot in the United States.[337] Manhattan's apartments cost $1,773 per square foot ($19,080/m2), compared to San Francisco housing at $1,185 per square foot ($12,760/m2), Boston housing at $751 per square foot ($8,080/m2), and Los Angeles housing at $451 per square foot ($4,850/m2).[338]
Infrastructure
Transportation
See also: Transportation in New York City
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Public transportation
Grand Central Terminal, a National Historic Landmark
Ferries departing Battery Park City Terminal and helicopters flying above Manhattan
The Staten Island Ferry, seen from the Battery, crosses Upper New York Bay, providing free public transportation between Staten Island and Manhattan.
Manhattan is unique in the U.S. for intense use of public transportation and lack of private car ownership. While 88% of Americans nationwide drive to their jobs, with only 5% using public transport, mass transit is the dominant form of travel for residents of Manhattan, with 72% of borough residents using public transport to get to work, while only 18% drove.[339][340] According to the 2000 United States Census, 77.5% of Manhattan households do not own a car.[341] In 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a congestion pricing system to regulate entering Manhattan south of 60th Street, but the state legislature rejected the proposal.[342]
The New York City Subway, the largest subway system in the world by number of stations, is the primary means of travel within the city, linking every borough except Staten Island. There are 151 subway stations in Manhattan, out of the 472 stations.[343] A second subway, the PATH system, connects six stations in Manhattan to northern New Jersey. Passengers pay fares with pay-per-ride MetroCards, which are valid on all city buses and subways, as well as on PATH trains.[344][345] Commuter rail services operating to and from Manhattan are the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), which connects Manhattan and other New York City boroughs to Long Island; the Metro-North Railroad, which connects Manhattan to Upstate New York and Southwestern Connecticut; and NJ Transit trains, which run to various points in New Jersey.
The US$11.1 billion East Side Access project, which brings LIRR trains to Grand Central Terminal, opened in 2023; this project utilized a pre-existing train tunnel beneath the East River, connecting the East Side of Manhattan with Long Island City, Queens.[346][347] Four multi-billion-dollar projects were completed in the mid-2010s: the $1.4 billion Fulton Center in November 2014,[348] the $2.4 billion 7 Subway Extension in September 2015,[349] the $4 billion World Trade Center Transportation Hub in March 2016,[350][351] and Phase 1 of the $4.5 billion Second Avenue Subway in January 2017.[352][353]
MTA New York City Transit offers a wide variety of local buses within Manhattan under the brand New York City Bus. An extensive network of express bus routes serves commuters and other travelers heading into Manhattan.[354] The bus system served 784 million passengers citywide in 2011, placing the bus system's ridership as the highest in the nation, and more than double the ridership of the second-place Los Angeles system.[355]
The Roosevelt Island Tramway, one of two commuter cable car systems in North America, takes commuters between Roosevelt Island and Manhattan in less than five minutes, and has been serving the island since 1978.[356][357]
The Staten Island Ferry, which runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, annually carries over 21 million passengers on the 5.2-mile (8.4 km) run between Manhattan and Staten Island. Each weekday, five vessels transport about 65,000 passengers on 109 boat trips.[358][359] The ferry has been fare-free since 1997.[360] In February 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city government would begin NYC Ferry to extend ferry transportation to traditionally underserved communities in the city.[361][362] The first routes of NYC Ferry opened in 2017.[363][364] All of the system's routes have termini in Manhattan, and the Lower East Side and Soundview routes also have intermediate stops on the East River.[365]
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. They are the two busiest rail stations in the United States. About one-third of users of mass transit and two-thirds of railway passengers in the country live in New York and its suburbs.[366] Amtrak provides inter-city passenger rail service from Penn Station to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.; Upstate New York and New England; cross-Canadian border service to Toronto and Montreal; and destinations in the Southern and Midwestern United States.
Major highways
I-78
I-95
I-278
I-478
I-495
US 9
NY 9A
NY 495
Taxis
Main article: Taxis of New York City
New York's iconic yellow taxicabs, which number 13,087 citywide and must have a medallion authorizing the pickup of street hails, are ubiquitous in the borough.[367] Various private vehicle for hire companies provide significant competition for taxicab drivers in Manhattan.[368]
Bicycles
Main article: Cycling in New York City
According to the government of New York City, Manhattan had 19,676 bicycle commuters in 2017, roughly doubling from its total of 9,613 in 2012.[369]
Streets and roads
See also: List of numbered streets in Manhattan and List of eponymous streets in New York City
The Brooklyn Bridge (on right) and Manhattan Bridge (on left), two of three bridges that connect Lower Manhattan with Brooklyn over the East River.
Eighth Avenue, looking northward ("Uptown"), in the rain; most streets and avenues in Manhattan's grid plan incorporate a one-way traffic configuration.
Tourists observing Manhattanhenge on July 12, 2016
The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 called for twelve numbered avenues running north and south roughly parallel to the shore of the Hudson River, each 100 feet (30 m) wide, with First Avenue on the east side and Twelfth Avenue on the west side. There are several intermittent avenues east of First Avenue, including four additional lettered avenues running from Avenue A eastward to Avenue D in an area now known as Alphabet City in Manhattan's East Village. The numbered streets in Manhattan run east–west, and are generally 60 feet (18 m) wide, with about 200 feet (61 m) between each pair of streets. With each combined street and block adding up to about 260 feet (79 m), there are almost exactly 20 blocks per mile. The typical block in Manhattan is 250 by 600 feet (76 by 183 m). The address algorithm of Manhattan refers to the formulas used to estimate the closest east–west cross street for building numbers on north–south avenues.
According to the original Commissioner's Plan, there were 155 numbered crosstown streets,[370] but later the grid was extended up to the northernmost corner of Manhattan, where the last numbered street is 220th Street. Moreover, the numbering system continues even in the Bronx, north of Manhattan, despite the fact that the grid plan is not as regular in that borough, whose last numbered street is 263rd Street.[371] Fifteen crosstown streets were designated as 100 feet (30 m) wide, including 34th, 42nd, 57th and 125th Streets,[372] which became some of the borough's most significant transportation and shopping venues. Broadway is the most notable of many exceptions to the grid, starting at Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan and continuing north into the Bronx at Manhattan's northern tip. In much of Midtown Manhattan, Broadway runs at a diagonal to the grid, creating major named intersections at Union Square (Park Avenue South/Fourth Avenue and 14th Street), Madison Square (Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street), Herald Square (Sixth Avenue and 34th Street), Times Square (Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street), and Columbus Circle (Eighth Avenue/Central Park West and 59th Street).
"Crosstown traffic" refers primarily to vehicular traffic between Manhattan's East Side and West Side. The trip is notoriously frustrating for drivers because of heavy congestion on narrow local streets laid out by the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, 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. Proposals in the mid-1900s to build express roads through the city's densest neighborhoods, namely the Mid-Manhattan Expressway and Lower Manhattan Expressway, did not go forward. Unlike the rest of the United States, New York State prohibits right or left turns on red in cities with a population greater than one million, to reduce traffic collisions and increase pedestrian safety. In New York City, therefore, all turns at red lights are illegal unless a sign permitting such maneuvers is present, significantly shaping traffic patterns in Manhattan.[373]
Another consequence of the strict grid plan of most of Manhattan, and the grid's skew of approximately 28.9 degrees, is a phenomenon sometimes referred to as Manhattanhenge (by analogy with Stonehenge).[374] On separate occasions in late May and early July, the sunset is aligned with the street grid lines, with the result that the sun is visible at or near the western horizon from street level.[374][375] A similar phenomenon occurs with the sunrise in January and December.
The FDR Drive and Harlem River Drive, both designed by controversial New York master planner Robert Moses,[376] comprise a single, long limited-access parkway skirting the east side of Manhattan along the East River and Harlem River south of Dyckman Street. The Henry Hudson Parkway is the corresponding parkway on the West Side north of 57th Street.
River crossings
Ferry service departing Battery Park City Ferry Terminal for Paulus Hook in New Jersey
Being primarily an island, Manhattan is linked to New York City's outer boroughs by numerous bridges, of various sizes. Manhattan has fixed highway connections with New Jersey to its west by way of the George Washington Bridge, the Holland Tunnel, and the Lincoln Tunnel, and to three of the four other New York City boroughs—the Bronx to the northeast, and Brooklyn and Queens (both on Long Island) to the east and south. Its only direct connection with the fifth New York City borough, Staten Island, is the Staten Island Ferry across New York Harbor, which is free of charge. The ferry terminal is located near Battery Park at Manhattan's southern tip. It is also possible to travel on land to Staten Island by way of Brooklyn, via the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.
The 14-lane George Washington Bridge, the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge,[377][378] connects Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan to Bergen County in New Jersey. There are numerous bridges to the Bronx across the Harlem River, and five (listed north to south)—the Triborough (known officially as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge), Ed Koch Queensboro (also known as the 59th Street Bridge), Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges—that cross the East River to connect Manhattan to Long Island.
Several tunnels also link Manhattan Island to New York City's outer boroughs and New Jersey. The Lincoln Tunnel, which carries 120,000 vehicles a day under the Hudson River between New Jersey and Midtown Manhattan, is the busiest vehicular tunnel in the world.[379] 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. The Holland Tunnel, connecting Lower Manhattan to Jersey City, New Jersey, was the world's first mechanically ventilated vehicular tunnel.[380] 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;[381] President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first person to drive through it.[382] The Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel runs underneath Battery Park and connects the Financial District at the southern tip of Manhattan to Red Hook in Brooklyn.
Several ferry services operate between New Jersey and Manhattan.[383] These ferries mainly serve midtown (at W. 39th St.), Battery Park City (WFC at Brookfield Place), and Wall Street (Pier 11).
Heliports
Manhattan has three public heliports: the East 34th Street Heliport (also known as the Atlantic Metroport) at East 34th Street, owned by New York City and run by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC); the Port Authority Downtown Manhattan/Wall Street Heliport, owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and run by the NYCEDC; and the West 30th Street Heliport, a privately owned heliport owned by the Hudson River Park Trust.[384] US Helicopter offered regularly scheduled helicopter service connecting the Downtown Manhattan Heliport with John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens and Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, before going out of business in 2009.[385]
Utilities
Gas and electric service is provided by Consolidated Edison to all of Manhattan. Con Edison's electric business traces its roots back to Thomas Edison's Edison Electric Illuminating Company, the first investor-owned electric utility. The company started service on September 4, 1882, using one generator to provide 110 volts direct current (DC) to 59 customers with 800 light bulbs, in a one-square-mile area of Lower Manhattan from his Pearl Street Station.[386][excessive detail?] Con Edison operates the world's largest district steam system, which consists of 105 miles (169 km) of steam pipes, providing steam for heating, hot water, and air conditioning[387] by some 1,800 Manhattan customers.[388] Cable service is provided by Time Warner Cable and telephone service is provided by Verizon Communications, although AT&T is available as well.
Manhattan witnessed the doubling of the natural gas supply delivered to the borough when a new gas pipeline opened on November 1, 2013.[389]
The New York City Department of Sanitation is responsible for garbage removal.[390] The bulk of the city's trash ultimately 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.[391] A small amount of trash processed at transfer sites in New Jersey is sometimes incinerated at waste-to-energy facilities. Like New York City, New Jersey and much of Greater New York relies on exporting its trash.
New York City has the largest clean-air diesel-hybrid and compressed natural gas bus fleet, which also operates in Manhattan, in the country. It also has some of the first hybrid taxis, most of which operate in Manhattan.[392]
Health care
Main article: List of hospitals in New York City § Manhattan
There are many hospitals in Manhattan, including two of the 25 largest in the United States (as of 2017):[393]
Bellevue Hospital
Lenox Hill Hospital
Lower Manhattan Hospital
Metropolitan Hospital Center
Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital
Mount Sinai Hospital
NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital
NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem
NYU Langone Medical Center
Water purity and availability
Main articles: Food and water in New York City and New York City water supply system
New York City is supplied with drinking water by the protected Catskill Mountains watershed.[394] As a result of the watershed's integrity and undisturbed natural water filtration system, New York is one of only four major cities in the United States the majority of whose drinking water is pure enough not to require purification by water treatment plants.[395] The Croton Watershed north of the city is undergoing construction of a US$3.2 billion water purification plant to augment New York City's water supply by an estimated 290 million gallons daily, representing a greater than 20% addition to the city's current availability of water.[396] Water comes to Manhattan through the tunnels 1 and 2, completed in 1917 and 1935, and in future through Tunnel No. 3, begun in 1970.[397]
See also
LGBT portal
World portal
flag United States portal
flag New York (state) portal
flag New York City portal
History of New York City
List of Manhattan neighborhoods
List of people from Manhattan
Manhattanhenge
Manhattanization
Manhattoe
National Register of Historic Places listings in Manhattan
Sawing-off of Manhattan Island
Timeline of New York City
Notes
Samuel Joseph Bloomingdale (June 17, 1873 – May 10, 1968) was an American heir to the Bloomingdale's department store fortune and president of Bloomingdale's from 1905 to 1930.[1]
Early life and education
Bloomingdale was born to Lyman Bloomingdale, founder of the Bloomingdale's department store, and Hattie Colenberg Bloomingdale, on June 17, 1873, at 938 Third Avenue, the first location of the family-owned department store.[2] He was educated at private schools and graduated from Columbia University in 1895, where he studied architecture.[3] However, after consultation with Dean William Robert Ware of the Columbia School of Architecture, he decided against becoming an architect and joined the family business.[4]
Career
Upon his father's death, Bloomingdale became president of the department store in 1905.[1] During his 25-year tenure, he oversaw the expansion of the department store and undertook a large scale reconstruction of the store into a modern eight-story structure occupying the entire block from 59th to 60th street between Lexington Avenue and Third Avenue.[4] As president, Bloomingdale was recognized as a pioneer of advertisement, which helped quintuple the sales volume of Bloomingdale's to $25 million annually. The department store was also the first in New York City to welcome an outside union.[1]
In 1930, the store joined the chain of Federated Department Stores and Bloomingdale became a director of the company until 1962.[1] He remained a chairman of Bloomingdale's until 1943 and became the honorary chairman thereafter.[5]
Philanthropy
Bloomingdale was a trustee of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and Montefiore Medical Center, and was active in the American Jewish Committee.[1][6]
Personal life
Bloomingdale died on May 10, 1968.[1] He was a member of the Century Association, Harmonie Club, Salmagundi Club, Quaker Ridge Golf Club,[7] and Congregation Emanu-El of New York.[1]
He married Rita G. Goodman in 1916 and had two daughters:[1]
Susan Bloomingdale, who married investor Richard C. Ernst[8][9][10]
Louise Bloomingdale, who married Edgar M. Cullman, president of the General Cigar Company[11][12
Manhattan (/mænˈhætən, mən-/) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is coextensive with New York County of the U.S. state of New York, the smallest county by land area in the contiguous United States. Located near the southern tip of New York State, Manhattan constitutes the geographical and demographic center of the Northeast megalopolis and the urban core of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass.[6] Manhattan serves as New York City's economic and administrative center, and has been described as the cultural, financial, media, and entertainment capital of the world.[7][8][9][10]
The area of present-day Manhattan was originally part of Lenape territory.[11] European settlement began with the establishment of a trading post founded by Dutch colonists in 1624 on Lower Manhattan; the post was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The territory and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York.[12] New York, based in present-day Manhattan, served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790.[13] The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor greeted millions of arriving immigrants in the late 19th century and is a world symbol of the United States and its ideals.[14] Manhattan became a borough during the consolidation of New York City in 1898, and houses New York City Hall, the seat of the city's government.[15] The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, part of the Stonewall National Monument, is considered the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement, cementing Manhattan's central role in LGBT culture.[16][17] It was also the site of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed during the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, the borough consists mostly of Manhattan Island, bounded by the Hudson, East, and Harlem rivers along with several small adjacent islands, including Roosevelt, U Thant, and Randalls and Wards Islands. The Borough of Manhattan also includes the small neighborhood of Marble Hill on the U.S. mainland. Manhattan Island is divided into three informally bounded components, each cutting across the borough's long axis: Lower, Midtown, and Upper Manhattan. Manhattan is one of the most densely populated locations in the world, with a 2020 census population of 1,694,251 living in a land area of 22.83 square miles (59.13 km2),[18][19][4] or 72,918 residents per square mile (28,154 residents/km2), and its residential property has the highest sale price per square foot in the United States.[20] Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere.[21]
Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial and fintech center of the world,[22][23][24][25] and Manhattan is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.[26][27] Many multinational media conglomerates are based in Manhattan, as are numerous colleges and universities, such as Columbia University and New York University; the headquarters of the United Nations is also located in the borough. Manhattan hosts three of the world's most-visited tourist attractions in 2013: Times Square, Central Park, and Grand Central Terminal.[28] Penn Station is the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere.[29] The borough hosts many prominent bridges and tunnels, and skyscrapers including the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and One World Trade Center.[30] It is also home to the NBA's New York Knicks and the NHL's New York Rangers.
