Early days and colonial rule
Before the arrival of European explorers, Native Americans populated the area now encompassing New York City. In 1524, 32 years after Christopher Columbus had sailed to the New World, Giovanni da Verrazano , an Italian in the service of the French King Francis I, arrived in New York Harbor. In 1609 Henry Hudson , an Englishman employed by the Dutch East India Company, landed at Manhattan and sailed his ship upriver as far as Albany. The Dutch established a trading post at the most northerly point Hudson had reached, Fort Nassau. In 1624, four years after the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed to Massachusetts, thirty families left Holland to become New York's first European settlers. Most sailed up to Fort Nassau, but a handful - eight families in all - staying behind on what is now Governors Island, which they called Nut Island because of the many walnut trees there. Slowly the community grew as more settlers arrived, and the little island became crowded; the decision was made to move to the limitless spaces across the water, and the settlement of Manhattan , taken from the Algonquin Indian word Manna-Hata meaning "Island of the Hills," began.

The Dutch gave their new outpost the name New Amsterdam though following British conquest of the island in 1664 the settlement took its new name from its owner the Duke of York - New York .

Revolution
By the 1750s the city had reached a population of 16,000, spread roughly as far north as Chambers Street. As the new community grew more confident, it realized that it could exist independently of the government in Britain. In a way, New York's role during the War of Independence was not critical, for all the battles fought in and around the city were generally won by the British, who ultimately lost the war. George Washington , who had held the American army together by sheer willpower, celebrated in New York riding in triumphal procession down Canal Street and saying farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern , a building that still stands at the end of Pearl Street. On April 30, 1789, Washington took the oath of president at the site of the Federal Hall National Memorial on Wall Street. The federal government was transferred to the District of Columbia one year later.

Immigration and civil war
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 allowed New York to expand massively as a port. The Great Lakes were suddenly opened to New York, and with them the rest of the country; goods manufactured in the city could be sent easily and cheaply to the American heartland. It was because of this transportation network, and the mass of cheap labour that flooded in throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that New York - and to an extent the nation - became wealthy. The first waves of immigrants , mainly German and Irish , began to arrive in the mid-nineteenth century, the latter forced out by the potato famine of 1846, the former by the failed revolutions of 1848-49. The city could not handle people arriving in such great numbers and epidemics of yellow fever and cholera were common, exacerbated by poor water supplies, unsanitary conditions and the poverty of most of the newcomers. Despite this, in the 1880s large-scale Italian immigration began, while at the same time refugees from Eastern Europe started to arrive - many of them Jewish. The two communities shared a home on the Lower East Side , which became one of the worst slum areas of its day. On the eve of the Civil War (1861-65) the majority of New York's 750,000 population were immigrants; in 1890 one in four of the city's inhabitants was Irish.

When the Civil War broke out, caused by growing differences between the northern and southern states, notably on the issues of slavery and trade. New York sided with the Union (North) against the Confederates (South), but none of the actual hand-to-hand fighting that ravaged the rest of the country took place near the city itself. It did, however, form a focus for much of the radical thinking behind the war, particularly with Abraham Lincoln 's influential "Might makes Right" speech from the Cooper Union Building in 1860. In 1863 a conscription law was passed that allowed the rich to buy themselves out of military service. Not surprisingly this was deeply unpopular, and New Yorkers rioted, burning buildings and looting shops: more than a thousand people were killed in these Draft Riots .

The late nineteenth century
The end of the Civil War saw much of the country devastated but New York intact, and it was fairly predictable that the city would soon become the wealthiest and most influential in the nation. New York was also the greatest business, commercial and manufacturing center in the country. Cornelius Vanderbilt controlled a vast shipping and railroad empire, and J.P. Morgan , the banking and investment wizard, was instrumental in organizing financial mergers that led to the formation of the prototypical corporate business.

The latter part of the nineteenth century was in many ways the city's golden age: elevated railways sprung up to transport people quickly and cheaply around the city; Thomas Edison lit the streets with his new electric light bulb, powered by the first electricity plant on Pearl Street; and in 1883, to the wonderment of New Yorkers, the Brooklyn Bridge was completed, linking Brooklyn and Manhattan. Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens and the part of Westchester known as the Bronx, along with Manhattan, were officially incorporated into New York City in 1898. All this commercial expansion stimulated the city's cultural growth; Walt Whitman eulogized the city in his poetry, while Henry James recorded its manners and mores in such novels as Washington Square .

Turn-of-the-nineteenth-century development
At the same time, the emigration of Europe's impoverished peoples continued unabated, and in 1884 new immigrants from Asia settled in what became known as Chinatown ; Jewish and other European immigrants continued to arrive, and in 1898 the population of New York amounted to more than three million, making it the largest city in the world. Twelve years earlier the Statue of Liberty was completed, holding a symbolic torch to guide the huddled masses; now pressure grew to limit immigration, but still people flooded in. Ellis Island , the depot that processed arrivals, was handling two thousand people a day, leading to a total of ten million by 1929, when laws were passed to curtail immigration. The first two decades of the century saw a further wave of immigration. In that period one-third of all the Jews in eastern Europe arrived in New York, and upwards of 1.5 million of them settled in New York City, primarily in the Lower East Side.

The war years and the Depression: 1914-45
With America's entry into World War I in 1917, New York benefited from wartime trade and commerce. Perhaps surprisingly, there was little conflict between the various European communities crammed into the city. Although Germans comprised roughly one-fifth of the city's population, there were few of the attacks on their lives or property that occurred elsewhere in the country.

