New York City, USA

New York City — five boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, consolidated into a single city in 1898 — is the largest city in the United States with around 8.3 million residents inside city limits and a Tri-State metropolitan area of roughly 19.5 million across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Manhattan, the central island of 59 square kilometres, holds the city's defining geography: the 1811 Commissioners' Plan imposed the famous numbered grid of avenues and streets above 14th Street that gives the borough its navigability, with the older Dutch-and-English colonial street network preserved south of Houston Street in SoHo, the Financial District, the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village. The city's iconic skyline runs from the supertall office and condominium towers of Midtown (the Empire State Building 381 m, One Vanderbilt 427 m, Central Park Tower 472 m, the Chrysler Building's 1930 stainless-steel Art Deco crown) down to the cluster of Lower Manhattan financial-district towers (One World Trade Center 541 m, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere). Times Square at the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue from 42nd to 47th Street is the city's most-visited single location with around 50 million annual visitors; Broadway's 41 theatres around it stage the most prestigious commercial theatre in the world and define the Tony Awards calendar. Central Park, designed in 1857 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux as the country's first major landscaped public park, runs 4 km north-south through the heart of Manhattan from 59th Street to 110th Street and absorbs 42 million visits a year. The Museum Mile along Fifth Avenue between 82nd and 105th Streets concentrates ten major museums — the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met, 5,000 years of art across 17 acres of galleries, the largest art museum in the Western Hemisphere), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Frank Lloyd Wright's 1959 spiral), the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, El Museo del Barrio — within a single avenue. Across the borough, MoMA on West 53rd Street (Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, Van Gogh's Starry Night, Cézanne, Monet, Pollock), the Whitney Museum on the Hudson at the High Line's southern terminus, the American Museum of Natural History opposite Central Park West, the Frick Collection in Henry Clay Frick's Gilded-Age mansion, the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, and the National Museum of the American Indian's George Gustav Heye Center at Bowling Green extend the cultural footprint. The Statue of Liberty (1886, French gift commemorating American independence and the Franco-American alliance) and Ellis Island (the 1892-1954 immigrant inspection station that processed 12 million arrivals, now the National Museum of Immigration) sit on islands in New York Harbor reachable by Statue Cruises ferries from Battery Park; the free Staten Island Ferry from the Whitehall Terminal also passes the Statue at close range and is the city's best-value sightseeing experience. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center site occupies the 6.5-hectare plaza around the twin reflecting pools set in the original tower footprints, with the names of the 2,977 victims of 11 September 2001 (and of the 1993 truck bombing) cut through bronze parapets. Beyond Manhattan, Brooklyn — the city's most populous borough at 2.7 million — runs from the Brooklyn Bridge waterfront and DUMBO galleries through brownstone Park Slope, hipster Williamsburg with its Smorgasburg open-air food market, Coney Island's boardwalk and the Cyclone wooden roller coaster, Prospect Park's Olmsted-and-Vaux companion design to Central Park, and the Brooklyn Museum and Brooklyn Botanic Garden cluster. Queens (the most ethnically diverse county in the United States) runs from Long Island City's Pepsi-Cola sign and MoMA PS1 to Astoria's Greek-and-Egyptian community, Flushing's Asian-American community (one of the largest Chinatowns in the world), the Mets' Citi Field stadium, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (twice the World's Fair site, 1939 and 1964) and the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center where the US Open is played each year. The Bronx hosts Yankee Stadium, the Bronx Zoo (the largest urban zoo in the United States) and the New York Botanical Garden. Staten Island, accessible by free ferry from Whitehall, is more residential but holds the Snug Harbor Cultural Center and the Greenbelt nature preserve. Three major airports serve the metropolitan region: John F. Kennedy International (JFK, the international hub in southeast Queens, AirTrain to Jamaica or Howard Beach connecting to subway and Long Island Rail Road), LaGuardia (LGA, the rebuilt-2022 close-in Queens airport for domestic flights, Q70 bus to subway), and Newark Liberty International (EWR, in New Jersey, AirTrain Newark to PATH and NJ Transit) — all three operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) operates the New York City Subway (472 stations, 36 lines, 24/7 service, the largest by stations in the world), the buses, the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North; OMNY contactless payment (tap any contactless credit card or Apple Pay / Google Pay) has progressively replaced the MetroCard since 2022. Penn Station under Madison Square Garden serves Amtrak Northeast Corridor (Acela to Washington in 2h 50min, to Boston in 3h 30min) and NJ Transit and LIRR commuter trains; Grand Central Terminal at 42nd Street and Park Avenue is the Metro-North Beaux-Arts terminal serving Westchester, Connecticut and the Bronx.