History
Main article: History of Manhattan
See also: History of New York City
History of New York City
Lenape and New Netherland, to 1664
New Amsterdam
British and Revolution, 1665–1783
Federal and early American, 1784–1854
Tammany and Consolidation, 1855–1897
(Civil War, 1861–1865)
Early 20th century, 1898–1945
Post–World War II, 1946–1977
Modern and post-9/11, 1978–present
See also
Transportation
Timelines: NYC • Bronx • Brooklyn • Queens • Staten Island
Category
vte
Lenape settlement
Manhattan was historically part of the Lenapehoking territory inhabited by the Munsee Lenape[31] and Wappinger tribes.[32] There were several Lenape settlements in the area including Sapohanikan, Nechtanc, and Konaande Kongh that were interconnected by a series of trails. The primary trail on the island ran from what is now Inwood in the north to Battery Park in the south. There were various sites for fishing and planting established by the Lenape throughout Manhattan.[11] The name Manhattan originated from the Lenapes language, Munsee, manaháhtaan (where manah- means "gather", -aht- means "bow", and -aan is an abstract element used to form verb stems). The Lenape word has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the (wood to make) bows". According to a Munsee tradition recorded by Albert Seqaqkind Anthony in the 19th century, the island was named so for a grove of hickory trees at its southern end that was considered ideal for the making of bows.[33]
Colonial era
Main articles: New Netherland, New Amsterdam, and Province of New York
New Amsterdam centered in what eventually became Lower Manhattan in 1664, the year England took control and renamed it New York
In 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. Verrazzano entered the tidal strait now known as The Narrows and named the land around Upper New York Harbor New Angoulême, in reference to the family name of King Francis I; he sailed far enough into the harbor to sight the Hudson River, and he named the Bay of Santa Margarita – what is now Upper New York Bay – after Marguerite de Navarre, the elder sister of the king.[34][35]
Manhattan was first mapped during a 1609 voyage of Henry Hudson.[36] Hudson came across Manhattan Island and the native people living there, and continued up the river that would later bear his name, the Hudson River.[37] Manhattan was first recorded in writing as Manna-hata, in the logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on the voyage.[38]
A permanent European presence in New Netherland began in 1624, with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement on Governors Island. In 1625, construction was started on the citadel of Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, later called New Amsterdam (Nieuw Amsterdam), in what is now Lower Manhattan.[39][40] The establishment of Fort Amsterdam is recognized as the birth of New York City.[41] In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant was appointed as the last Dutch Director-General of the colony.[42] New Amsterdam was formally incorporated as a city on February 2, 1653.[43] In 1674, the English bought New Netherland, after Holland lost rentable sugar business in Brazil, and renamed it "New York" after the English Duke of York and Albany, the future King James II.[44] The Dutch Republic re-captured the city in August 1673, renaming it "New Orange". New Netherland was ultimately ceded to the English in November 1674 through the Treaty of Westminster.[45]
American Revolution and the early United States
Further information: American Revolution
Washington's statue in front of Federal Hall on Wall Street, where in 1789 he was sworn in as the first U.S. president[46]
Manhattan was at the heart of the New York Campaign, a series of major battles in the early stages of the American Revolutionary War. The Continental Army was forced to abandon Manhattan after the Battle of Fort Washington on November 16, 1776. The city, greatly damaged by the Great Fire of New York during the campaign, became the British military and political center of operations in North America for the remainder of the war.[47] British occupation lasted until November 25, 1783, when George Washington returned to Manhattan, as the last British forces left the city.[48]
From January 11, 1785, to the fall of 1788, New York City was the fifth of five capitals of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, with the Continental Congress meeting at New York City Hall (then at Fraunces Tavern). New York was the first capital under the newly enacted Constitution of the United States, from March 4, 1789, to August 12, 1790, at Federal Hall.[49] Federal Hall was where the United States Supreme Court met for the first time,[50] the United States Bill of Rights were drafted and ratified,[51] and where the Northwest Ordinance was adopted, establishing measures for adding new states to the Union.[52]
19th century
New York grew as an economic center, first as a result of Alexander Hamilton's policies and practices as the first Secretary of the Treasury and, later, with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which connected the Atlantic port to the vast agricultural markets of the Midwestern United States and Canada.[53][54] By 1810, New York City, then confined to Manhattan, had surpassed Philadelphia as the largest city in the United States.[55] The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 laid out the island of Manhattan in its familiar grid plan.
Tammany Hall, a Democratic Party political machine, began to grow in influence with the support of many of the immigrant Irish, culminating in the election of the first Tammany mayor, Fernando Wood, in 1854. Central Park, which opened to the public in 1858, became the first landscaped public park in an American city.[56][57]
New York City played a complex role in the American Civil War. The city had strong commercial ties to the South, but anger around conscription, resentment against Lincoln's war policies and fomenting paranoia about free Blacks taking the poor immigrants' jobs[58] culminated in the three-day-long New York Draft Riots of July 1863, among the worst incidents of civil disorder in American history.[59] 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.[60][61] This immigration brought further social upheaval. In a city of tenements packed with poorly paid laborers from dozens of nations, the city became a hotbed of revolution (including anarchists and communists among others), syndicalism, racketeering, and unionization.
In 1883, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge established a road connection to Brooklyn. In 1898 New York City consolidated with three neighboring counties to form "the City of Greater New York", and Manhattan was established as a borough.
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
20th century
Further information: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and Stonewall riots
Manhattan's Little Italy on the Lower East Side, c. 1900
The construction of the New York City Subway, which opened in 1904, helped bind the new city together, as did additional bridges to Brooklyn. In the 1920s Manhattan experienced large arrivals of African-Americans as part of the Great Migration from the southern United States, and the Harlem Renaissance, part of a larger boom time in the Prohibition era that included new skyscrapers competing for the skyline. Manhattan's majority white ethnic group declined from 98.7% in 1900 to 58.3% by 1990.[62] On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village killed 146 garment workers, leading to overhauls of the city's fire department, building codes, and workplace regulations.
Despite the Great Depression, some of the world's tallest skyscrapers were completed in Manhattan during the 1930s, including numerous Art Deco masterpieces that are still part of the city's skyline, most notably the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the 30 Rockefeller Plaza.[63] Returning World War II veterans created a postwar economic boom, which led to the development of huge housing developments targeted at returning veterans, the largest being Peter Cooper Village-Stuyvesant Town, which opened in 1947.[64] In 1951–1952, the United Nations relocated to a new headquarters the East Side of Manhattan.[65][66] The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent protests by members of the gay community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. They are widely considered to constitute the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement[67][68] and the modern fight for LGBT rights.[69][70]
In the 1970s, job losses due to industrial restructuring caused New York City, including Manhattan, to suffer from economic problems and rising crime rates.[71] 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.[72] The 1980s saw a rebirth of Wall Street, and Manhattan reclaimed its role at the center of the worldwide financial industry. The 1980s also saw Manhattan at the heart of the AIDS crisis, with Greenwich Village at its epicenter.
By the 1990s, crime rates started to drop dramatically and the city once again became the destination of immigrants from around the world, joining with low interest rates and Wall Street bonuses to fuel the growth of the real estate market.[73] Important new sectors, such as Silicon Alley, emerged in Manhattan's economy.
21st century
See also: September 11 attacks
United Airlines Flight 175 hits the South Tower on September 11, 2001.
On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center were struck by hijacked aircraft and collapsed in the September 11 attacks launched by al-Qaeda terrorists. The collapse caused extensive damage to surrounding buildings and skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, and resulted in the deaths of 2,606 people, in addition to those on the planes. Since 2001, most of Lower Manhattan has been restored, although there has been controversy surrounding the rebuilding. In 2014, the new One World Trade Center, at 1,776 feet (541 m) and formerly known as the Freedom Tower, became the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.[74]
The Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan began on September 17, 2011, receiving global attention and spawning the Occupy movement against social and economic inequality worldwide.[75]
On October 29 and 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused extensive destruction in the borough, ravaging portions of Lower Manhattan with record-high storm surge from New York Harbor,[76] severe flooding, and high winds, causing power outages for hundreds of thousands of city residents[77] and leading to gasoline shortages[78] and disruption of mass transit systems.[79][80][81][82] 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.[83]
On October 31, 2017, a terrorist deliberately drove a truck down a bike path alongside the West Side Highway in Lower Manhattan, killing eight.[84]
Geography
See also: Geography of New York City
Satellite image of Manhattan, bounded by the Hudson River to the west, the Harlem River to the north, the East River to the east, and New York Harbor to the south, with rectangular Central Park prominently visible. Roosevelt Island, in the East River, belongs to Manhattan.
Detailed map of Manhattan in 2023, from OpenStreetMap
Location of Manhattan (in red) and the rest of New York City (in yellow)
Components
The borough consists of Manhattan Island, Marble Hill, and several small islands, including Randalls Island and Wards Island, and Roosevelt Island in the East River, and Governors Island and Liberty Island to the south in New York Harbor.[85]
According to the United States Census Bureau, New York County has a total area of 33.6 square miles (87 km2), of which 22.8 square miles (59 km2) is land and 10.8 square miles (28 km2) (32%) is water.[1] The northern segment of Upper Manhattan represents a geographic panhandle. Manhattan Island is 22.7 square miles (59 km2) in area, 13.4 miles (21.6 km) long and 2.3 miles (3.7 km) wide, at its widest (near 14th Street).[86]
Manhattan Island
Manhattan Island is loosely divided into Downtown (Lower Manhattan), Midtown (Midtown Manhattan), and Uptown (Upper Manhattan), with Fifth Avenue dividing Manhattan lengthwise into its East Side and West Side. Manhattan Island is bounded by the Hudson River to the west and the East River to the east. To the north, the Harlem River divides Manhattan Island from the Bronx and the mainland United States.
Early in the 19th century, landfill was used to expand Lower Manhattan from the natural Hudson shoreline at Greenwich Street to West Street.[87] When building the World Trade Center in 1968, 1.2 million cubic yards (917,000 m3) of material was excavated from the site.[88] Rather than being dumped at sea or in landfills, the fill material was used to expand the Manhattan shoreline across West Street, creating Battery Park City.[89] The result was a 700-foot (210 m) extension into the river, running six blocks or 1,484 feet (452 m), covering 92 acres (37 ha), providing a 1.2-mile (1.9 km) riverfront esplanade and over 30 acres (12 ha) of parks;[90] Hudson River Park was subsequently opened in stages beginning in 1998.[91] Little Island opened on the Hudson River in May 2021, connected to the western termini of 13th and 14th Streets by footbridges.[92]
Marble Hill
One neighborhood of New York County, Marble Hill, is contiguous with the U.S. mainland. Marble Hill at one time was part of Manhattan Island, but the Harlem River Ship Canal, dug in 1895 to improve navigation on the Harlem River, separated it from the remainder of Manhattan as an island between the Bronx and the remainder of Manhattan.[93] Before World War I, the section of the original Harlem River channel separating Marble Hill from the Bronx was filled in, and Marble Hill became part of the mainland.[94]
Marble Hill is one example of how Manhattan's land has been considerably altered by human intervention. The borough has seen substantial land reclamation along its waterfronts since Dutch colonial times, and much of the natural variation in its topography has been evened out.[95]
Smaller islands
See also: List of smaller islands in New York City
A tall green statue on an island in a harbor.
Liberty Island, an exclave of Manhattan, New York City, and New York state, that is surrounded by New Jersey waters
Within New York Harbor, there are three smaller islands:
Ellis Island, shared with New Jersey
Governors Island
Liberty Island
Other smaller islands, in the East River, include (from north to south):
Randalls and Wards Islands, joined by landfill
Mill Rock
Roosevelt Island
U Thant Island (legally Belmont Island)
Geology
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A schist outcropping in Central Park
The bedrock underlying much of Manhattan is a mica schist known as Manhattan schist[96] of the Manhattan Prong physiographic region. It is a strong, competent metamorphic rock that was produced when Pangaea formed. It is well suited for the foundations of tall buildings. In Central Park, outcrops of Manhattan schist occur; Rat Rock is one rather large example.[97][98][99]
Geologically, a predominant feature of the substrata of Manhattan is that the underlying bedrock base of the island rises considerably closer to the surface near Midtown Manhattan, dips down lower between 29th Street and Canal Street, then rises toward the surface again in Lower Manhattan. It has been widely believed that the depth to bedrock was the primary reason for the clustering of skyscrapers in the Midtown and Financial District areas, and their absence over the intervening territory between these two areas.[100][101] However, research has shown that economic factors played a bigger part in the locations of these skyscrapers.[102][103][104]
According to the United States Geological Survey, an updated analysis of seismic hazard in July 2014 revealed a "slightly lower hazard for tall buildings" in Manhattan than previously assessed. Scientists estimated this lessened risk based upon a lower likelihood than previously thought of slow shaking near New York City, which would be more likely to cause damage to taller structures from an earthquake in the vicinity of the city.[105]
Locations
Places adjacent to Manhattan
Bergen County,
New Jersey Bronx County
(The Bronx) Bronx County
(The Bronx)
Hudson County,
New Jersey
New York County
Queens County
(Queens)
Richmond County
(Staten Island) Kings County
(Brooklyn) Kings County
(Brooklyn)
National protected areas
African Burial Ground National Monument
Castle Clinton National Monument
Federal Hall National Memorial
General Grant National Memorial
Governors Island National Monument
Hamilton Grange National Memorial
Lower East Side Tenement National Historic Site
Statue of Liberty National Monument (part)
Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site
Neighborhoods
Main articles: Neighborhoods in New York City and List of Manhattan neighborhoods
The Empire State Building (in foreground) looking south from the top of Rockefeller Center with One World Trade Center (in background); the Midtown South Community Council acts as a civic caretaker for much of the neighborhood between the skyscrapers of Midtown and Lower Manhattan.
Manhattan's many neighborhoods are not named according to any particular convention, nor do they have official boundaries. Some are geographical (the Upper East Side), or ethnically descriptive (Little Italy). Others are acronyms, such as TriBeCa (for "TRIangle BElow CAnal Street") or SoHo ("SOuth of HOuston"), or the far more recent vintages NoLIta ("NOrth of Little ITAly").[106][107] and NoMad ("NOrth of MADison Square Park").[108][109][110] Harlem is a name from the Dutch colonial era after Haarlem, a city in the Netherlands.[111] Alphabet City comprises Avenues A, B, C, and D, to which its name refers. Some have simple folkloric names, such as Hell's Kitchen, alongside their more official but lesser used title (in this case, Clinton).