The postwar years saw one law and one character dominating the New York scene: the law was Prohibition , passed in 1920 (and not repealed until 1933) in an attempt to sober up the nation; the character was Jimmy Walker , elected mayor in 1925. Walker led a far from sober lifestyle, "No civilized man," he said, "goes to bed the same day he wakes up," and it was during his flamboyant career that the Jazz Age came to the city. In speakeasies all over town the bootleg liquor flowed and writers as diverse as Damon Runyon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway portrayed the excitement of the times and musicians such as George Gershwin and Benny Goodman packed nightclubs with their new sound.

With the Wall Street crash of 1929 the party came to an abrupt end. Yet during the Depression three of New York's most opulent - and most beautiful - skyscrapers were built: the Chrysler Building in 1930, the Empire State in 1931 and in 1932 Rockefeller Center - all very impressive, but of little immediate help to those in the other depressed parts of the city.

The country's entry into World War II in 1941 had little direct impact on New York City: lights were blacked out at night in case of bomb attacks, two hundred Japanese were interned on Ellis Island and guards were placed at the entrances to bridges and tunnels. But, more importantly, the Manhattan Project , which took place behind the scenes at Columbia University, succeeded in splitting the uranium atom, thereby creating the first atomic weapon.

The postwar years
Following racial tensions in the 1950s there was a general exodus of the white middle classes out of New York - the Great White Flight as the media labeled it. Between 1950 and 1970 more than a million families left the city. Things went from bad to worse during the 1960s with race riots uptown in Harlem and in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The World's Fair of 1964 was a white elephant to boost the city's international profile, but on the streets the call for civil liberties for blacks and protest against US involvement in Vietnam (1964-75) were as strong as any in the rest of the country.

Manhattan reached crisis point in 1975. By now the city was spending more than it received in taxes - billions of dollars more. Essential services, long shaky due to underfunding, were ready to collapse. Tourism, caused by cheap transatlantic airfares, and a new mayor, Edward I. Koch helped save the city. Despite the fact that New York was no longer facing bankruptcy, it was still suffering from the massive nationwide recession, and the city turned to its nightlife for relief. Starting in the mid-1970s, singles bars sprang up all over the city, gay bars proliferated in the Village, and Disco was King. Studio 54 was an internationally known hotspot, and drugs and illicit sex were the main events off the dance floor.

In the 1980s the real estate and stock markets boomed and another era of Big Money was ushered in; fortunes were made and lost overnight and big Wall Street names, most notably Michael Milken , were thrown in jail for insider trading. A spate of building gave the city yet more fabulous architecture, notably Battery Park City downtown, and master builder Donald Trump provided glitzy housing for the super-wealthy.

In 1989, Koch lost the Democratic nomination for the mayoral elections to David Dinkins, the first African-American mayor of New York, yet the stock market crash in 1987 had started yet another downturn. By the end of the 1980s New York was slipping hard and fast into a massive recession : in 1989 the city's budget deficit ran at $500 million; and one in four New Yorkers was officially classed as poor - a figure unequaled since the Depression. In the 1993 mayoral elections, Dinkins narrowly lost to the brash prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani . New York, traditionally a firmly Democratic city, wanted a change and with Giuliani - the city's first Republican mayor in 28 years - it got it.

The Giuliani years
Though it may have been coincidental, Giuliani's first term helped usher in a dramatic upswing in New York's prosperity. A New York Times article described 1995 as "the best year in recent memory for New York City." Even the pope came to town and called New York "the capital of the world." The city's reputation flourished, with remarkable decreases in crime statistics and a revitalized economy that helped spur the tourism industry to some of its best years ever. Such successes helped the mayor withstand a bitter fight over rent control in 1997 as well as continued concern over serious overcrowding in the public school system and cutbacks in health and welfare programs. Giuliani won re-election in 1997 in a landslide.

The early years of his second term were characterized by the continued growth of the city's economy, and more civic improvements, such as the "cleaning up" of previously crime-ridden neighborhoods like Times Square, the renovation of Grand Central Station and the building of new hotels and office buildings. All these developments greatly boosted tourism and thus the city's coffers, but they also raised protests that the mayor would do anything to attract national chains to the city, often at the expense of local business and local workers.

Several high-profile incidents, such as the Abner Louima torture case involving shocking allegations of police brutality, led to charges of disregard for minority rights. With reports on racial profiling somewhat backing this up, Giuliani's popularity, once amazingly high in this heavily Democratic city, dwindled significantly - though it was soon to be resuscitated in a big way

September 11, 2001, and beyond
Nothing could have prepared New York - or indeed the world - for the morning of September 11, 2001 , when terrorists took over four hijacked planes, crashing two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a third plane into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and a fourth in a field south of Pittsburgh, PA. New York was hit hardest: within hours, each tower had collapsed, and the fallout and debris resulted in the destruction of a number of nearby buildings. Around 3000 people were killed in the attack, while smoking rubble piled several stories high. The signature skyline was no more.

Beyond the staggering number of lives lost, the billions in assets wiped out, the wreckage of subway lines and so on, there were other holes to deal with: entire firefighting crews, and quite a few at or near the top of the ranks in the fire and police departments died in the collapse. New Yorkers - and many from around the world - rallied to the rescue effort under the compassionate yet firm leadership of Giuliani. Suddenly, few wanted to see him go, though he was precluded by law for running for a third term in the elections (whose primaries, ironically, had been scheduled for September 11th).

The man who did eventually take control, new Republican mayor Michael Bloomberg (an ex-Democrat to boot), has a yeoman's task ahead. Rebuilding the city will take a long while; restoring shaken faith and economic fortune will take more than just time - and it's not as if the city's other problems have gone away, just taken a back seat and been put in slightly different perspective. Still, if any city is resilient enough to weather the damage and bounce back, clearly it's New York.

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