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straight lines up and down, or across. This pattern is called a grid. Each avenue has either a name or a number. The numbers of the streets (from one to over one hundred) begin in Lower Manhattan as you go north. Only a few of the streets have names. Wall and Broad Streets is the seat of the New York Stock Exchange, a United States Federal Reserve bank and the American Stock Exchange. Many prominent banking, brokerage, and financial institutions and offices of many large corporations are located here. The twin towers of the Trade Center, one of the world’s tallest structures, were here too, until destroyed in September 11th, 2001 as a result of the terrorist attacks. Thousands of civilians, blue-collar workers, police officers, and three hundred and forty-three firemen died that terrible day.
When you think of New York, you think of skyscrapers. You see them miles away across the enormous harbor the moment you sail through the “Narrows” between Long
Island and Staten Island. They seem to float between sea and sky like turrets in a fairy tale. Midtown Manhattan is a forest of notable skyscrapers. The first skyscraper in New York was built in 1902. It was twenty-storey-high. These skyscrapers were built in art deco style and were abundantly and richly decorated. Opened in the teeth of the Depression as a mighty symbol of rebirth, the slender 102-storey Empire State Building, 1931, got off to a wobbly start financially. Built by General Motors executive John Raskob, the building reigned for 43 years as the world’s tallest building (1,250 feet high). Its Art Deco crown, intended as a mooring mast for blimps, served as a handy perch in King Kong (a gigantic gorilla hung on to the top of the building, clutching a terrified woman). At night, the top 40 stories are illuminated with colors according to the season: red and green for Christmas, orange and brown for Halloween. From the top you can see all Manhattan spread out below you. A few sky-scrapers have since soared higher, but none has surpassed its limestone majesty. The Chrysler Building was built by an automobile company called Chrysler. Its shiny steel top was made to look like a car radiator. The Rockefeller Center group, built in the 1930s by John Rockefeller according to one general plan, is the largest privately owned business and entertainment center consisting of nineteen buildings, which include offices, banks, shops, and various places of entertainment. In the 1950s, there was a second building boom, which introduced a new style – buildings of steel and glass. The United Nations Secretariat building was the first steel-marble-and-glass sky-scraper (originally, the UN Headquarters were in San Francisco). Outside the UN Headquarters fly the flags of all countries that belong. They are arranged in alphabetical order. Most of the city’s theaters are clustered around Times Square and on Broadway. Broadway is the symbol of American theater, as Hollywood is of American cinema. The intersection of
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Broadway and Seventh Avenue forms world-famous Times Square which, as you remember, is actually a triangle. The square got its name from the New York Times, the most popular newspaper in America. New Year Eve’s celebrations always start here and at mid-night, a large red ball is lowered down to show that the New Year has begun.
Practically the most of Manhattan is a sea of concrete. Luckily for New Yorkers, there is one exception : Central Park. This huge park in the middle of the city was designed in the 1850s by the landscape architect Frederic Law Olmsted and opened in 1876. You can take a ride through Central Park in a little carriage pulled by a horse, or rent a bicycle. There are many attractions in the park: a zoo, a skating-rink, an old-fashion carousel, a lake with boats, and an outdoor theater. The city is particularly noted for its many retail outlets, including large department stores and specialty shops. Fifth and Madison Avenues are especially famous for their fine shops. On Fifth Avenue – along Central park - there are so many museums that it is called “Museum Mile”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art with huge collection of are from all over the world is one of the most important museums in the United States. Park Avenue represents luxury and fashion because of its large expensive apartment houses. Madison Avenue is also known as the center of advertising industry. The street on the western side of Central Park has large and unusual-looking buildings. The first apartments built were very large and rent was very high, and the place was so far from the center, that people called them the Dakota – it was the same as building these apartment houses in the Dakotas ( the states of South and North Dakota are situated a long way from New York). However, the place with the view on Central Park attracted people. Some very famous people have lived in the Dakota, among them the remarkable conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein and one of the fabulously famous Beatles musicians John Lennon who was killed right outside the building on December 8, 1980. As a challenge to quadrangular Manhattan, there rises the building of the Guggenheim Museum, shaped like a shell. Inside you view the pictures by walking down a curved ramp. The Guggenheim was designed by a 90-year-old architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Harlem began after 1900. At first, few people needed new apartments in Manhattan, so new buildings remained empty. Then a black man gave an idea to the building owners: why not rent the apartments to the black families who wanted to move from the old, half-ruined apartments in which they lived in downtown Manhattan and in the south of the USA. The idea worked, and in this way Harlem became an area mostly inhabited by black population. The 1920s were the time of Harlem flourishing. Famous jazz musicians regularly performed there, Duke Ellington among them. With times, bad economy and continued discrimination, the area
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became poorer, many middle-class blacks left. Yet, Harlem has kept its special atmosphere and remained the center of black culture.
Among New York’s largest institutions of higher learning are New York and Columbia universities, both privately owned.
New York is a global city. Like London and Tokyo, New York had emerged in the mud-1980s as a dominant force by serving as the link between the national and the global economies. Since then, population of New York Mega has not been growing, it has been stagnating or shrunk.
There is an inflow of highly-educated 20-to35-year-olds, along with an outflow of the very young and the old, in part, due to the spiraling downtown real-estate prices and incomes. Apartments that once held families now hold one single investment banker. And the space required by that single banker for offices, restaurants and shops can be two to four times more than that required by the family he or she replaces. This is, in part, why the urban glamour zone is expending dramatically. Fewer people means more economic activity. If anything, the elites who populate these glamour zones need more specialized services than ever. Firms, from agriculture to finance, are buying more services. Finance, insurance real estate sales to corporations has grew 30-40% for the last ten years. The general rule is that the most complex an international services (highend law, accounting, finance and management) congregate in the center, while more standardized and national segments of those same services get farmed out to midsize cities. Thus Goldman Sachs has moved a whole series of more standardizes jobs including automated mass trading to New Jersey and Connecticut, but it is building what is probably the world’s largest private trading floor in the Wall Street area. That helps explain the increasing wealth advantage of New York. The earnings of high-level professional jobs have grown the fastest.