Some neighborhoods, such as SoHo, which is mixed use, are known for upscale shopping as well as residential use. Others, such as Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, Alphabet City and the East Village, have long been associated with the Bohemian subculture.[112] Chelsea is one of several Manhattan neighborhoods with large gay populations and has become a center of both the international art industry and New York's nightlife.[113] Chinatown has the highest concentration of people of Chinese descent outside of Asia.[114][115] Koreatown is roughly bounded by 6th and Madison Avenues,[116][117][118] between 31st and 33rd Streets, where Hangul signage is ubiquitous. Rose Hill features a growing number of Indian restaurants and spice shops along a stretch of Lexington Avenue between 25th and 30th Streets which has become known as Curry Hill.[119] Washington Heights in Uptown Manhattan is home to the largest Dominican immigrant community in the United States.[120] Harlem, also in Upper Manhattan, is the historical epicenter of African American culture. Since 2010, a Little Australia has emerged and is growing in Nolita, Lower Manhattan.[121]
In Manhattan, uptown means north (more precisely north-northeast, which is the direction the island and its street grid system are oriented) and downtown means south (south-southwest).[122] This usage differs from that of most American cities, where downtown refers to the central business district. Manhattan has two central business districts, the Financial District at the southern tip of the island, and Midtown Manhattan. The term uptown also refers to the northern part of Manhattan above 72nd Street and downtown to the southern portion below 14th Street,[123] with Midtown covering the area in between, though definitions can be fluid.
Fifth Avenue roughly bisects Manhattan Island and acts as the demarcation line for east/west designations (e.g., East 27th Street, West 42nd Street); street addresses start at Fifth Avenue and increase heading away from Fifth Avenue, at a rate of 100 per block on most streets.[123] South of Waverly Place, Fifth Avenue terminates and Broadway becomes the east/west demarcation line. Although the grid does start with 1st Street, just north of Houston Street (the southernmost street divided in west and east portions), the grid does not fully take hold until north of 14th Street, where nearly all east–west streets are numerically identified, which increase from south to north to 220th Street, the highest numbered street on the island. Streets in Midtown are usually one-way, with the few exceptions generally being the busiest cross-town thoroughfares (14th, 23rd, 34th, and 42nd Streets, for example), which are bidirectional across the width of Manhattan Island. Typically odd-numbered streets run west, while even-numbered streets run east.[86]
Climate
Central Park in autumn
Under the Köppen climate classification, using the 0 °C (32 °F) isotherm, New York City features both a humid subtropical climate (Cfa) and a humid continental climate (Dfa);[124] it is the northernmost major city on the North American continent with a humid subtropical climate. The city averages 234 days with at least some sunshine annually.[125] The city lies in the USDA 7b plant hardiness zone.[126]
Winters are cold and damp, and prevailing wind patterns that blow offshore temper the moderating effects of the Atlantic Ocean; yet the Atlantic and the partial shielding from colder air by the Appalachians keep the city warmer in the winter than inland North American cities at similar or lesser latitudes such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. The daily mean temperature in January, the area's coldest month, is 32.6 °F (0.3 °C);[127] temperatures usually drop to 10 °F (−12 °C) several times per winter,[127][128] and reach 60 °F (16 °C) several days in the coldest winter month.[127] Spring and autumn are unpredictable and can range from chilly to warm, although they are usually mild with low humidity. Summers are typically warm to hot and humid, with a daily mean temperature of 76.5 °F (24.7 °C) in July.[127] Nighttime conditions are often exacerbated by the urban heat island phenomenon, which causes heat absorbed during the day to be radiated back at night, raising temperatures by as much as 7 °F (4 °C) when winds are slow.[129] Daytime temperatures exceed 90 °F (32 °C) on average of 17 days each summer[130] and in some years exceed 100 °F (38 °C). Extreme temperatures have ranged from −15 °F (−26 °C), recorded on February 9, 1934, up to 106 °F (41 °C) on July 9, 1936.[130]
Manhattan receives 49.9 inches (1,270 mm) of precipitation annually, which is relatively evenly spread throughout the year. Average winter snowfall between 1981 and 2010 has been 25.8 inches (66 cm); this varies considerably from year to year.[130] Governors Island in New York Harbor is planned to host a US$1 billion research and education center with the intention of making New York City the global leader in addressing the climate crisis.[131]
vte
Climate data for New York (Belvedere Castle, Central Park), 1991–2020 normals,[b] extremes 1869–present[c]
Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year
Record high °F (°C) 72
(22) 78
(26) 86
(30) 96
(36) 99
(37) 101
(38) 106
(41) 104
(40) 102
(39) 94
(34) 84
(29) 75
(24) 106
(41)
Mean maximum °F (°C) 60.4
(15.8) 60.7
(15.9) 70.3
(21.3) 82.9
(28.3) 88.5
(31.4) 92.1
(33.4) 95.7
(35.4) 93.4
(34.1) 89.0
(31.7) 79.7
(26.5) 70.7
(21.5) 62.9
(17.2) 97.0
(36.1)
Average high °F (°C) 39.5
(4.2) 42.2
(5.7) 49.9
(9.9) 61.8
(16.6) 71.4
(21.9) 79.7
(26.5) 84.9
(29.4) 83.3
(28.5) 76.2
(24.6) 64.5
(18.1) 54.0
(12.2) 44.3
(6.8) 62.6
(17.0)
Daily mean °F (°C) 33.7
(0.9) 35.9
(2.2) 42.8
(6.0) 53.7
(12.1) 63.2
(17.3) 72.0
(22.2) 77.5
(25.3) 76.1
(24.5) 69.2
(20.7) 57.9
(14.4) 48.0
(8.9) 39.1
(3.9) 55.8
(13.2)
Average low °F (°C) 27.9
(−2.3) 29.5
(−1.4) 35.8
(2.1) 45.5
(7.5) 55.0
(12.8) 64.4
(18.0) 70.1
(21.2) 68.9
(20.5) 62.3
(16.8) 51.4
(10.8) 42.0
(5.6) 33.8
(1.0) 48.9
(9.4)
Mean minimum °F (°C) 9.8
(−12.3) 12.7
(−10.7) 19.7
(−6.8) 32.8
(0.4) 43.9
(6.6) 52.7
(11.5) 61.8
(16.6) 60.3
(15.7) 50.2
(10.1) 38.4
(3.6) 27.7
(−2.4) 18.0
(−7.8) 7.7
(−13.5)
Record low °F (°C) −6
(−21) −15
(−26) 3
(−16) 12
(−11) 32
(0) 44
(7) 52
(11) 50
(10) 39
(4) 28
(−2) 5
(−15) −13
(−25) −15
(−26)
Average precipitation inches (mm) 3.64
(92) 3.19
(81) 4.29
(109) 4.09
(104) 3.96
(101) 4.54
(115) 4.60
(117) 4.56
(116) 4.31
(109) 4.38
(111) 3.58
(91) 4.38
(111) 49.52
(1,258)
Average snowfall inches (cm) 8.8
(22) 10.1
(26) 5.0
(13) 0.4
(1.0) 0.0
(0.0) 0.0
(0.0) 0.0
(0.0) 0.0
(0.0) 0.0
(0.0) 0.1
(0.25) 0.5
(1.3) 4.9
(12) 29.8
(76)
Average precipitation days (≥ 0.01 in) 10.8 10.0 11.1 11.4 11.5 11.2 10.5 10.0 8.8 9.5 9.2 11.4 125.4
Average snowy days (≥ 0.1 in) 3.7 3.2 2.0 0.2 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.2 2.1 11.4
Average relative humidity (%) 61.5 60.2 58.5 55.3 62.7 65.2 64.2 66.0 67.8 65.6 64.6 64.1 63.0
Average dew point °F (°C) 18.0
(−7.8) 19.0
(−7.2) 25.9
(−3.4) 34.0
(1.1) 47.3
(8.5) 57.4
(14.1) 61.9
(16.6) 62.1
(16.7) 55.6
(13.1) 44.1
(6.7) 34.0
(1.1) 24.6
(−4.1) 40.3
(4.6)
Mean monthly sunshine hours 162.7 163.1 212.5 225.6 256.6 257.3 268.2 268.2 219.3 211.2 151.0 139.0 2,534.7
Percent possible sunshine 54 55 57 57 57 57 59 63 59 61 51 48 57
Average ultraviolet index 2 3 4 6 7 8 8 8 6 4 2 1 5
Source 1: NOAA (relative humidity and sun 1961–1990; dew point 1965–1984)[130][127][125]
Source 2: Weather Atlas[133]
See Climate of New York City for additional climate information from the outer boroughs.
Sea temperature data for New York[133]
Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year
Average sea
temperature °F (°C) 41.7
(5.4) 39.7
(4.3) 40.2
(4.5) 45.1
(7.3) 52.5
(11.4) 64.5
(18.1) 72.1
(22.3) 74.1
(23.4) 70.1
(21.2) 63.0
(17.2) 54.3
(12.4) 47.2
(8.4) 55.4
(13.0)
Boroughscape
Ten-mile Manhattan skyline panorama from 120th Street to the Battery, taken February 21, 2018, from across the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey.
Riverside ChurchTime Warner Center220 Central Park SouthCentral Park TowerOne57432 Park Avenue53W53Chrysler BuildingBank of America TowerConde Nast BuildingThe New York Times BuildingEmpire State BuildingManhattan Westa: 55 Hudson Yards, b: 35 Hudson Yards, c: 10 Hudson Yards, d: 15 Hudson Yards56 Leonard Street8 Spruce StreetWoolworth Building70 Pine Street30 Park Place40 Wall StreetThree World Trade CenterFour World Trade CenterOne World Trade Center
Demographics
Main article: Demographics of Manhattan
Looking at crowds down Broadway
Broadway in Midtown Manhattan. As of the 2020 U.S. census, Manhattan was the most densely populated municipality in the United States.
In 2020, 1,694,251 people lived in Manhattan. At the 2010 U.S. census, there were 1,585,873 people living in Manhattan, an increase of 3.2% since 2000. Since 2010, Manhattan's population was estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau to have increased 2.7% to 1,628,706 as of 2018, representing 19.5% of New York City's population of 8,336,817 and 8.4% of New York State's population of 19,745,289.[18][134] As of the 2020 census, the population density of New York County was 74,870.7 inhabitants per square mile (28,907.7/km2), the highest population density of any county in the United States.[18]
Racial composition 2020[135] 2010[136] 2000[137] 1990[138] 1950[138] 1900[138]
White 50.0% 57.4% 54.3% 58.3% 79.4% 97.8%
—Non-Hispanic 46.8% 48% 45.7% 48.9% n/a n/a
Black or African American 13.5% 15.6% 17.3% 22.0% 19.6% 2.0%
Hispanic or Latino (of any race) 23.8% 25.4% 27.1% 26.0% n/a n/a
Asian 13.1% 11.3% 9.4% 7.4% 0.8% 0.3%
Historical population
Manhattan is one of the highest-income places in the United States with a population greater than one million. As of 2023, Manhattan's cost of living was the highest in the United States.[141] Manhattan is also the United States county with the highest per capita income, being the sole county whose per capita income exceeded $100,000 in 2010.[142] However, from 2011–2015 Census data of New York County, the per capita income was recorded in 2015 dollars as $64,993, with the median household income at $72,871, and poverty at 17.6%.[143] In 2012, The New York Times reported that inequality was higher than in most developing countries, stating, "The wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites made more than 40 times what the lowest fifth reported, a widening gap (it was 38 times, the year before) surpassed by only a few developing countries".[144]
Religion
In 2010, the largest organized religious group in Manhattan was the Archdiocese of New York, with 323,325 Catholics worshiping at 109 parishes, followed by 64,000 Orthodox Jews with 77 congregations, an estimated 42,545 Muslims with 21 congregations, 42,502 non-denominational adherents with 54 congregations, 26,178 TEC Episcopalians with 46 congregations, 25,048 ABC-USA Baptists with 41 congregations, 24,536 Reform Jews with 10 congregations, 23,982 Mahayana Buddhists with 35 congregations, 10,503 PC-USA Presbyterians with 30 congregations, and 10,268 RCA Presbyterians with 10 congregations. Altogether, 44.0% of the population was claimed as members by religious congregations, although members of historically African-American denominations were underrepresented due to incomplete information.[145] In 2014, Manhattan had 703 religious organizations, the seventeenth most out of all US counties.[146] There is a large Buddhist temple in Manhattan located at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown.[147]
Languages
As of 2010, 59.98% (902,267) of Manhattan residents, aged five and older, spoke only English at home, while 23.07% (347,033) spoke Spanish, 5.33% (80,240) Chinese, 2.03% (30,567) French, 0.78% (11,776) Japanese, 0.77% (11,517) Russian, 0.72% (10,788) Korean, 0.70% (10,496) German, 0.66% (9,868) Italian, 0.64% (9,555) Hebrew, and 0.48% (7,158) spoke African languages at home. In total, 40.02% (602,058) of Manhattan's population, aged five and older, spoke a language other than English at home.[148]
As of 2015, 60.0% (927,650) of Manhattan residents, aged five and older, spoke only English at home, while 22.63% (350,112) spoke Spanish, 5.37% (83,013) Chinese, 2.21% (34,246) French, 0.85% (13,138) Korean, 0.72% (11,135) Russian, and 0.70% (10,766) Japanese. In total, 40.0% of Manhattan's population, aged five and older, spoke a language other than English at home.[149]
Landmarks and architecture
Main article: Architecture of New York City
See also: List of skyscrapers in New York City
Estonian House, a main center of Estonian culture among Estonian Americans
Points of interest on Manhattan Island include the American Museum of Natural History; the Battery; Broadway and the Theater District; Bryant Park; Central Park, Chinatown; the Chrysler Building; The Cloisters; Columbia University; Curry Hill; the Empire State Building; Flatiron Building; the Financial District (including the New York Stock Exchange Building; Wall Street; and the South Street Seaport); Grand Central Terminal; Greenwich Village (including New York University; Washington Square Arch; and Stonewall Inn); Harlem and Spanish Harlem; the High Line; Koreatown; Lincoln Center; Little Australia; Little Italy; Madison Square Garden; Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art); Penn Station, Port Authority Bus Terminal; Rockefeller Center (including Radio City Music Hall); Times Square; and the World Trade Center (including the National September 11 Museum and One World Trade Center).
There are also numerous iconic bridges across rivers that connect to Manhattan Island, as well as an emerging number of supertall skyscrapers. The Statue of Liberty rests on a pedestal on Liberty Island, an exclave of Manhattan, and part of Ellis Island is also an exclave of Manhattan. The borough has many energy-efficient, environmentally friendly office buildings, such as the Hearst Tower, the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center,[150] and the Bank of America Tower—the first skyscraper designed to attain a Platinum LEED Certification.[151][152]
Architectural history
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Alexander Turney Stewart on 9th Street in Manhattan in 1870
Many tall buildings have setbacks on their facade due to the 1916 Zoning Resolution, exemplified at Park Avenue and 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan.
