New York - The City that Never Sleeps

New York, the Big Apple, IS America, and probably the greatest city in the world. Enriched with an extensive system of public and private universities, training colleges, medical schools, business schools and art schools, it is truly one of the great educational cities.

Set at the mouth of the great Hudson River, New York is the largest urban area of America. It is a town where the unusual is commonplace, the dramatic expected. New York is a series of neighbourhoods that are the real melting pot of America – a city of diversity where people have come from all over the world to build their lives. This is reflected in the neighbourhood names. Conjure with the ideas of the Bronx, Hell’s Kitchen, Spanish Harlem, Little Italy and Chinatown.

Culture and Action

Art and artists are a way of life in New York, from the small studios of Greenwich Village to the magic of Broadway, providing everything from musicals to Shakespeare starring top-rank actors and actresses. We can also throw in the world-famous Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, and uncountable numbers of music and theatre venues. Museums do not come better than the Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and the American Museum of Natural History. And if you do need the best research library there is, the New York Public Library is waiting for you with ten million books and ten million manuscripts, including George Washington’s farewell address drafted in his own hand.

If this becomes all too highbrow, there are clubs, bars and restaurants, as well as world-class sports facilities to keep you busy, and more than enough parks and open spaces if you just want to relax.

Where is the financial capital of the world? Right here. The financial district of Manhattan is home to some of the greatest modern architecture in the world - and I guess we don’t need to tell you about Wall Street!

Manhattan

Manhattan is the economic and cultural heart of the city; dominated by skyscrapers, bright lights and a pace of life to match, inhabited by the strange and the rich in equal measure. Shop ‘til you drop in the magical stores of Fifth Avenue, smell the money being made day and night on Wall Street, discover the Orient in China Town, or hang out with the artists, writers and musicians in Greenwich Village and SoHo. All of this is shoe-horned into only 57 square kilometers along with 1.5 million people.

New York is the only city in the USA with a large public-university system. There is a wide range of specialized colleges – art and design, fashion, performing arts, printing, cooking and maritime trades. The private universities also provide special courses such as journalism at Columbia, medicine at Fordham, fine art studies at New York and biomedicine at Rockefeller.

There are, however, plenty of open spaces in the city. Some 50,000 acres of green island parks are scattered through the boroughs, from small triangles to the 25,000 acres of beaches, parkland and marshes of the national recreation area on Staten Island. New Yorkers really use their parks and beaches - a million people turn out on summer weekends at Coney Island in Brooklyn. Rockaway Beach on the southern shore of Long Island finds three quarters of a million swimmers in its Atlantic Ocean.

For animal lovers, there is a taste of the wild in the zoos of the Bronx, Central Park, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, and botanical gardens in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.

New York is also the home town of some of the most famous sports teams in America – the Jets and the Giants at football, the Knicks at basketball, the Islanders and Rangers at hockey, and the Yankees and the Mets at baseball.

Climate and Surroundings

The average monthly temperature is 12ºC but it gets hot in summer, and there can be a lot of snow in winter that makes it ideal for winter sports. You can easily have a day at the beach or if you want to get out of town, New York has three international airports, 100,000 miles of highway throughout the state, and 4,500 miles of rail track. It is easy to explore this historic part of America, from the Appalachians and the Catskills to the Great Lakes, or follow the Hudson River to Albany. There is plenty of opportunity for outdoor pursuits.

As Frank Sinatra sang ‘ If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere’.

See you in the big Apple!

Author
Mike Janulewicz