New York is the most ethnically diverse, religiously varied, commercially driven, famously congested, and, in the eyes of many, the most attractive urban centre in the United States of America. Its symbol is the Statue of Liberty, but the metropolis is itself an icon, the arena in which people of every nation are transformed into Americans Ñ and if they remain in the city, they become New Yorkers. Located where the Hudson and East rivers empty into one of the world's premier harbors, New York is both the gateway to the North American continent and its preferred exit to the oceans of the globe.
New York is the most populous and the most international city in the country. It has more Jews than Tel Aviv, more Irish than Dublin, more Italians than Naples, and more Puerto Ricans than San Juan.
No other city has contributed more images to the collective consciousness of Americans: Wall Street means finance, Broadway is synonymous with theatre, Fifth Avenue is automatically paired with shopping, Madison Avenue means the advertising industry, Greenwich Village connotes bohemian lifestyles, Seventh Avenue signifies fashion, Tammany Hall defines machine politics, and Harlem evokes images of the Jazz Age, African American aspirations, and slums.
The word tenement brings to mind both the miseries of urban life and the upward mobility of striving immigrant masses.