The skyscraper, which has shaped Manhattan's distinctive skyline, has been closely associated with New York City's identity since the end of the 19th century. From 1890 to 1973, the title of world's tallest building resided continually in Manhattan (with a gap between 1894 and 1908, when the title was held by Philadelphia City Hall), with eight different buildings holding the title.[153] The New York World Building on Park Row, was the first to take the title in 1890, standing 309 feet (94 m) until 1955, when it was demolished to construct a new ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge.[154] The nearby Park Row Building, with its 29 stories standing 391 feet (119 m) high, became the world's tallest office building when it opened in 1899.[155] The 41-story Singer Building, constructed in 1908 as the headquarters of the eponymous sewing machine manufacturer, stood 612 feet (187 m) high until 1967, when it became the tallest building ever demolished.[156] The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, standing 700 feet (210 m) at the foot of Madison Avenue, wrested the title in 1909, with a tower reminiscent of St Mark's Campanile in Venice.[157] The Woolworth Building, and its distinctive Gothic architecture, took the title in 1913, topping off at 792 feet (241 m).[158] Structures such as the Equitable Building of 1915, which rises vertically forty stories from the sidewalk, prompted the passage of the 1916 Zoning Resolution, requiring new buildings to contain setbacks withdrawing progressively at a defined angle from the street as they rose, in order to preserve a view of the sky at street level.[159]
The Roaring Twenties saw three separate buildings pursuing the world's tallest title in the span of a year. As the stock market soared in the days before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, two developers publicly competed for the crown.[160] At 927 feet (283 m), 40 Wall Street, completed in May 1930 in only eleven months as the headquarters of the Bank of Manhattan, seemed to have secured the title.[161] At Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street, auto executive Walter Chrysler and his architect William Van Alen developed plans to build the structure's trademark 185-foot (56 m) spire in secret, pushing the Chrysler Building to 1,046 feet (319 m) and making it the tallest in the world when it was completed in 1929.[162] Both buildings were soon surpassed with the May 1931 completion of the 102-story Empire State Building with its Art Deco tower reaching 1,250 feet (380 m) at the top of the building. The 203-foot (62 m) high pinnacle was later added bringing the total height of the building to 1,453 ft (443 m).[163][164]
The former Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were located in Lower Manhattan. At 1,368 and 1,362 feet (417 and 415 m), the 110-story buildings were the world's tallest from 1972 until they were surpassed by the construction of the Willis Tower in 1974 (formerly known as the Sears Tower, located in Chicago).[165] One World Trade Center, a replacement for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, is currently the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.[166]
In 1961, the Pennsylvania Railroad unveiled plans to tear down the old Penn Station and replace it with a new Madison Square Garden and office building complex. 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.[167] Despite these efforts, demolition of the structure began in October 1963. The loss of Penn Station—called "an act of irresponsible public vandalism" by historian Lewis Mumford—led directly to the enactment in 1965 of a local law establishing the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which is responsible for preserving the "city's historic, aesthetic, and cultural heritage".[168] 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.[169] 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.[170]
Parkland
Central Park
Parkland composes 17.8% of the borough, covering a total of 2,686 acres (10.87 km2). The 843-acre (3.41 km2) Central Park, the largest park comprising 30% of Manhattan's parkland, is bordered on the north by West 110th Street (Central Park North), on the west by Eighth Avenue (Central Park West), on the south by West 59th Street (Central Park South), and on the east by Fifth Avenue. Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, offers extensive walking tracks, two ice-skating rinks, a wildlife sanctuary, and several lawns and sporting areas, as well as 21 playgrounds and a 6-mile (9.7 km) road from which automobile traffic is banned.[171] While much of the park looks natural, it is almost entirely landscaped: the construction of Central Park in the 1850s was one of the era's most massive public works projects, with some 20,000 workers crafting the topography to create the English-style pastoral landscape Olmsted and Vaux sought.[172]
The remaining 70% of Manhattan's parkland includes 204 playgrounds, 251 Greenstreets, 371 basketball courts, and many other amenities.[173] The next-largest park in Manhattan, the Hudson River Park, stretches 4.5 miles (7.2 km) on the Hudson River and comprises 550 acres (220 ha).[174] Other major parks include:[175]
Bowling Green
Bryant Park
City Hall Park
DeWitt Clinton Park
East River Greenway
Fort Tryon Park
Fort Washington Park
Harlem River Park
Holcombe Rucker Park
Imagination Playground
Inwood Hill Park
Isham Park
J. Hood Wright Park
Jackie Robinson Park
Madison Square Park
Marcus Garvey Park
Morningside Park
Randall's Island Park
Riverside Park
Sara D. Roosevelt Park
Seward Park
St. Nicholas Park
Stuyvesant Square
The Battery
The High Line
Thomas Jefferson Park
Tompkins Square Park
Union Square Park
Washington Square Park
Economy
Main article: Economy of New York City
By a significant margin, the New York Stock Exchange is the world's largest stock exchange; the market capitalization of its listed companies[176][177] is US$23.1 trillion as of April 2018, the largest of any stock exchange in the world[178]
Manhattan is the economic engine of New York City, with its 2.3 million workers in 2007 drawn from the entire New York metropolitan area accounting for almost two-thirds of all jobs in New York City.[179] In the first quarter of 2014, the average weekly wage in Manhattan (New York County) was $2,749, representing the highest total among large counties in the United States.[180] Manhattan's workforce is overwhelmingly focused on white collar professions, with manufacturing nearly extinct.[citation needed] Manhattan also has the highest per capita income of any county in the United States.
In 2010, Manhattan's daytime population was swelling to 3.94 million, with commuters adding a net 1.48 million people to the population, along with visitors, tourists, and commuting students. The commuter influx of 1.61 million workers coming into Manhattan was the largest of any county or city in the country,[181] and was more than triple the 480,000 commuters who headed into second-ranked Washington, D.C.[182]
Financial sector
Main article: Wall Street
The Financial District of Lower Manhattan, seen from Brooklyn
Manhattan's most important economic sector lies in its role as the headquarters for the U.S. financial industry, metonymously known as Wall Street. Manhattan is home to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), at 11 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, and the Nasdaq, now located at 4 Times Square in Midtown Manhattan, representing the world's largest and second-largest stock exchanges, respectively, when measured both by overall share trading value and by total market capitalization of their listed companies in 2013.[27] The NYSE American (formerly the American Stock Exchange, AMEX), New York Board of Trade, and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) are also located downtown. Financial technology (fintech) and cryptocurrency have emerged as more recent constituents of the financial sector as well as the tech sector.
Corporate sector
Manhattan contains over 520 million square feet (48,000,000 m2) of office space. During the COVID-19 pandemic, hybrid work prompted consideration of commercial-to-residential conversion in Manhattan.[183]
New York City is home to the most corporate headquarters of any city in the United States, the overwhelming majority based in Manhattan.[184] Manhattan contained over 520 million square feet (48.3 million m2) of office space in 2022,[185] making it the largest office market in the United States; while Midtown Manhattan, with over 400 million square feet (37.2 million m2) is the largest central business district in the world.[186] New York City's role as the top global center for the advertising industry is metonymously reflected as "Madison Avenue".
Tech and biotech
Further information: Tech companies in Manhattan, Biotech companies in Manhattan, Silicon Alley, and Tech:NYC
The Flatiron District, the birthplace and center of Silicon Alley[187]
Manhattan has driven New York's status as a top-tier global high technology hub.[188] Silicon Alley, once a metonym for the sphere encompassing the metropolitan region's high technology industries,[189] is no longer a relevant moniker as the city's tech environment has expanded dramatically both in location and in its scope. New York City's current tech sphere encompasses a universal array of applications involving artificial intelligence, the internet, new media, financial technology (fintech) and cryptocurrency, biotechnology, game design, and other fields within information technology that are supported by its entrepreneurship ecosystem and venture capital investments.As of 2014, New York City hosted 300,000 employees in the tech sector.[190][191] In 2015, Silicon Alley generated over US$7.3 billion in venture capital investment,[192] most based in Manhattan, as well as in Brooklyn, Queens, and elsewhere in the region. High technology startup companies and employment are growing in Manhattan and across New York City, bolstered by the city's emergence as a global node of creativity and entrepreneurship,[192] social tolerance,[193] and environmental sustainability,[194][195] as well as New York's position as the leading Internet hub and telecommunications center in North America, including its vicinity to several transatlantic fiber optic trunk lines, the city's intellectual capital, and its extensive outdoor wireless connectivity.[196] 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.[197] As of October 2014, New York City hosted 300,000 employees in the tech sector,[191] with a significant proportion in Manhattan. The technology sector has been expanding across Manhattan since 2010.[198]
The biotechnology sector is also growing in Manhattan based upon the city's strength in academic scientific research and public and commercial financial support. 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 New York City Economic Development Corporation's Early Stage Life Sciences Funding Initiative and venture capital partners, including Celgene, General Electric Ventures, and Eli Lilly, committed a minimum of US$100 million to help launch 15 to 20 ventures in life sciences and biotechnology.[199] In 2011, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had announced his choice of Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to build a US$2 billion graduate school of applied sciences on Roosevelt Island, Manhattan, with the goal of transforming New York City into the world's premier technology capital.[200][201][needs update]
Tourism
Main article: Tourism in New York City
Times Square is the hub of Broadway's theater district and a major Manhattan cultural venue with 50 million tourists annually, making it one of the world's most popular tourist destinations.[28]
Tourism is vital to Manhattan's economy, and the landmarks of Manhattan are the focus of New York City's tourists, enumerating an eighth consecutive annual record of approximately 62.8 million visitors in 2017.[202] According to The Broadway League, for the 2018–2019 season (which ended May 26, 2019) total attendance was 14,768,254 and Broadway shows had US$1,829,312,140 in grosses, with attendance up 9.5%, grosses up 10.3%, and playing weeks up 9.3%.[203]
Real estate
Real estate is a major force in Manhattan's economy. Manhattan has perennially been home to some of the nation's, as well as the world's, most valuable real estate, including the Time Warner Center, which had the highest-listed market value in the city in 2006 at US$1.1 billion,[204] to be subsequently surpassed in October 2014 by the Waldorf Astoria New York, which became the most expensive hotel ever sold after being purchased by the Anbang Insurance Group, based in China, for US$1.95 billion.[205] When 450 Park Avenue was sold on July 2, 2007, for US$510 million, about US$1,589 per square foot (US$17,104/m²), it broke the barely month-old record for an American office building of US$1,476 per square foot (US$15,887/m²) based on the sale of 660 Madison Avenue.[206] In 2014, Manhattan was home to six of the top ten zip codes in the United States by median housing price.[207] In 2019, the most expensive home sale ever in the United States occurred in Manhattan, at a selling price of US$238 million, for a 24,000-square-foot (2,200 m2) penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park,[208] while Central Park Tower, topped out at 1,550 feet (472 m) in 2019, is the world's tallest residential building, followed globally in height by 111 West 57th Street and 432 Park Avenue, both also located in Midtown Manhattan.
Manhattan had approximately 520 million square feet (48.1 million m²) of office space in 2013,[209] making it the largest office market in the United States.[210] Midtown Manhattan is the largest central business district in the nation based on office space,[211] while Lower Manhattan is the third-largest (after the Chicago Loop).[212][213]
As of the fourth quarter of 2021, the median value of homes in Manhattan was $1,306,208. It ranked second among US counties for highest median home value at the time, second to Nantucket.[214]
Media
Main articles: Media in New York City and New Yorkers in journalism
Manhattan has been described as the media capital of the world.[215][216] A significant array of media outlets and their journalists report about international, American, business, entertainment, and New York metropolitan area-related matters from Manhattan.
News
The headquarters of The New York Times at 620 Eighth Avenue
Manhattan is served by the major New York City daily news publications, including The New York Times, which has won the most Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and is considered the U.S. media's "newspaper of record";[217] the New York Daily News; and the New York Post, which are all headquartered in the borough. The nation's largest newspaper by circulation, The Wall Street Journal, is also based in Manhattan. Other daily newspapers include AM New York and The Villager. The New York Amsterdam News, based in Harlem, is one of the leading Black-owned weekly newspapers in the United States. 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.[218]
Television, radio, film
See also: List of films set in New York City and List of television shows set in New York City
The television industry developed in Manhattan and is a significant employer in the borough's economy. The four major American broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, as well as Univision, are all headquartered in Manhattan, as are many cable channels, including CNN, MSNBC, MTV, Fox News, HBO, and Comedy Central. In 1971, WLIB became New York City's first Black-owned radio station and began broadcasts geared toward the African-American community in 1949. WQHT, also known as Hot 97, claims to be the premier hip-hop station in the United States. WNYC, comprising an AM and FM signal, has the largest public radio audience in the nation and is the most-listened to commercial or non-commercial radio station in Manhattan.[219] WBAI, with news and information programming, is one of the few socialist radio stations operating in the United States.[citation needed]
The oldest public-access television cable TV channel in the United States is the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, founded in 1971, offers eclectic local programming that ranges from a jazz hour to discussion of labor issues to foreign language and religious programming.[220] NY1, Time Warner Cable's local news channel, is known for its beat coverage of City Hall and state politics.
Education
See also: Education in New York City, List of high schools in New York City, and List of colleges and universities in New York City
The notable architectural design of Butler Library at Columbia University, an Ivy League university in Manhattan[221]
Stuyvesant High School in Tribeca[222]
New York Public Library Main Branch at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue
Education in Manhattan is provided by a vast number of public and private institutions. Non-charter public schools in the borough are operated by the New York City Department of Education,[223] the largest public school system in the United States. Charter schools include Success Academy Harlem 1 through 5, Success Academy Upper West, and Public Prep.
Several notable New York City public high schools are located in Manhattan, including A. Philip Randolph Campus High School, Beacon High School, Stuyvesant High School, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, High School of Fashion Industries, Eleanor Roosevelt High School, NYC Lab School, Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, Hunter College High School, and High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College. Bard High School Early College, a hybrid school created by Bard College, serves students from around the city.
Many private preparatory schools are also situated in Manhattan, including the Upper East Side's Brearley School, Dalton School, Browning School, Spence School, Chapin School, Nightingale-Bamford School, Convent of the Sacred Heart, Hewitt School, Saint David's School, Loyola School, and Regis High School. The Upper West Side is home to the Collegiate School and Trinity School. The borough is also home to Manhattan Country School, Trevor Day School, Xavier High School and the United Nations International School.
Based on data from the 2011–2015 American Community Survey, 59.9% of Manhattan residents over age 25 have a bachelor's degree.[224] As of 2005, about 60% of residents were college graduates and some 25% had earned advanced degrees, giving Manhattan one of the nation's densest concentrations of highly educated people.[225]
Manhattan has various colleges and universities, including Columbia University (and its affiliate Barnard College), Cooper Union, Marymount Manhattan College, New York Institute of Technology, New York University (NYU), The Juilliard School, Pace University, Berkeley College, The New School, Yeshiva University, and a campus of Fordham University. Other schools include Bank Street College of Education, Boricua College, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Manhattan School of Music, Metropolitan College of New York, Parsons School of Design, School of Visual Arts, Touro College, and Union Theological Seminary. Several other private institutions maintain a Manhattan presence, among them Mercy College, St. John's University, Adelphi University, The King's College, and Pratt Institute. Cornell Tech, part of Cornell University, is developing on Roosevelt Island.
The City University of New York (CUNY), the municipal college system of New York City, is the largest urban university system in the United States, serving more than 226,000 degree students and a roughly equal number of adult, continuing and professional education students.[226] A third of college graduates in New York City graduate from CUNY, with the institution enrolling about half of all college students in New York City. CUNY senior colleges located in Manhattan include: Baruch College, City College of New York, Hunter College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the CUNY Graduate Center (graduate studies and doctorate granting institution). The only CUNY community college located in Manhattan is the Borough of Manhattan Community College. The State University of New York is represented by the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York State College of Optometry, and Stony Brook University – Manhattan.
Manhattan is a world center for training and education in medicine and the life sciences.[227] The city as a whole receives the second-highest amount of annual funding from the National Institutes of Health among all U.S. cities,[228] the bulk of which goes to Manhattan's research institutions, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Weill Cornell Medical College, and New York University School of Medicine.
Manhattan is served by the New York Public Library, which has the largest collection of any public library system in the country.[229] The five units of the Central Library—Mid-Manhattan Library, 53rd Street Library, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, and the Science, Industry and Business Library—are all located in Manhattan.[230] More than 35 other branch libraries are located in the borough.[231]
Culture
See also: Culture of New York City
Further information: Broadway theatre, LGBT culture in New York City, List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City, Music of New York City, Met Gala, New York Fashion Week, NYC Pride March, and Stonewall Riots
The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Manhattan is the borough most closely associated with New York City by non-residents; regionally, residents within the New York City metropolitan area, including natives of New York City's boroughs outside Manhattan, will often describe a trip to Manhattan as "going to the City".[232] Journalist Walt Whitman characterized the streets of Manhattan as being traversed by "hurrying, feverish, electric crowds".[233]
In 1912, about 20,000 workers, a quarter of them women, marched upon Washington Square Park to commemorate the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 workers on March 25, 1911. Many of the women wore fitted tucked-front blouses like those manufactured by the company, a clothing style that became the working woman's uniform and a symbol of women's liberation, reflecting the alliance of the labor and suffrage movements.[234]
Manhattan has been the scene of many important global and American cultural movements. The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s established the African-American literary canon in the United States and introduced writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Manhattan's visual art scene in the 1950s and 1960s was a center of the pop art movement, which gave birth to such giants as Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. The downtown pop art movement of the late 1970s included artist Andy Warhol and clubs like Serendipity 3 and Studio 54, where he socialized.
