Almost everything a visitor does in New York happens in about six square miles of one borough. That is fine — it is where the famous things are — but it helps to know what the rest of it is, because the shape of the city explains a great deal about how it works.
Five boroughs
New York City has existed in its current form only since 1898, when five separate places were consolidated into one municipality. Before that, Brooklyn was the third-largest city in the United States in its own right and had no intention of joining; the merger passed there by about 300 votes out of 130,000.
Manhattan is an island, 13.4 miles long and 2.3 miles across at its widest. About 1.6 million people live on it and something like four million are on it during a working day. It is where the skyline, the museums, the theatres and nearly all the hotels are.
Brooklyn is the most populous borough with about 2.7 million people, which on its own would make it the fourth-largest city in America. It sits at the western end of Long Island, across the East River.
Queens is the largest by area and the second by population, also on Long Island, and is the most linguistically diverse place on earth by most measures — around 160 languages. Both major airports are in it.
The Bronx is the only borough attached to the mainland of North America. It holds the zoo, the botanical garden, Yankee Stadium and about 1.4 million people.
Staten Island is the smallest by population, physically closer to New Jersey than to the rest of the city, and connected to Manhattan by the free ferry and to Brooklyn by one enormous bridge.
The water
New York is a harbour city and the harbour is the reason it exists. The Hudson River runs down the west side of Manhattan and is technically a tidal estuary for its whole length in the city — it flows both ways depending on the tide, and the Lenape name for it, Muhheakantuck, means the river that flows two ways.
The East River is not a river at all but a tidal strait connecting Long Island Sound to the harbour, which is why its currents are violent and why swimming in it is a bad idea.
Upper New York Bay is the deep, sheltered, ice-free anchorage that made the port. Everything about the city’s early wealth follows from it.
There are more than 500 miles of waterfront, and about forty islands, several of which — Governors, Ellis, Liberty, Roosevelt — you can visit.
The ground
Manhattan is built on schist, a hard metamorphic rock that comes close to the surface in Midtown and Lower Manhattan and dips deep in between. That is not the reason the skyline has two clusters — the economics of land value explain most of it — but it made building tall in those two places cheaper.
The island’s original terrain was hilly, marshy and full of streams. Nearly all of it was flattened, filled or buried when the grid was imposed after 1811. Minetta Street in Greenwich Village bends because it follows a buried creek. Canal Street was a canal. Everything south of the original shoreline at Pearl Street is landfill.
The people
About 8.3 million in the city, roughly 20 million in the wider metropolitan area.
Around 37 per cent were born outside the United States, which is a higher share than at any point since 1910. Around half of New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home. The Department of Education has recorded well over a hundred languages in the school system, and researchers working in Queens have documented something closer to 800 in the metropolitan area including endangered languages with only a handful of speakers left anywhere.
The city has no majority ethnic group.
The weather
A humid continental climate, which means genuinely hot summers and genuinely cold winters, with two short and excellent seasons in between.
July and August: regularly above 32°C with heavy humidity. Afternoon thunderstorms are common and clear fast. Subway platforms are brutal.
January and February: highs around 3 to 5°C, below freezing at night, with wind funnelled down the avenues that makes it feel worse. Snow a few times a season.
May and October are the best months.
Hurricane season runs to November and the city has been hit — Sandy in 2012 flooded the subway tunnels and Lower Manhattan — but a direct strike is rare.
How the city moves
The subway has 472 stations, more than any other system anywhere, and runs 24 hours a day. It is the fastest way to cover distance in Manhattan for most of the day.
Buses cover the crosstown routes the subway handles badly and are slower.
Ferries — the free Staten Island Ferry and the NYC Ferry network — are the pleasantest way to travel and increasingly useful.
Walking is faster than driving in Manhattan between about 8am and 7pm. Twenty north–south blocks make a mile.
Only about 45 per cent of New York households own a car, which is the lowest rate in the United States by a wide margin and the single biggest difference between this city and every other American one.