Lanterna Rally

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2015-08-04

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13: 9781332176809

Excerpt from Pennsylvania Railroad System: A Description of Its Main Lines and Branches With Notes of the Historical Events Which Have Taken Place in the Territory Contiguous New York, the eastern terminus of the Pennsylvania System, with a population of 5,006,484, is the second city of the world, the commercial metropolis of the United States, and the financial center of the American continent. It is, also, the greatest port on the globe. While the Dutch are always associated with the early settlement of New York, it was Giovanni Verrazano, a Florentine in the employ of the French King, who first saw Manhattan Island, in 1524, and a year later the Spaniard, Estevan Gomez, sailed into the bay. But after the few trading vessels from France had ceased visiting it, it remained for Hendrik Hudson to bring it to the interest of the Dutch in September, 1609. In 1623, the Dutch West India Company sent thirty families to the new land, a few of whom settled on Manhattan Island. Three years later, Peter Minuit, director-general of the new colony, bought the whole island from the Indian owners for twenty-four dollars' worth of beads and ribbons, and christened it New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam, which had Bowling Green for its civic center and Wall Street as its northern boundary, remained Dutch until 1664, when the flag of the British was flung from its civic pole, and New Amsterdam became New York, in honor of the Duke of York and Albany. During the Revolution the growing settlement, which had spread with outlying farms and "bouweries" to Madison Square and then to the Harlem River, was occupied by the British and its commerce and trade destroyed. But with the peace of 1783 it resumed its growth and eventually outstripped all other cities on the Atlantic seaboard. It became the great immigration center of the New World and the melting pot in which were amalgamated the millions who have come to the United States from England, Ireland, France, Scandinavia, Italy, Germany, Austria, Russia, Spain, the Balkans and the Far East. Despite the compact condition of its residential sections and the enormous sky-scraping business buildings erected to take care of the millions of workers, it overspread the narrow confines of Manhattan Island into the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond counties, and created the demand for Greater New York, formed by the amalgamation of these five boroughs with Manhattan into a Metropolitan District on January 1, 1898. Greater New York has an area of 317 square miles. It has 3,132 miles of streets, 1,500 miles of which are paved. It is a city of great contrasts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.