Broadway theatre is considered the highest professional form of theatre in the United States. Plays and musicals are staged in one of the 39 larger professional theatres with at least 500 seats, almost all in and around Times Square. Off-Broadway theatres feature productions in venues with 100–500 seats.[235][236] Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, anchoring Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is home to 12 influential arts organizations, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, and New York City Ballet, as well as the Vivian Beaumont Theater, the Juilliard School, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Alice Tully Hall. Performance artists displaying diverse skills are ubiquitous on the streets of Manhattan.
Manhattan is also home to some of the most extensive art collections in the world, both contemporary and classical art, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Frick Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum. The Upper East Side has many art galleries,[237][238] and the downtown neighborhood of Chelsea is known for its more than 200 art galleries that are home to modern art from both upcoming and established artists.[239][240] Many of the world's most lucrative art auctions are held in Manhattan.[241][242]
The Empire State Building displays the colors of the Rainbow Flag as an LGBT icon, top. The annual NYC Pride March in June (seen here in 2018) is the world's largest LGBT event, imaged below.[243][244]
Manhattan is the epicenter of LGBT culture and the central node of the LGBTQ+ sociopolitical ecosystem.[245] The borough is widely acclaimed as the cradle of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, with its inception at the June 1969 Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan – widely considered to constitute the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement[68][246][247] and the modern fight for LGBT rights in the United States.[69][248] Brian Silverman, the author of Frommer's New York City from $90 a Day, wrote the city has "one of the world's largest, loudest, and most powerful LGBT communities", and "Gay and lesbian culture is as much a part of New York's basic identity as yellow cabs, high-rise buildings, and Broadway theatre"—[249] radiating from this central hub, as LGBT travel guide Queer in the World states, "The fabulosity of Gay New York is unrivaled on Earth, and queer culture seeps into every corner of its five boroughs".[250] Multiple gay villages have developed, spanning the length of the borough from the Lower East Side, East Village, and Greenwich Village, through Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen, uptown to Morningside Heights.
The annual NYC Pride March (or gay pride parade) traverses southward down Fifth Avenue and ends at Greenwich Village; the Manhattan parade is the largest pride parade in the world, attracting tens of thousands of participants and millions of sidewalk spectators each June.[244][243] Stonewall 50 – WorldPride NYC 2019 was the largest international Pride celebration in history, produced by Heritage of Pride. The events were in partnership with the I ❤ NY program's LGBT division, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, with 150,000 participants and five million spectators attending in Manhattan.[251]
The borough is represented in several prominent idioms. The phrase New York minute is meant to convey an extremely short time such as an instant,[252] sometimes in hyperbolic form, as in "perhaps faster than you would believe is possible," referring to the rapid pace of life in Manhattan.[253][254] The expression "melting pot" was first popularly coined to describe the densely populated immigrant neighborhoods on the Lower East Side in Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot, which was an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet set in New York City in 1908.[255] The iconic Flatiron Building is said to have been the source of the phrase "23 skidoo" or scram, from what cops would shout at men who tried to get glimpses of women's dresses being blown up by the winds created by the triangular building.[256] The "Big Apple" dates back to the 1920s, when a reporter heard the term used by New Orleans stablehands to refer to New York City's horse racetracks and named his racing column "Around The Big Apple". Jazz musicians adopted the term to refer to the city as the world's jazz capital, and a 1970s ad campaign by the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau helped popularize the term.[257] Manhattan, Kansas, a city of 53,000 people,[258][importance?] was named by New York investors after the borough and is nicknamed the "little apple".[259]
Clockwise, from upper left: the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the world's largest parade;[260] the annual Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village, the world's largest Halloween parade, with millions of spectators annually, and with its roots in New York's queer community;[261] the annual Philippine Independence Day Parade, the largest outside the Philippines; and the ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts
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. The majority of higher profile parades in New York City are held in Manhattan. The primary orientation of the annual street parades is typically from north to south, marching along major avenues. The annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is the world's largest parade,[260] beginning alongside Central Park and processing southward to the flagship Macy's Herald Square store;[262] the parade is viewed on telecasts worldwide and draws millions of spectators in person.[260] Other notable parades including the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade in March, the New York City Pride Parade in June, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in October, and numerous parades commemorating the independence days of many nations. Ticker-tape parades celebrating championships won by sports teams as well as other heroic accomplishments march northward along the Canyon of Heroes on Broadway from Bowling Green to City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan. New York Fashion Week, held at various locations in Manhattan, is a high-profile semiannual event featuring models displaying the latest wardrobes created by prominent fashion designers worldwide in advance of these fashions proceeding to the retail marketplace.
Sports
The skating pond in Central Park in 1862
Madison Square Garden, home to the New York Rangers of the National Hockey League and the New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association
Manhattan is home to the NBA's New York Knicks and the NHL's New York Rangers, both of which play their home games at Madison Square Garden, the only major professional sports arena in the borough. The Garden was also home to the WNBA's New York Liberty through the 2017 season, but that team's primary home is now the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The New York Jets proposed a West Side Stadium for their home field, but the proposal was eventually defeated in June 2005, and they now play at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.[263]
While Manhattan does not currently have a professional baseball franchise, three of the four Major League Baseball teams to have played in New York City played in Manhattan. The original New York Giants played in the various incarnations of the Polo Grounds at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue from their inception in 1883—except for 1889, when they split their time between Jersey City, New Jersey and Staten Island, and when they played in Hilltop Park in 1911—until they headed to California with the Brooklyn Dodgers after the 1957 season.[264] The New York Yankees began their franchise as the Highlanders, named for Hilltop Park, where they played from their creation in 1903 until 1912. The team moved to the Polo Grounds with the 1913 season, where they were officially christened the New York Yankees, remaining there until they moved across the Harlem River in 1923 to Yankee Stadium.[265] The New York Mets played in the Polo Grounds in 1962 and 1963, their first two seasons, before Shea Stadium was completed in 1964.[266] After the Mets departed, the Polo Grounds was demolished in April 1964, replaced by public housing.[267][268]
The first national college-level basketball championship, the National Invitation Tournament, was held in New York in 1938 and remains in the city.[269] The New York Knicks started play in 1946 as one of the National Basketball Association's original teams, playing their first home games at the 69th Regiment Armory, before making Madison Square Garden their permanent home.[270] The New York Liberty of the WNBA shared the Garden with the Knicks from their creation in 1997 as one of the league's original eight teams through the 2017 season,[271] after which the team moved nearly all of its home schedule to White Plains in Westchester County.[272] Rucker Park in Harlem is a playground court, famed for its streetball style of play, where many NBA athletes have played in the summer league.[273]
Although both of New York City's football teams play today across the Hudson River in MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, both teams started out playing in the Polo Grounds. The New York Giants played side-by-side with their baseball namesakes from the time they entered the National Football League in 1925, until crossing over to Yankee Stadium in 1956.[274] The New York Jets, originally known as the Titans of New York, started out in 1960 at the Polo Grounds, staying there for four seasons before joining the Mets in Queens at Shea Stadium in 1964.[275]
The New York Rangers of the National Hockey League have played in the various locations of Madison Square Garden since the team's founding in the 1926–1927 season. The Rangers were predated by the New York Americans, who started play in the Garden the previous season, lasting until the team folded after the 1941–1942 NHL season, a season it played in the Garden as the Brooklyn Americans.[276]
The New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League played their home games at Downing Stadium for two seasons, starting in 1974. The playing pitch and facilities at Downing Stadium were in unsatisfactory condition, however, and as the team's popularity grew they too left for Yankee Stadium, and then Giants Stadium. The stadium was demolished in 2002 to make way for the $45 million, 4,754-seat Icahn Stadium, which includes an Olympic-standard 400-meter running track and, as part of Pelé's and the Cosmos' legacy, includes a FIFA-approved floodlit soccer stadium that hosts matches between the 48 youth teams of a Manhattan soccer club.[277][278]
Government
Main article: Government of New York City
Manhattan Municipal Building
Since New York City's consolidation in 1898, Manhattan has been governed by the New York City Charter, which has provided for a strong mayor–council system since its revision in 1989.[279] The centralized New York City government is responsible for public education, correctional institutions, libraries, public safety, recreational facilities, sanitation, water supply, and welfare services in Manhattan.
The office of Borough President was created in the consolidation of 1898 to balance centralization with local authority. Each borough president had a powerful administrative role derived from having a vote on the New York City Board of Estimate, which was responsible for creating and approving the city's budget and proposals for land use. In 1989, the Supreme Court of the United States declared the Board of Estimate unconstitutional because Brooklyn, the most populous borough, had no greater effective representation on the Board than Staten Island, the least populous borough, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause pursuant to the high court's 1964 "one man, one vote" decision.[280] Since 1990, the largely powerless Borough President has acted as an advocate for the borough at the mayoral agencies, the City Council, the New York state government, and corporations. Manhattan's current Borough President is Mark Levine, elected as a Democrat in November 2021. Levine replaced Gale Brewer, who went on to represent the sixth district of the New York City Council.
Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, is the District Attorney of New York County. Manhattan has ten City Council members, the third largest contingent among the five boroughs. It also has twelve administrative districts, each served by a local Community Board. Community Boards are representative bodies that field complaints and serve as advocates for local residents.
As the host of the United Nations, the borough is home to the world's largest international consular corps, comprising 105 consulates, consulates general and honorary consulates.[281] It is also the home of New York City Hall, the seat of New York City government housing the Mayor of New York City and the New York City Council. The mayor's staff and thirteen municipal agencies are located in the nearby Manhattan Municipal Building, completed in 1914, one of the largest governmental buildings in the world.[282]
Politics
See also: Community boards of Manhattan
¶ The presidential election results below for the years 1876–1912 are not strictly comparable with the earlier and later ones because New York County included the West Bronx after 1874 and all of what is now the Borough of the Bronx (Bronx County, New York) from 1895 until The Bronx became a separate borough in 1914.
United States presidential election results for New York County, New York[283][284][285][excessive detail?]
Year Republican / Whig Democratic Third party
No. % No. % No. %
2020 85,185 12.21% 603,040 86.42% 9,588 1.37%
2016 64,930 9.71% 579,013 86.56% 24,997 3.74%
2012 89,559 14.92% 502,674 83.74% 8,058 1.34%
2008 89,949 13.47% 572,370 85.70% 5,566 0.83%
2004 107,405 16.73% 526,765 82.06% 7,781 1.21%
2000 82,113 14.38% 454,523 79.60% 34,370 6.02%
1996 67,839 13.76% 394,131 79.96% 30,929 6.27%
1992 84,501 15.88% 416,142 78.20% 31,475 5.92%
1988 115,927 22.89% 385,675 76.14% 4,949 0.98%
1984 144,281 27.39% 379,521 72.06% 2,869 0.54%
1980 115,911 26.23% 275,742 62.40% 50,245 11.37%
1976 117,702 25.54% 337,438 73.22% 5,698 1.24%
1972 178,515 33.38% 354,326 66.25% 2,022 0.38%
1968 135,458 25.59% 370,806 70.04% 23,128 4.37%
1964 120,125 19.20% 503,848 80.52% 1,746 0.28%
1960 217,271 34.19% 414,902 65.28% 3,394 0.53%
1956 300,004 44.26% 377,856 55.74% 0 0.00%
1952 300,284 39.30% 446,727 58.47% 16,974 2.22%
1948 241,752 32.75% 380,310 51.51% 116,208 15.74%
1944 258,650 33.47% 509,263 65.90% 4,864 0.63%
1940 292,480 37.59% 478,153 61.45% 7,466 0.96%
1936 174,299 24.51% 517,134 72.71% 19,820 2.79%
1932 157,014 27.78% 378,077 66.89% 30,114 5.33%
1928 186,396 35.74% 317,227 60.82% 17,935 3.44%
1924 190,871 41.20% 183,249 39.55% 89,206 19.25%
1920 275,013 59.22% 135,249 29.12% 54,158 11.66%
1916 113,254 42.65% 139,547 52.55% 12,759 4.80%
1912 63,107 18.15% 166,157 47.79% 118,391 34.05%
1908 154,958 44.71% 160,261 46.24% 31,393 9.06%
1904 155,003 42.11% 189,712 51.54% 23,357 6.35%
1900 153,001 44.16% 181,786 52.47% 11,700 3.38%
1896 156,359 50.73% 135,624 44.00% 16,249 5.27%
1892 98,967 34.73% 175,267 61.50% 10,750 3.77%
1888 106,922 39.20% 162,735 59.67% 3,076 1.13%
1884 90,095 39.54% 133,222 58.47% 4,530 1.99%
1880 81,730 39.79% 123,015 59.90% 636 0.31%
1876 58,561 34.17% 112,530 65.66% 289 0.17%
1872 54,676 41.27% 77,814 58.73% 0 0.00%
1868 47,738 30.59% 108,316 69.41% 0 0.00%
1864 36,681 33.23% 73,709 66.77% 0 0.00%
1860 33,290 34.83% 62,293 65.17% 0 0.00%
1856 17,771 22.32% 41,913 52.65% 19,922 25.03%
1852 23,124 39.98% 34,280 59.27% 436 0.75%
1848 29,070 54.51% 18,973 35.57% 5,290 9.92%
1844 26,385 48.15% 28,296 51.64% 117 0.21%
1840 20,958 48.69% 21,936 50.96% 153 0.36%
1836 16,348 48.42% 17,417 51.58% 0 0.00%
1832 12,506 40.97% 18,020 59.03% 0 0.00%
1828 9,638 38.44% 15,435 61.56% 0 0.00%
James A. Farley Post Office
The Democratic Party holds most public offices. Registered Republicans are a minority in the borough, constituting 9.88% of the electorate as of April 2016. Registered Republicans are more than 20% of the electorate only in the neighborhoods of the Upper East Side and the Financial District as of 2016. Democrats accounted for 68.41% of those registered to vote, while 17.94% of voters were unaffiliated.[286][287]
No Republican has won the presidential election in Manhattan since 1924, when Calvin Coolidge won a plurality of the New York County vote over Democrat John W. Davis, 41.20%–39.55%. Warren G. Harding was the most recent Republican presidential candidate to win a majority of the Manhattan vote, with 59.22% of the 1920 vote.[citation needed] In the 2004 presidential election, Democrat John Kerry received 82.1% of the vote in Manhattan and Republican George W. Bush received 16.7%.[288][importance?] The borough is the most important source of funding for presidential campaigns in the United States; in 2004, it was home to six of the top seven ZIP codes in the nation for political contributions.[289] The top ZIP code, 10021 on the Upper East Side, generated the most money for the United States presidential election for all presidential candidates, including both Kerry and Bush during the 2004 election.[290][needs update]
Representatives in the U.S. Congress
In 2018, four Democrats represented Manhattan in the United States House of Representatives.[291]
Nydia Velázquez (first elected in 1992) represents New York's 7th congressional district, which includes the Lower East Side and Alphabet City. The district also covers central and western Brooklyn and a small part of Queens.[291][292][293]
Jerry Nadler (first elected in 1992) represents New York's 10th congressional district, which includes the West Side neighborhoods of Battery Park City, Chelsea, Chinatown, the Financial District, Greenwich Village, Hell's Kitchen, SoHo, Tribeca, and the Upper West Side. The district also covers southwestern Brooklyn.[291][294][295]
Carolyn Maloney (first elected in 1992) represents New York's 12th congressional district, which includes the East Side neighborhoods of Gramercy Park, Kips Bay, Midtown Manhattan, Murray Hill, Roosevelt Island, Turtle Bay, Upper East Side, and most of the Lower East Side and the East Village. The district also covers western Queens.[291][296][297]
Adriano Espaillat (first elected in 2016) represents New York's 13th congressional district, which includes the Upper Manhattan neighborhoods of East Harlem, Harlem, Inwood, Marble Hill, Washington Heights, and portions of Morningside Heights, as well as part of the northwest Bronx.[291][298][299]
Federal offices
The United States Postal Service operates post offices in Manhattan. The James Farley Post Office at 421 Eighth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, between 31st Street and 33rd Street, is New York City's main post office.[300] Both the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit are located in Lower Manhattan's Foley Square, and the U.S. Attorney and other federal offices and agencies maintain locations in that area.