Everyday millions of people pour in to Manhattan across the bridges, or through the huge tunnels under the water. They come from the Bronx across the Harlem River, from Queens and Brooklyn on Long Island, from Richmond on Staten Island across New York Bay (an arm of the Atlantic Ocean). Cars stream along the elevated highways, trains rattle over the 3-mile-long Hell Gate railway bridge in to the city itself. And beneath the city, the subway trains rumble. For millions, it is an impossible place to live and the only place to live. As the song says, “New York, New York…It’s a helluva town!”
Questions
1. What makes the Mid-Atlantic Region distinct from other regions? 2. What city is the gateway to America? 3. Why is New York’s nickname a “Big Pie”? 4. Which five
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boroughs does New York consist of? 5. Is Staten Island a state or a borough of New York? 6. How many islands does New York comprise and which is the largest one? 7. What role does Manhattan play in the life of USA? 8. Is Rhode Island one of the islands New York consists of? 9. Where is the Dakota and why is it so called? 10. What’s Harlem and how did it happen that it became an area of mostly black population?
New York City is the largest city of New York - a state in the Mid-Atlantic Region. This state has been called the Empire State since before 1800. George Washington predicted that New York would become the seat of the new empire – a reference to its wealth and variety of resources. The state was named in the1660s for the Duke of York, later James II of England. Once a Dutch colony, New York entered the Union in 1788 as the 11th of the original 13 states. The colossal Statue of Liberty set on Liberty Island in the Upper Bay of New York Harbor was the first view of America seen by millions of immigrants arriving at New York City. Standing 302 ft high including its pedestal, the statue itself 151feet tall, one of the world’s greatest and best-loved monuments, it represents a woman with a crown on her head. High, in her right hand she holds a huge torch which sends a light far out into the Atlantic. In her left hand is a tablet bearing the date - July 4, 1776, proclaiming liberty. The full name of the monument is “The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World.” An elevator lifts to the balcony level, and a spiral staircase leads to an observation platform so that anyone could climb to the top and look through the windows which form the jewels in Liberty’s crown. The American Museum of Immigration is contained in the statue’s base.
At the end of the 19th century, America had become very settled and prosperous once the terrible Civil War had ended in 1865. To the oppressed people of Europe it seemed to offer new hope and new opportunity. The people of France, which is also a republic, had always felt friendly towards the people of America. Many felt that they would like to pay tribute to America for taking in starving and persecuted people and allowing them to live and worship as they wished. A French historian made a proposal for the lasting memorial to Liberty and Franco-American friendship. A young sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi, started his part of work. He decided to mould the figure in copper, because that was a metal which could not be spoiled by sea air. The framework inside the figure was to be in iron and steel. A great engineer, Eiffel, designed that part. (do you know of another large building he is famous for?) The French people raised the money through fetes, concerts, shows collections and a lottery. The work began in France in 1875. By 1884, there was the great statue, towering over the rooftops of Paris. It was the pride and joy of all France. In 1885, the completed statue weighing 225 tons,
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was dissembled and shipped to New York City. By 1886, it had been fitted together again in New York and anchored firmly to the pedestal was designed by American
Architect Richard Morris Hunt and built on Bedloe’s Island. On October 28, 1886, the
Statue of Liberty was presented by Bartholdi to the American nation, her lamp lit for the first time. In the mid-1980s the statue was repaired and restored by both American and French workers for a centennial celebration held in July 1986. It was declared a national monument in 1924. In the 1930s the whole of the island was incorporated into the monument. In 1956 Bedloe’s Island was renamed Liberty Island, and in 1965 nearby Ellis Island, once the country’s major immigration station, was added, bringing the monument’s total area to about 58 acres.
The rest of the MidAtlantic Region was originally a center of immigration, particularly of Germans and Scotch-Irish. The original patterns of large proprietorships were preserved here. In 1638, a group of Swedish settlers set up a colony along the Delaware River and lived there peacefully until 1655 when the Dutch, who disliked the Swedes, settled there. Later it was taken over by the English, and finally became independent in 1776. Delaware is called the First State because it was the first to accept the Constitution, in December, 1787. It is a very small state, second only to Rhode Island. Another important fact about Delaware is that in 1939, nylon, the light-weight, yet strong fiber of the twenty’s century, was invented there, in the largest city Willington which houses the giant chemical company called DuPont. In1938 DuPont invented Teflon as coating. In 1940, DuPont found the killer app. The city of Willington is sometimes called “the chemical capital of the world”. In colonial days, Delaware was part of the “bread basket” area, raising wheat, corn, and other grains for national consumption.
New Jersey (Garden State) is most densely populated and the fifth smallest of states. It ranks seventh biggest in manufactures and even higher in income per acre of farmland. The first professional baseball game in the world was played in New Jersey–the nation’s mostly populated and fifth smallest of states. Baseball is America’s most popular sport. No matter where you travel, baseball is a part of American consciousness
–from tin signs hanging in old bars and restaurants, to TV commercials, to the video games American kids play. It’s more than just a part of Americans’ life, it’s a religion, an American religion. Americans attend more baseball games every season than attend the religious services of all religions combined in the US. No wonder, baseball parks have been referred to as cathedrals by many writers in the past. The past is what hooks Americans – the past of their parents. It’s the equivalent of the storytelling – a tradition, handed down one generation to the next. Where did it come from? No one knows for sure. Many believe that a man named Abner Doubleday invented the game in