N e w Y o r k

New York is the largest city and port in the United States. It is the industrial and cultural centre of the country. It is the financial and business centre of the capitalist world. It is also the centre of the political life, the centre of the mass media and the world’s biggest bank centre. New York is the economic capital of the USA with a population of nearly eight million. American travel agencies call New York “the wonder city of the world”.

The population of New York, together with the population of its suburbs, comes to 16 million people. It is a multi-national city, the people that live in it speak seventy-five different languages. New York is a city of social contrasts. Not very far from some of the city’s famous skyscrapers there are slums – streets of broken-down houses where the poor of the city live. If you go along the Fifth Avenue, you come to Harlem, populated by the black people of New York. It is the largest Negro ghetto.

There are five parts (“boroughs”, as they are called there) in New York: Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Richmond. Only one of them, the Bronx, is not on an island.

The centre of New York is located on the granite island of Manhattan, which lies between the Hudson River and the East River. The island is 13 miles long and 2 miles wide (the smallest island in New York). The population of Manhattan is about two million people. Here is the heart of America’s business and culture, the city of skyscrapers, of Broadway, of Wall Street, which is the centre of American money business.

Wall Street is the site of the New York Stock Exchange and the centre of the world financial life. The street got its name in the old days when one of the Dutch governors of New Amsterdam built a wall across Manhattan to protect the colonists from the Indians. The wall was later broken but the name remained.

Broadway is the centre of the theatres and night life. It is a city that never goes to sleep. Buses and the subway run all night. There are many drugstores and restaurants, which never close. There are cinemas with films that start at midnight. Broadway is known as “The Great White Way” because of the electric signs which turn night into day.

New York has a famous opera house, the Metropolitan, where international stars sing from September until April. The Carnegie Hall is the city’s most popular concert hall.

The pride of the New Yorkers is the Empire State Building situated in the centre of the city (at the corner of the 5^th Avenue and the 34^th Street). It is of 102 storeys high (448 metres) and is built of Indian limestone, aluminium, steel, glass and marble brought from France, Italy, Belgium and Germany. The building weighs 365 000 tons. There are two observation platforms: one – on the 86^th and the other on the 102^nd floor. The building is open for observation seven days and nights a week. The observatory elevators speed the visitors to the 80^th floor in less than a minute. The highest, most powerful and far-reaching television antenna in the USA (1454 feet) is erected on that tower. There are 73 elevators in the building, 1860 steps on stairs (from street level to the 102^nd floor), 6500 windows and 3500 miles of telephone and telegraph wire. On the main floor a city of shops is located, it is visited by 35000 people daily. Over two million and a half people visit the Empire State Building each year.

Q u e s t i o n s :

1. What kind of city is New York?

2. What is typical for New York?

3. Where is the city located?

4. What are the boroughs of New York?

5. What are the main streets of the city?

6. What is the pride of the New Yorkers?