Crime and public safety
Main article: Crime in New York City
An 1885 sketch of Five Points
Starting in the mid-19th century, the United States became a magnet for immigrants seeking to escape poverty in their home countries. After arriving in New York, many new arrivals ended up living in squalor in the slums of the Five Points neighborhood, an area between Broadway and the Bowery, northeast of New York City Hall. By the 1820s, the area was home to many gambling dens and brothels, and was known as a dangerous place to go. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited the area and was appalled at the horrendous living conditions he had seen.[301] The area was so notorious that it even caught the attention of Abraham Lincoln, who visited the area before his Cooper Union speech in 1860.[302] The predominantly Irish Five Points Gang was one of the country's first major organized crime entities.
As Italian immigration grew in the early 20th century many joined ethnic gangs, including Al Capone, who got his start in crime with the Five Points Gang.[303] The Mafia (also known as Cosa Nostra) first developed in the mid-19th century in Sicily and spread to the East Coast of the United States during the late 19th century following waves of Sicilian and Southern Italian emigration. Lucky Luciano established Cosa Nostra in Manhattan, forming alliances with other criminal enterprises, including the Jewish mob, led by Meyer Lansky, the leading Jewish gangster of that period.[304] From 1920 to 1933, Prohibition helped create a thriving black market in liquor, upon which the Mafia was quick to capitalize.[304]
New York City as a whole experienced a sharp increase in crime during the post-war period.[305] The murder rate in Manhattan hit an all-time high of 42 murders per 100,000 residents in 1979.[306] Manhattan retained the highest murder rate in the city until 1985 when it was surpassed by the Bronx. Most serious violent crime has been historically concentrated in Upper Manhattan and the Lower East Side, though robbery in particular was a major quality of life concern throughout the borough. Through the 1990s and 2000s, levels of violent crime in Manhattan plummeted to levels not seen since the 1950s.[307]
Today crime rates in most of Lower Manhattan, Midtown, the Upper East Side, and the Upper West Side are consistent with other major city centers in the United States. However, crime rates remain high in the Upper Manhattan neighborhoods of East Harlem, Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, and NYCHA developments across the borough despite significant reductions. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, there has been an increase in violent crime, particularly in Upper Manhattan.[308]
Housing
Tenement houses in 1936
At the time of its construction, London Terrace in Chelsea was the largest apartment building in the world.
During Manhattan's early history, wood construction and poor access to water supplies left the city vulnerable to fires. In 1776, shortly after the Continental Army evacuated Manhattan and left it to the British, a massive fire broke out destroying one-third of the city and some 500 houses.[309]
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. Tenements were usually five stories high, constructed on the then-typical 25 by 100 feet (7.6 by 30.5 m) lots, with "cockroach landlords" exploiting the new immigrants.[310][311] By 1929, stricter fire codes and the increased use of elevators in residential buildings, were the impetus behind a new housing code that effectively ended the tenement as a form of new construction, though many tenement buildings survive today on the East Side of the borough.[311] Conversely, there were also areas with luxury apartment developments, the first of which was the Dakota on the Upper West Side.[312]
Manhattan offers a wide array of public (NYCHA) and private housing options. Affordable rental and co-operative housing units throughout the borough were created under the Mitchell–Lama Housing Program. There were 852,575 housing units in 2013[18] at an average density of 37,345 units per square mile (14,419/km2). As of 2003, only 20.3% of Manhattan residents lived in owner-occupied housing, the second-lowest rate of all counties in the nation, behind the Bronx.[313] Although the city of New York has the highest average cost for rent in the United States, it simultaneously hosts a higher average of income per capita. Because of this, rent is a lower percentage of annual income than in several other American cities.[314]
Manhattan's real estate market for luxury housing continues to be among the most expensive in the world,[315] and Manhattan residential property continues to have the highest sale price per square foot in the United States.[20] Manhattan's apartments cost $1,773 per square foot ($19,080/m2), compared to San Francisco housing at $1,185 per square foot ($12,760/m2), Boston housing at $751 per square foot ($8,080/m2), and Los Angeles housing at $451 per square foot ($4,850/m2).[316]
Infrastructure
Transportation
See also: Transportation in New York City
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Public transportation
Grand Central Terminal, a National Historic Landmark
Ferries departing Battery Park City Terminal and helicopters flying above Manhattan
The Staten Island Ferry, seen from the Battery, crosses Upper New York Bay, providing free public transportation between Staten Island and Manhattan.
Manhattan is unique in the U.S. for intense use of public transportation and lack of private car ownership. While 88% of Americans nationwide drive to their jobs, with only 5% using public transport, mass transit is the dominant form of travel for residents of Manhattan, with 72% of borough residents using public transport to get to work, while only 18% drove.[317][318] According to the 2000 United States Census, 77.5% of Manhattan households do not own a car.[319] In 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a congestion pricing system to regulate entering Manhattan south of 60th Street, but the state legislature rejected the proposal.[320]
The New York City Subway, the largest subway system in the world by number of stations, is the primary means of travel within the city, linking every borough except Staten Island. There are 151 subway stations in Manhattan, out of the 472 stations.[321] A second subway, the PATH system, connects six stations in Manhattan to northern New Jersey. Passengers pay fares with pay-per-ride MetroCards, which are valid on all city buses and subways, as well as on PATH trains.[322][323] Commuter rail services operating to and from Manhattan are the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), which connects Manhattan and other New York City boroughs to Long Island; the Metro-North Railroad, which connects Manhattan to Upstate New York and Southwestern Connecticut; and NJ Transit trains, which run to various points in New Jersey.
The US$11.1 billion East Side Access project, which brings LIRR trains to Grand Central Terminal, opened in 2023; this project utilized a pre-existing train tunnel beneath the East River, connecting the East Side of Manhattan with Long Island City, Queens.[324][325] Four multi-billion-dollar projects were completed in the mid-2010s: the $1.4 billion Fulton Center in November 2014,[326] the $2.4 billion 7 Subway Extension in September 2015,[327] the $4 billion World Trade Center Transportation Hub in March 2016,[328][329] and Phase 1 of the $4.5 billion Second Avenue Subway in January 2017.[330][331]
MTA New York City Transit offers a wide variety of local buses within Manhattan under the brand New York City Bus. An extensive network of express bus routes serves commuters and other travelers heading into Manhattan.[332] The bus system served 784 million passengers citywide in 2011, placing the bus system's ridership as the highest in the nation, and more than double the ridership of the second-place Los Angeles system.[333]
The Roosevelt Island Tramway, one of two commuter cable car systems in North America, takes commuters between Roosevelt Island and Manhattan in less than five minutes, and has been serving the island since 1978.[334][335]
The Staten Island Ferry, which runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, annually carries over 21 million passengers on the 5.2-mile (8.4 km) run between Manhattan and Staten Island. Each weekday, five vessels transport about 65,000 passengers on 109 boat trips.[336][337] The ferry has been fare-free since 1997.[338] In February 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city government would begin NYC Ferry to extend ferry transportation to traditionally underserved communities in the city.[339][340] The first routes of NYC Ferry opened in 2017.[341][342] All of the system's routes have termini in Manhattan, and the Lower East Side and Soundview routes also have intermediate stops on the East River.[343]
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. They are the two busiest rail stations in the United States. About one-third of users of mass transit and two-thirds of railway passengers in the country live in New York and its suburbs.[344] Amtrak provides inter-city passenger rail service from Penn Station to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.; Upstate New York and New England; cross-Canadian border service to Toronto and Montreal; and destinations in the Southern and Midwestern United States.
Major highways
I-78
I-95
I-278
I-478
I-495
US 9
NY 9A
NY 495
Taxis
Main article: Taxis of New York City
New York's iconic yellow taxicabs, which number 13,087 citywide and must have a medallion authorizing the pickup of street hails, are ubiquitous in the borough.[345] Various private vehicle for hire companies provide significant competition for taxicab drivers in Manhattan.[346]
Bicycles
Main article: Cycling in New York City
According to the government of New York City, Manhattan had 19,676 bicycle commuters in 2017, roughly doubling from its total of 9,613 in 2012.[347]
Streets and roads
See also: List of numbered streets in Manhattan and List of eponymous streets in New York City
The Brooklyn Bridge (on right) and Manhattan Bridge (on left), two of three bridges that connect Lower Manhattan with Brooklyn over the East River.
Eighth Avenue, looking northward ("Uptown"), in the rain; most streets and avenues in Manhattan's grid plan incorporate a one-way traffic configuration.
Tourists observing Manhattanhenge on July 12, 2016
The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 called for twelve numbered avenues running north and south roughly parallel to the shore of the Hudson River, each 100 feet (30 m) wide, with First Avenue on the east side and Twelfth Avenue on the west side. There are several intermittent avenues east of First Avenue, including four additional lettered avenues running from Avenue A eastward to Avenue D in an area now known as Alphabet City in Manhattan's East Village. The numbered streets in Manhattan run east–west, and are generally 60 feet (18 m) wide, with about 200 feet (61 m) between each pair of streets. With each combined street and block adding up to about 260 feet (79 m), there are almost exactly 20 blocks per mile. The typical block in Manhattan is 250 by 600 feet (76 by 183 m). The address algorithm of Manhattan refers to the formulas used to estimate the closest east–west cross street for building numbers on north–south avenues.
According to the original Commissioner's Plan, there were 155 numbered crosstown streets,[348] but later the grid was extended up to the northernmost corner of Manhattan, where the last numbered street is 220th Street. Moreover, the numbering system continues even in the Bronx, north of Manhattan, despite the fact that the grid plan is not as regular in that borough, whose last numbered street is 263rd Street.[349] Fifteen crosstown streets were designated as 100 feet (30 m) wide, including 34th, 42nd, 57th and 125th Streets,[350] which became some of the borough's most significant transportation and shopping venues. Broadway is the most notable of many exceptions to the grid, starting at Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan and continuing north into the Bronx at Manhattan's northern tip. In much of Midtown Manhattan, Broadway runs at a diagonal to the grid, creating major named intersections at Union Square (Park Avenue South/Fourth Avenue and 14th Street), Madison Square (Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street), Herald Square (Sixth Avenue and 34th Street), Times Square (Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street), and Columbus Circle (Eighth Avenue/Central Park West and 59th Street).
"Crosstown traffic" refers primarily to vehicular traffic between Manhattan's East Side and West Side. The trip is notoriously frustrating for drivers because of heavy congestion on narrow local streets laid out by the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, 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. Proposals in the mid-1900s to build express roads through the city's densest neighborhoods, namely the Mid-Manhattan Expressway and Lower Manhattan Expressway, did not go forward. Unlike the rest of the United States, New York State prohibits right or left turns on red in cities with a population greater than one million, to reduce traffic collisions and increase pedestrian safety. In New York City, therefore, all turns at red lights are illegal unless a sign permitting such maneuvers is present, significantly shaping traffic patterns in Manhattan.[351]
Another consequence of the strict grid plan of most of Manhattan, and the grid's skew of approximately 28.9 degrees, is a phenomenon sometimes referred to as Manhattanhenge (by analogy with Stonehenge).[352] On separate occasions in late May and early July, the sunset is aligned with the street grid lines, with the result that the sun is visible at or near the western horizon from street level.[352][353] A similar phenomenon occurs with the sunrise in January and December.
The FDR Drive and Harlem River Drive, both designed by controversial New York master planner Robert Moses,[354] comprise a single, long limited-access parkway skirting the east side of Manhattan along the East River and Harlem River south of Dyckman Street. The Henry Hudson Parkway is the corresponding parkway on the West Side north of 57th Street.
River crossings
Ferry service departing Battery Park City Ferry Terminal for Paulus Hook in New Jersey
Being primarily an island, Manhattan is linked to New York City's outer boroughs by numerous bridges, of various sizes. Manhattan has fixed highway connections with New Jersey to its west by way of the George Washington Bridge, the Holland Tunnel, and the Lincoln Tunnel, and to three of the four other New York City boroughs—the Bronx to the northeast, and Brooklyn and Queens (both on Long Island) to the east and south. Its only direct connection with the fifth New York City borough, Staten Island, is the Staten Island Ferry across New York Harbor, which is free of charge. The ferry terminal is located near Battery Park at Manhattan's southern tip. It is also possible to travel on land to Staten Island by way of Brooklyn, via the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.
The 14-lane George Washington Bridge, the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge,[355][356] connects Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan to Bergen County in New Jersey. There are numerous bridges to the Bronx across the Harlem River, and five (listed north to south)—the Triborough (known officially as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge), Ed Koch Queensboro (also known as the 59th Street Bridge), Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges—that cross the East River to connect Manhattan to Long Island.
Several tunnels also link Manhattan Island to New York City's outer boroughs and New Jersey. The Lincoln Tunnel, which carries 120,000 vehicles a day under the Hudson River between New Jersey and Midtown Manhattan, is the busiest vehicular tunnel in the world.[357] 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. The Holland Tunnel, connecting Lower Manhattan to Jersey City, New Jersey, was the world's first mechanically ventilated vehicular tunnel.[358] 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;[359] President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first person to drive through it.[360] The Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel runs underneath Battery Park and connects the Financial District at the southern tip of Manhattan to Red Hook in Brooklyn.
Several ferry services operate between New Jersey and Manhattan.[361] These ferries mainly serve midtown (at W. 39th St.), Battery Park City (WFC at Brookfield Place), and Wall Street (Pier 11).
Heliports
Manhattan has three public heliports: the East 34th Street Heliport (also known as the Atlantic Metroport) at East 34th Street, owned by New York City and run by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC); the Port Authority Downtown Manhattan/Wall Street Heliport, owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and run by the NYCEDC; and the West 30th Street Heliport, a privately owned heliport owned by the Hudson River Park Trust.[362] US Helicopter offered regularly scheduled helicopter service connecting the Downtown Manhattan Heliport with John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens and Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, before going out of business in 2009.[363]
Utilities
Gas and electric service is provided by Consolidated Edison to all of Manhattan. Con Edison's electric business traces its roots back to Thomas Edison's Edison Electric Illuminating Company, the first investor-owned electric utility. The company started service on September 4, 1882, using one generator to provide 110 volts direct current (DC) to 59 customers with 800 light bulbs, in a one-square-mile area of Lower Manhattan from his Pearl Street Station.[364][excessive detail?] Con Edison operates the world's largest district steam system, which consists of 105 miles (169 km) of steam pipes, providing steam for heating, hot water, and air conditioning[365] by some 1,800 Manhattan customers.[366] Cable service is provided by Time Warner Cable and telephone service is provided by Verizon Communications, although AT&T is available as well.
Manhattan witnessed the doubling of the natural gas supply delivered to the borough when a new gas pipeline opened on November 1, 2013.[367]
The New York City Department of Sanitation is responsible for garbage removal.[368] The bulk of the city's trash ultimately 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.[369] A small amount of trash processed at transfer sites in New Jersey is sometimes incinerated at waste-to-energy facilities. Like New York City, New Jersey and much of Greater New York relies on exporting its trash.
