New York City has long been unusual because of its sheer size. Even before 1775, when its population was never more that 25,000, it ranked among the five leading cities in the colonies. It surpassed Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by 1810 to become the largest city in the United States, and in 1830 it passed Mexico City, Mexico, to become the largest in the western hemisphere. By 1930 it was the largest city in the world. In the 1980s the metro region was surpassed in total size by Tokyo, Japan; Mexico City; and Sao Paolo, Brazil. Yet with almost 20 million people, the New York City region remains an urban agglomeration of almost unimaginable size. For example, in 1998, when the population of the city itself was 7.4 million, each of its five boroughs was large enough to have been an important city in its own right, with populations exceeding those of many major U.S. cities.
The five boroughs of New York City together cover 800 sq km (309 sq mi). The urbanized area, however, includes 28 adjacent counties in New York state, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Together, they make up the New York metropolitan region, which in 1990 housed about 8 percent of the national population on about 0.2 percent of the land area of the contiguous 48 states. Moreover, New York stands at the center of the urbanized northeastern seaboard, which contained about 60 million people in the late 1990s.
Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. New York Information info
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