New York City has the largest clean-air diesel-hybrid and compressed natural gas bus fleet, which also operates in Manhattan, in the country. It also has some of the first hybrid taxis, most of which operate in Manhattan.[370]
Health care
Main article: List of hospitals in New York City § Manhattan
There are many hospitals in Manhattan, including two of the 25 largest in the United States (as of 2017):[371]
Bellevue Hospital
Lenox Hill Hospital
Lower Manhattan Hospital
Metropolitan Hospital Center
Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital
Mount Sinai Hospital
NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital
NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem
NYU Langone Medical Center
Water purity and availability
Main articles: Food and water in New York City and New York City water supply system
New York City is supplied with drinking water by the protected Catskill Mountains watershed.[372] As a result of the watershed's integrity and undisturbed natural water filtration system, New York is one of only four major cities in the United States the majority of whose drinking water is pure enough not to require purification by water treatment plants.[373] The Croton Watershed north of the city is undergoing construction of a US$3.2 billion water purification plant to augment New York City's water supply by an estimated 290 million gallons daily, representing a greater than 20% addition to the city's current availability of water.[374] Water comes to Manhattan through the tunnels 1 and 2, completed in 1917 and 1935, and in future through Tunnel No. 3, begun in 1970.[375]
See also
LGBT portal
World portal
flag United States portal
flag New York (state) portal
flag New York City portal
History of New York City
List of Manhattan neighborhoods
List of people from Manhattan
Manhattanhenge
Manhattanization
Manhattoe
National Register of Historic Places listings in Manhattan
I haven’t visited any other photographers’ archives, and had a hazy idea that I’d be walking into a spacious library, perhaps with mobile shelves on rails and a controlled climate. This turned out to be somewhat inaccurate: the Orkin/Engel archives are housed in a narrow room, perhaps eight by twenty feet, with materials piled on high shelves and other available surfaces. “Obviously I have the work in archival boxes, and I have good insurance,” Engel told me. “Anything else is expensive. I don’t know anyone who has the resources for climate control.”
Mary Engel at the Orkin/Engel Archives
When Orkin died in 1985, following a battle with cancer, Mary Engel was in her twenties. At first, she resisted the idea of managing her mother’s archive full-time: “It was too intense,” she said. But after a while, she realized that years of helping her mother—along with her experience as an advertising assistant at ARTnews magazine and in the agent training program at William Morris—was the perfect preparation for the job. “I thought, why represent all these crazy actors and writers?” she said. “Let me just represent my mom.”
It wasn’t easy in the beginning, though. Engel got some advice from Doon Arbus, who manages the estate of her mother Diane Arbus, but often found she was learning on the job. “How do you decide how much to license an image for?” she said. She would sometimes charge too little for a print, or send out a vintage print for reproduction, which was a mistake considering how valuable vintage prints would later become.
Orkin’s most famous image—one you’ve surely seen, even if you don’t know who took it—is An American Girl in Italy, 1951. In it, a statuesque, dark-haired beauty saunters down a street in Florence, while men on either side ogle and call out to her. A document of its time, the image contrasts the self-assurance of a gutsy woman with the cheeky appreciation of a group of underemployed men.
An American Girl in Italy, 1951, (c) Ruth Orkin, courtesy of the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive
The subject of the photograph, Ninalee Craig, met Orkin in Florence in 1951, when Orkin was on her way back from a LIFE assignment in Israel. “We were two young, carefree women, playing with the idea of a woman traveling alone,” Craig recently told the Guardian’s column That’s me in the picture. Though feminists have read sexual harassment into the image, Craig and Engel resist that interpretation. “My expression is not one of distress, that is just how I stalked around the city,” Craig remembered.
Ruth with camera, 1947, courtesy of the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive
Orkin, too, was adventurous from a young age. It was a treat to look through some of her old materials at the archive, like the album she made about the cross-country cycle ride she did in 1939, when she was seventeen. “She had chutzpah,” Engel told me. “I don’t know why her parents let her go on that trip at seventeen, but they did—I think they just realized, she was who she was.”
Eventually, this free spirit did settle down. She married fellow-photographer Morris Engel, who had critiqued her images in a class, and the two became creative collaborators. Their debut movie, Little Fugitive, is credited as being the first independent American movie. “Everything was made by studios then, but this was truly independent—there was my dad, my mom and one other person,” Mary Engel recalled. To shoot on location in Coney Island, Engel built a handheld lightweight 35mm movie camera, allowing them to work fast and spontaneously. Years later, directors Truffaut and Cassavetes would copy their methods.
Some of Ruth Orkin’s portraits of celebrities
For a while after she married Engel, Orkin maintained an active career outside the home. Following her love of music, she went to Tanglewood and photographed luminaries like Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, which grew into assignments photographing Hollywood stars and other celebrities. Twenty-five of these portraits sit, framed, on a board on Engel’s office desk.
Inevitably, though, once the couple had children, Orkin took on more domestic work (it was the 1950s, after all). In the Orkin-inspired chapter of her 2012 novel Eight Girls Taking Pictures, author Whitney Otto vividly imagines the journey made from globetrotting photojournalist to mother. “Some days it shamed her to want to be anywhere but home making jelly sandwiches and reading the same books that she had read a thousand times,” Otto writes. Drawn to her window, the Orkin character (here called Miri Marx) watches “the pedestrians and the sky, the trees, and the way countless windows lit up, wondering what was going on behind them.”
In the novel, as in real life, this watching leads to series of photographs that become a book called A World Through My Window, which symbolizes both the limitations imposed on women and Marx/Orkin’s ability to creatively subvert them. Seeing an exhibition of the work, an older female photographer in the novel understands that under its quietness lies a political statement. “The men only see what we do as sweet, sentimental, missing the meaning entirely as they view us as women who make photographs in our spare time,” she remarks.
As this page from an early scrapbook shows, Ruth Orkin was curious from a young age
Engel said that, although her mother sometimes felt restricted by domestic responsibilities, she was a wonderful parent nonetheless. “She was into being a mother; she was around. I couldn’t do this job, spend all this time with her work, if I hadn’t had a real connection with her.” Engel also had a great connection with her father, who died in 2005. One of her favorite images in the archive shows her at age five, looking up at her dad and mimicking his actions as he shaves in front of a mirror.
Morris and Mary Shaving. Courtesy of the Morris Engel Archive
These days, in addition to managing both her parents’ archives, Engel also runs the American Photography Archives Group (APAG), a resource and support group for people who own or manage privately-held photography archives, which she founded in order to help people like herself who have inherited photographers’ archives. “So many of our members work full-time, and although getting bequeathed an archive is a wonderful legacy, it’s a huge responsibility,” she said. APAG offers regular meetings, seminars with experts, and online resources to help guide individuals through the intricacies of owning an archive.
For Engel, who has made archive management her career, the weight of responsibility is balanced by the satisfaction of seeing her parents’ work preserved and loved. It can be a hard business to run, she said, but she tries to approach it with her mother’s can-do spirit. “I remember, we’d go out on the street and she’d stop someone and say, I’m a photographer and you’re fascinating, can I take your picture?” she told me. “It embarrassed me at the time. But now, when I’m out in the world, I try to have that same confidence.”
I’m ashamed that I’d never heard of the films of Morris Engel until just recently, given how wonderful and influential they are. Francois Truffaut said that the movies of the French New Wave would never have existed if their directors hadn’t had the example of Engel to follow, and the same can pretty clearly be said about John Cassavetes and similar American auteurs.
It soothes my ego just a touch to note that even my most cinephilic friends had also not heard of him.
Today’s Pic is the publicity shot for Weddings and Babies, the last of the three films that Engel made, all between 1953 and 1960 and all in collaboration with his wife the street photographer Ruth Orkin. (Engel too spent most of his career as a photojournalist.) It may be my favorite of his films. It tells the poignant story of a perpetually about-to-be-married couple who run a tiny weddings-and-babies photo studio in Little Italy in New York, and make extra money by filming the street life around them.
As in all of Engel’s films, he gives the streets of New York as important a role as any of his human characters. The gorgeous chaos he wanders through is wonderful to watch, and painful, too, from the vantage point of our ever more corporate, antiseptic and Dallas-ized city. Engel’s New York is made extra present because he films its streets with a handheld 35mm camera that he helped design. The cinematographers of the French New Wave owed some of their own hand-holding to him.
Engel’s human characters are also amazing. In Weddings and Babies there’s one old woman with dementia who, despite barely uttering a single line, is utterly compelling. That must be because she’s almost certainly more-or-less playing herself.
A few of Engel’s actors were pros, sometimes even well-known ones. But a lot of them were untrained, asked to improvise their way into their roles. Again, Truffaut and his pals were given extra license to cast “ordinary” people in their films because Engel had done it first.
There are flaws in Engel’s art – he was figuring it out as he went, and sometimes fell back on Hollywood sentiment. (His films’ scores are painfully full of it, despite the occasional moment of jazzy modernism.)
Post-WWII American independent cinema pioneer Morris Engel co-directed 1953 cinéma vérité-inspired classic Little Fugitive
More than any other post-World War II filmmaker, Morris Engel deserves the title of “father of the (non-avant-garde) American independent cinema.” The case rests on a single movie: The cinéma vérité-inspired, Coney Island-set runaway boy’s tale Little Fugitive, a 1953 feature that, whether directly or indirectly, became one of the most influential motion pictures ever made.
Of course, Little Fugitive wasn’t created in a cinematic vacuum. Morris Engel himself had been clearly influenced by predecessors in the United States and elsewhere. Among them:
- Robert Flaherty’s faux documentary (“docufiction”) Louisiana Story (1948) and Sidney Meyers’ Academy Award-nominated naturalistic documentary The Quiet One (1949) – both centered on young boys.
- The Italian neorealist movement, minus the socially conscious themes, possibly in addition to Luciano Emmer’s Sunday in August / Domenica d’agosto (1950), a portrait of disparate people spending the day at the beach in Ostia, just outside of Rome.
- Silent/dawn of the sound era releases like F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), which, however stylized and studio-bound, features a lengthy, plotless mid-section partly set at an amusement park; Paul Fejos’ Lonesome (1928), a thematically simple but technically ambitious, Coney Island-set love story; and Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer’s slice-of-life, Berlin-set People on Sunday / Menschen am Sonntag (1930).
Below is a brief overview of Morris Engle’s Little Fugitive and its lasting impact.
From photojournalist to filmmaker
Born in Brooklyn on April 8, 1918, at a young age Morris Engel began working as a bank clerk to help support his widowed mother. In 1936, he joined the Photo League, which combined the art of photography with social awareness, later landing a job as a photojournalist at the liberal New York City daily PM.
During World War II, Engel worked as a combat photographer for the U.S. Navy, being present at the D-Day Normandy landing. After the war, he returned to PM, where fellow photographer and future A Clockwork Orange director Stanley Kubrick became a friend, and worked on assignments for name publications like Collier’s and McCall’s.
Engel had become acquainted with filmmaking while helping out photographer Paul Strand create the pro-union documentary/fiction mix Native Land, released in 1942. His chance to finally make his own movie would materialize once he and fellow WWII combat photographer Charles Woodruff developed a portable 35mm camera.
The light, compact device prevented jittery images without the need for a tripod, at the same time giving its user the ability to film people without being noticed. Just as importantly, Engel would be able to make his own professional-caliber motion picture on a small budget and with a skeleton crew.
Little Fugitive: A big-city boy’s cinéma vérité story
Morris Engel conceived Little Fugitive with photographer Ruth Orkin, who became his wife during the 1952 shooting of the film, and former PM colleague Raymond Abrashkin (billed as Ray Ashley). The trio was credited for the film’s direction and story, with Abrashkin/Ashley named the author of the actual screenplay.
Engel and Abrashkin also wore producer hats, while Orkin shared editing duties with Lester Troob (who doubled as sound/music supervisor in his sole screen credit). Future Emmy nominee Eddy Manson (the DuPont Show of the Month episode “Harvey,” 1957) was responsible for the low-key, mood-enhancing harmonica score. Along the lines of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan, nonprofessionals were cast in the lead roles.
The simple plot – if it can be called that – revolves around a seven-year-old boy (Richie Andrusco, in his only film appearance) who runs away from home after mistakenly believing he has shot dead his 11-year-old brother (Richard Brewster, also in his film debut/swan song). With a little grocery money in his pocket, the boy eventually finds himself immersed in the sights and sounds of Coney Island.
Little Fugitive was produced for a reported $30,000 (one 1954 source pegged its cost at $87,000), raised from friends. Engel shot the film himself, with his portable camera strapped to his shoulder. Sound and dialogue were added in post-production.
Little Fugitive vs. Hollywood ‘realism’
Little Fugitive was hardly the first postwar American feature to take the action far away from Hollywood studio lots. At least partly influenced by Italian neorealism, Jules Dassin had filmed the cop drama The Naked City (1948) in the streets of New York while Elia Kazan had shot the thriller Panic in the Streets (1950) on location in New Orleans.
Yet The Naked City, Panic in the Streets, and other such “naturalistic” Hollywood productions were also traditional big-studio fare, featuring formal storylines, name actors, studio-schooled behind-the-scenes talent, and sizable budgets.
In that regard, the cheap, independently made, marque-nameless, loosely threaded Little Fugitive was a unique product that would require “specialty” handling.
That job fell to Polish-born indie distributor Joseph Burstyn, who previously had, at times in partnership with Arthur Mayer, brought to the United States European imports such as Jean Renoir’s slice-of-life A Day in the Country, and the neorealist works of Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan) and Roberto Rossellini (Open City, the polemical L’Amore).
Through Burstyn’s efforts, Little Fugitive was screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival, where it was one of the recipients of that year’s Silver Lion.[1]
‘Photographer’s triumph’
As expected, Little Fugitive didn’t break any box office records. Certainly not in a year heralding the arrival of CinemaScope (The Robe, How to Marry a Millionaire), the expansion of 3D (Kiss Me Kate, House of Wax), and the release of sumptuous standard-format color productions (Shane, Mogambo, Salome), all-star prestige titles (From Here to Eternity, Julius Caesar), and saucy comedies (The Moon Is Blue, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).
But unlike some of its bigger-budget competitors, the modest big-city boy’s tale was warmly received, even if with caveats in some quarters. Here’s the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther:
Not unexpected Oscar nomination
Little Fugitive was named one of the National Board of Review’s top ten films, while Raymond Abrashkin’s all-but-plotless screenplay became a Writers Guild of America Award contender for the year’s Best Written American Drama. (Abrashkin/Ashley lost to Daniel Taradash for From Here to Eternity.)
Additionally, in early 1954 Little Fugitive earned an Academy Award nomination in the Best Motion Picture Story category. That was likely not a major surprise; in previous years, both Louisiana Story and The Quiet One had also been shortlisted for their “story.” (The latter in the “Best Story and Screenplay” category.)
The winner turned out to be another tale about a runaway and an exemplar of slick Hollywood filmmaking: Paramount’s Roman Holiday, which traces the romantic adventures of a young princess (Best Actress Audrey Hepburn) as she promenades incognito throughout Rome.[2]
Little Fugitive influence: John Cassavetes + François Truffaut
In a 1960 interview with The New Yorker’s Lillian Ross, French New Wave filmmaker François Truffaut affirmed: “Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie Little Fugitive.”
All hyperbole aside, Little Fugitive’s no-frills, no-stars, little-to-no-plot approach to narrative cinema did exert a marked influence on filmmakers around the world.
In the United States, the most notable example among Morris Engel’s successors is John Cassavetes. Shot with a handheld 16mm camera in New York City, his first feature, Shadows, came out in 1958.
However, in contrast to Engel, Cassavetes managed to keep cranking out movies over the ensuing three decades, receiving Oscar nominations for Faces (Best Original screenplay, 1968) and A Woman Under the Influence (Best Director, 1974)[3] – thus impacting more generations of filmmakers, from Martin Scorsese (“It was after seeing [Shadows], I realized we could make films … nothing was forbidden anymore”) to Jim Jarmusch (“There’s a particular feeling I get when I’m about to see one of your films – an anticipation”).
Elsewhere, besides François Truffaut (The 400 Blows, 1959), the sway of Little Fugitive could be felt in the works of, among others, Albert Lamorisse (The Red Balloon, 1956), Jean-Luc Godard (whose 1960 crime drama Breathless was shot with a handheld camera through the streets of Paris), and, more recently, Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, 1995).
Regarding Truffaut’s claim that Little Fugitive was the Nouvelle Vague’s originator, Engel would counter decades later in a New York Times interview: “It’s ridiculous, but I am not going to argue.”
Lovers and Lollipops & Weddings and Babies
In spite of Little Fugitive’s critical success and awards season mentions, funding for other Morris Engel projects would prove hard to come by. Probably not helping matters was distributor Joseph Burstyn’s death in 1953.
Hollywood was out of the question. “It was exactly the kind of work that doesn’t appeal to me,” he would tell the Times. “I am happy I didn’t go.”
Engel would direct only two more features in the 1950s, the first one a joint directorial effort with Ruth Orkin:
- Lovers and Lollipops (1956), the story of a widowed New York fashion model (Lori March) whose seven-year-old daughter (Cathy Dunn, in her only film appearance) disturbs her budding liaison with an engineer (Gerald S. O’Loughlin, in his film debut), recently returned from South America.
- Weddings and Babies (shot in 1957; self-distributed in 1960), supposed to be the first feature “made with a portable camera with synchronous sound attachment” and the only Engel effort to boast the presence of an actual movie star, Viveca Lindfors (Night Unto Night, Moonfleet). The partly autobiographical plot revolves around the relationship between a business-oriented, New York City-based wedding photographer (John Myhers) and his Swedish-born, family-oriented girlfriend/assistant (Lindfors).
Later years
I Need a Ride to California (1968) was Morris Engel’s first color effort, and his fourth and final feature film. This tale of a young California woman enmeshed with troubled East Village hippies would remain undistributed until its October 2019 premiere at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.
In the 1990s, Engel worked on a couple of full-length video projects: A Little Bit Pregnant (1994), in which an eight-year-old boy discovers the differences between the sexes, and Camellia (1998), centered on a two-year-old girl.
“People are always hunting for something,” he told the Times in 2002. “You only need one piece, one good movie. That’s enough fulfillment for a man’s life.”
Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin remained married until her death at age 63 in 1985. Engel died at age 86 in March 2005 in New York City.
“Morris Engel: Little Fugitive Director” notes
Six Silver Lion winners
[1] The Golden Lion was not awarded in 1953. Little Fugitive shared the Silver Lion with the following:
- Marcel Carné’s The Adulteress / Thérèse Raquin.
- Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni.
- Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu.
- John Huston’s Moulin Rouge.
- Aleksandr Ptushko’s Sadko.
Dalton Trumbo front
[2] Ian McLellan Hunter, a front for blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, was originally credited for the Roman Holiday “story.” Hunter was also credited for the screenplay, alongside John Dighton.
William Wyler directed the romantic comedy; Gregory Peck and Eddie Albert were Audrey Hepburn’s costars.
Big-studio actor & director John Cassavetes
[3] Unlike Morris Engel, John Cassavetes also acted in mainstream Hollywood productions – e.g., Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City (1957), Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). He was a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee for Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967).
Also unlike Morris Engel, who had no interest in working within Hollywood’s studio system, John Cassavetes would occasionally direct studio films.
Examples include United Artists’ Stanley Kramer-produced A Child Is Waiting (1962), starring Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland, and Columbia Pictures’ Gloria (1980), starring Cassavetes’ wife and frequent collaborator Gena Rowlands.
Morris Engel
This article is more than 18 years old
American film director who heralded the French new wave
Ronald Bergan
Tue 10 May 2005 20.19 EDT
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Interviewed in the New Yorker in the 1960s, the French director François Truffaut said that the French new wave "would never have come into being if it had not been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie The Little Fugitive".
Engel, who has died of cancer aged 86, could also claim to have influenced John Cassavetes, who followed Engel's 1953 example of independent filmmaking with his $40,000 picture, Shadows, in 1959, the same year that Truffaut delivered The 400 Blows, leading the way to the American independent movement.
It is easy today to see how The Little Fugitive could have been one of the progenitors of the French new wave. Like the Truffaut film, it is told from a young boy's perspective, and has a freewheeling quality derived from the use of an innovative, handheld 35mm camera.
The camera was attached by a single strap to the shoulder, allowing Engel to shoot unnoticed in crowds - from inside a small space, such as a baseball batting cage, to a spinning amusement park ride - while maintaining a steady image indistinguishable from the professional, tripod-style cameras. In this sense, it could be seen as a prototype for the steadicam.
The Little Fugitive focuses on seven-year-old Joey (Richie Andrusco), a Brooklyn street kid who is tricked into thinking he has fatally shot his 11-year-old brother. Convinced by the brother's friends to run away because of the fear of facing the death penalty, Joey steals the family grocery money and takes the subway to the funfairs of Coney Island.
This vivid, boy's-eye view, in which he goes on rides, plays games, eats endless amounts of hot dogs and cotton candy, is a tour de force of cinéma-vérité.
"The concept of making the film almost unnoticed among crowds seemed to work," Engel said at the time. What spurred the technique was the fact that he and his wife, Ruth Orkin, co-credited as directors on the film, were previously renowned as still photographers accustomed to taking their pictures unseen.
Engel was born in Brooklyn, growing up as a street kid much like Joey. He became fascinated with photography at the age of nine and, in his teens, signed up for a $6 course at the Photo League and began roaming the streets of New York with his camera. He also met the leftwing photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand, with whom he worked as assistant on Native Land (made in 1938, but released in 1942), about the need for social revolution in America.
Engel was less radical thematically in his work, though his photos and films are an insider's view of working-class life in New York. During the second world war, he enlisted in the US navy and was assigned to Combat Photo Unit No 8, photographing the D-day landings. After the war, he took pictures for magazines such as Collier's and McCall's. In 1952, while working on The Little Fugitive, he married Orkin, whom he had met in the 1930s.
The daughter of the silent movie star Mary Ruby, Orkin had almost as great a reputation as a magazine photographer as her husband. Their first feature, which cost $30,000, won the silver lion award at the Venice Film Festival, and was nominated for an Oscar as best screenplay.
They followed the Little Fugitive with Lovers And Lollipops (1955) and Weddings And Babies (1958), making up a New York trilogy. Lovers And Lollipops focused on a seven-year-old girl and her relationship with her widowed mother and the woman's photographer boyfriend. The child (Cathy Dunn) gave a wonderfully naturalistic performance, and the set pieces, especially at the Statue of Liberty, had a refreshing quality.
In Weddings And Babies, Engel and Orkin used direct sound for the first time, lending the film an even more spontaneous feel. Unlike in their previous movies, they used professional actors, with the Swedish-born Viveca Lindfors playing the fiancee of a photographer struggling to make enough money to marry her.
Though these three films do not amount to a great output, their reputation and influence have been enormous. After Orkin's death from cancer in 1985, Engel made two video documentaries, A Little Bit Pregnant (1993) and Camellia (1998).
He is survived by a son and daughter.
· Morris Engel, photographer and filmmaker, born April 8 1918; died March 5 2005
here’s a scene halfway through 1958’s Weddings and Babies, the third feature by photographer turned filmmaker Morris Engel, that captures the essence of this dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker’s brief but vivid oeuvre. Al (John Myhers), an aspiring filmmaker and the current frustrated owner of a modest photography studio in Little Italy, has just invested in a spiffy new movie camera that can be operated by hand and record synchronous sound (the same camera, incidentally, that the film was shot on). Skirting other pressing matters, he takes it for a debut spin around the neighborhood, and Engel responds to his protagonist’s gleeful, wordless observation with a candid awe of his own in a sequence that plays like an homage to the spirited high of capturing life through a camera. On several occasions, as Al glimpses through the viewfinder, Engel cuts to approximations of his field of view, momentarily implying that filmmaker and subject have become one.
This self-effacing submission to subject and environment is key to Engel’s films. Primarily known for his unadorned snapshots of New York City street life, a practice that established him as a mainstay of the Photo League and the city’s thriving pre- and post-war photography scenes, Engel, like Al, turned his sights to the potential of amateur filmmaking technology and scored a runaway hit with his 1953 feature debut, Little Fugitive. Co-directed with his wife and fellow photographer, Ruth Orkin, and Ray Ashley, the film is a shaggy day-in-the-life portrait of a wide-eyed seven-year-old, Joey (Richie Andrusco), who, thinking that his older brother, Lennie (Richard Brewster), is dead after a cruel prank, ends up having the best day of his young life. While his single mother (Winifred Cushing) is out of town, Joey wanders off to Coney Island, and the film directs all its attention to the boy breathlessly hopscotching between carnival attractions, suggesting a puppy being enticed in all directions.
Little Fugitive made a substantial mark in large part because of its charming modesty. Shot for just $30,000 on a handheld 35mm camera that Engel jerry-rigged himself for an efficient documentary-style workflow that John Cassavetes would co-opt six years later, the film won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and caught the attention of François Truffaut, who would later credit it with kickstarting the French New Wave. While Engel appreciated such worldly acclaim—and rode it to an Oscar screenwriting nomination (shared with Orkin and Ashley) and a box office gross that quadrupled the film’s budget—his passion and attention ultimately remained on his home turf, and the three subsequent independent narrative features that he produced bring the same rapt urban observation on display in Little Fugitive to bear on other Big Apple neighborhoods. Whatever their other merits, Engel’s films are, above all, perceptive street-level time capsules of a city, capturing the lives of ordinary working New Yorkers and the textures of their environment with an intimacy and affection that was clearly informed by his lived-in familiarity of the day-to-day happenings of the city.
The Upper West Side is the backdrop for 1956’s Lovers and Lollipops, building on a conversance with the Central Park-adjacent streets that Engel and Orkin called home for decades. Like Little Fugitive, the film has a child and a single mother at its core, but here the filmmakers balance the focus, exploring an increasingly fraught mother-daughter relationship. Ann (Lori March) is dating Larry (Gerald O’Loughlin), and her daughter, Peggy (Cathy Dunn), is growing jealous. Engel and Orkin privilege neither the stubborn kid nor her increasingly exasperated mother. One delicately observed scene after another touches on a different facet of this evolving dynamic, with Peggy turning on a dime from obnoxious neediness to withdrawn confusion and Ann struggling to maintain composure as she attempts to negotiate her love for her daughter and her strengthening romance. Even the well-mannered Larry emerges as a complex figure; initially gentle and accommodating, he eventually reveals an impatience and callousness as his plans and projections don’t so easily pan out.
YouTube video
Both Little Fugitive and Lovers and Lollipops were shot without synchronized sound, giving their dialogue scenes an ungainly quality—an issue that presents itself more often in the latter film, which centers much of its dramatic action on Ann’s humble living room. True to their photographic backgrounds, however, Engel and Orkin thrive on sequences of pure action and observation, where an instinct for placing the camera in the right place at the right time rings tension, humor, or tenderness out of any given moment. Little Fugitive is a montage-oriented film; rarely do any of its scenes last longer than 30 seconds, and it generates a ping-ponging rhythm in the alternation between shots of carnival rides and landscape shots juxtaposing Joey’s smallness against the unfamiliar hustle-bustle of the world around him. Lovers and Lollipops gestures toward a more dynamic mise-en-scéne, often letting tensions within a single shot play out across longer durations—an idea charmingly orchestrated in a scene of mischief-making at MoMA that evokes the multi-plane visual comedy of Jacques Tati.
Engel, sitting solo in the director’s chair, would take yet another formal leap with Weddings and Babies, for which he was able to utilize sync-sound recording thanks to a development for his handheld camera made possible by technician Otto Popelka. The long, plainly staged one-on-ones between Al and his girlfriend, Bea (Viveca Lindfors), that constitute the film’s emotional core offer a blueprint for so many scenes of domestic strife in American independent movies, confidently making the case for an artisanal cinema of tortured faces against white walls. Engel’s artistic zenith, Weddings and Babies finds Al in a moment of crisis. He’s tired of his uninspiring job shooting hallmark moments and wants to graduate to a life of caméra-stylo self-determination, while Bea, eyeing a more committed married life, is trying to find her place in that fantasy, and Al’s lonely mother (Chiarina Barile, an elderly Italian immigrant whose earthy presence is a testament to Engel’s gift for casting nonprofessionals) awaits death in a nearby nursing home. Gracefully handling these interlocking challenges would require maturity and self-sacrifice, and Al is simply not up to the task.
Engel’s overarching subject is the child within, an innocence he repeatedly links to both photography and movies. Nearly all of his protagonists wield cameras at one point or another, and nearly all of them also harbor an obsession with American westerns: Joey and Peggy both carry cap guns and long for the glow of the television screen, while Al speaks fondly of his encounters with dubbed cowboy pictures back in his native Italy. In Weddings and Babies, Al’s inability to shed this childlike wonder is inseparable from his inability to make any extra-personal commitments, and all of this is increasingly regarded by Engel with a tragic fatalism. Flanked by images of loneliness, with compositions often entrapping people in corners of rooms or wide-open spaces, the film culminates in a desolate climax set in the Staten Island cemetery where Al’s father is buried, and where his incompatible psychological burdens converge, setting the stage for an ending in which nothing is resolved or certain. Al ends up trudging down a church aisle that’s photographed from a high angle to suggest a dark tunnel—the same tunnel that his mother traversed earlier toward an equally discouraging future.
After Weddings and Babies, Engel’s own future was anything but laid out. He subsisted exclusively outside the film industry for a decade to respectable acclaim but little in the way of financial ballast. He made four documentary shorts throughout the ’60s before closing the books—temporarily, at least, for he’d direct two more documentaries in the ’90s—on his filmmaking career with 1968’s I Need a Ride to California. For unknown reasons, Engel never released the film, but despite a meandering structure and some technical blemishes, it’s hardly the failed experiment that fate would imply. Switching to vibrant color film and adopting the era’s cinematic fashions (non-linear storytelling, jarring editing, and playful self-reflexivity), the film might have made the impression of a fusty bid for relevance if not for Engel’s compassionate alignment with the youthful dreamers on screen.
Where Engel’s prior films were all heavily soundtrack-driven—“Home on the Range,” “Oh, My Darling Clementine,” and “Here Comes the Bride,” interpreted on various solo instruments, act as the themes for Little Fugitive, Lovers and Lollipops, and Weddings and Babies, respectively—I Need a Ride to California is a veritable jukebox film, filling nearly crevice of its runtime with bargain approximations of the era’s hippie folk (composers include Mark Barkan, Don Oriolo, Jim Lyons and Rolf Barnes). These jangly, wistful sounds—one track is fittingly titled “Through the Eyes of a Child”—underscore a smattering of scenes in the life of Lilly Shell, a barefooted bohemian playing herself in a freeform docudrama set in Greenwich Village. I Need a Ride to California opens with Lilly waxing poetic on the very film we’re about to see, arguing in her airy way that all actors ultimately play themselves, and that films should embrace the drama of the everyday. To a nearly formless degree, I Need a Ride to California does just that, free-associatively cutting between Lilly’s flings with different men and her happy-go-lucky strolls through the Lower East Side, camera always at the ready.
In her reckless abandon, the bright-eyed Lilly recalls seven-year-old Joey spinning around on all those Coney Island rides in Little Fugitive, only in I Need a Ride to California Engel takes greater pains to break the spell with harbingers of a darker reality: unsatisfactory boyfriends, a fleeting glimpse of a heroin needle, and, in the film’s shockingly misguided conclusion, a pair of rapists. Dark shadows such as these feel intrusive in Engel’s otherwise sunny filmography, and at the director’s best, he casts them subtly and pointedly, as in the shot of Joey reaching deep into his pockets to find his coin supply drained in Little Fugitive, or the heartbreaking montages of Al’s somnambulant mother plodding down the lively streets of Little Italy in Weddings and Babies. In moments like these, Engel betrays a deep-seated awareness of the inherent contradiction of life: that drudging reality is often irreconcilable with youthful spirit. Cinema, however, offered Engel a place to defy this inconvenient truth.