The New York Giants were originally named the New York Football Giants in 1925, so as not to be confused with the baseball team, which also played at the Polo Grounds.

The New York Rangers were named when sportswriters, impressed with Madison Square Garden President G.L. “Tex” Rickard’s ability to pull together an impressive roster of players for a sports franchise, dubbed the team “Tex’s Rangers.”

In 1934, the New York Giants won the NFL title game against the Chicago Bears by switching from cleats to basketball shoes at half time in order to gain better traction on the freezing ground, in what is now known as the “Sneakers Game.”

The Knicks won both the last game played in the old Madison Square Garden, and the first game at the new Madison Square Garden in February 1968.

The Giants advanced to the 1951 World Series after Bobby Thomson hit a home run off the Dodger’s Ralph Branca in the bottom of the ninth in the final National League pennant game, which has since been immortalized as “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”

The Polo Grounds were named after the New York Giant’s original playing field, a polo ground in Central Park.

On August 26, 1939, the Brooklyn Dodgers played the Cincinnati Reds, insignificant except for the fact that it was the first Major League Baseball game broadcast on television.

Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Elmer Stricklett debuted the spitball on May 29, 1905.

The first “subway series” baseball game was played between the New York Giants and the New York Yankees in 1921. The Giants won.

The fare stayed at fifteen cents until 1966, when it was raised to twenty cents. The following years saw consistent increases:

1970: $0.30
1972: $0.35
1975: $0.50
1980: $0.60
1981: $0.75
1984: $0.90
1986: $1.00
1990: $1.15
1992: $1.25
1995: $1.50

The use of fake tokens—usually foreign coins equivalent to a few cents—caused the system to lose so much money that ‘bull’s eye’ tokens were introduced in 1986 to make forgery more difficult. At first these tokens featured a metal disc in the center; today a hole fulfills the same function. MetroCards, first introduced in 1994, immediately became popular with subway riders and are now more widely used than tokens.

The oldest municipal golf course in the U.S. is in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, opened in 1895.

In 1935, a live alligator was found in a New York City sewer in Harlem; it was more than seven feet long, and the story was reported in The New York Times on February 10, 1935.

The man generally credited with inventing toilet paper was a New Yorker, Joseph C. Gayetty; he came up with the useful product in 1857.

Before effective sewers and flushable toilets were introduced to the city, much of the garbage and refuse was simply dumped on the streets. Until the 1840s, thousands of pigs roamed the city, feeding off the garbage.

Under Dutch rule in the 17th Century, the tallest structure in New York was a two–story windmill.

Before 1898, New York and Brooklyn were separate cities. When they were united New York was the largest city in the U.S., and Brooklyn was the third largest.

New Yorkers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cody Stanton started the U.S. women’s rights movement in 1848.

John Randall, Jr. laid out the grid system for New York streets, composed of avenues running north to south and streets running east to west, from Houston Street to 155th Street, in 1808.

Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan got its name because it was the place where young women would go to do laundry in the 17th century; at the time, Maiden Lane was in fields beyond the city limits (Wall Street was the northern border of the city).

Canal Street was originally a real canal; the original Dutch settlers, remembering the canals of their native land, dug the channel through the marshy ground all the way from the Hudson to the East River.

Wall Street took its name from a wooden wall that the settlers built across the tip of the island for defense against attacks from the north.

Water Street in Lower Manhattan originally ran along the very edge of Manhattan Island. It’s now several blocks inland from the East River, due to land reclamation (basically, dumping trash and dirt along the coastline and creating new land out of it) during the 19th century.

Before it was a paved street, Broadway was a dirt path used by the Algonquin Indians, called the Wiechquaekeck Trail.

The Bronx is the only borough in New York City connected to the mainland United States.

The nickname “the Big Apple” has a much more recent derivation; it was coined around 1920 by jazz musicians from New Orleans. In New Orleans slang, to play in the big apple meant to play the big–time shows. By 1920 New York was the principal city for jazz, and so over time it became known as the Big Apple.

Sports writer John J. Fitz Gerald helped to popularize the term with his racing column of the early 1920s, Around the Big Apple. (“There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York,” he wrote in a column from February 18, 1924.) He’d heard the name from his stable hands, who had picked it up from the jazz circuit. The nickname became official in the 1970s, when the New York Convention and Visitor’s Bureau started the Big Apple publicity campaign to attract tourists to the city.

The first presidential home in the United States was also in New York City; it was called “The Palace” and was located at 3 Cherry Street, on a site now occupied by the anchorage for the Brooklyn Bridge.

The first daily Yiddish newspaper, Yiddishes Tageblat, was founded in New York in 1865.

The first successful steamboat was launched from New York City. Designed and built by Robert Fulton, the Clermont made its maiden voyage from New York City to Albany in 1807.

The first public beer brewery in America was located in New Amsterdam, the predecessor of New York City. Peter Minuit, who was the governor of the colony in the 17th Century, established the brewery at the Market (Marckveldt) Field, which later gave its name to Market Street.

The first coins issued by the United States were pennies minted by a private contractor in New York.

The first local city bus in the United States was located in New York City. It started running in 1827, from the intersection of Houston Street and Broadway to the corner of Wall and William streets.

More than one–fourth of the world’s gold bullion is stored in New York, at the Federal Reserve Bank on Maiden Lane.

There are approximately ten million bricks in the Empire State Building.

The Statue of Liberty’s index finger is eight feet long.

There are 578 miles of waterfront in New York City.

The average speed for cross–town automobile traffic in New York City is less than six miles per hour. The maximum possible average speed for cross–town traffic, as maintained by the timing of traffic lights, is fifteen miles per hour.

There are more than 2,000 surveillance cameras keeping watch over New York City.

New Yorkers produce approximately 26,400,000 pounds of garbage every day.

In New York City, rats may outnumber people by as much as four to one; the total rat population is somewhere between ten and fifty million.

Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island is the world’s biggest landfill. It was in constant use from 1948 to 2001, and covers 2,800 acres. (The surface of the landfill is now covered and landscaped.) Considered as a single mass, the landfill is the largest human–made object on the planet.

In Dutch, for example, a “bowerie” was a farm. Peter Stuyvesant, one of the original governors of the colony, had a large farm that encompassed much of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The region was called “Stuyvesant’s bowerie” or simply “the bowerie.” Today, “The Bowery” is the name still used for both the region and the main street that runs through it.

Rivers in New York often maintain their original Dutch name. “Kil” was the Dutch word for river; the name “Fresh Kills”—which now refers to an area used for a landfill on Staten Island—originally referred to the area’s freshwater streams. The Dutch also named the Schuylkill River, the Arthur Kill (in New Jersey), the English Kills River (in Queens), and the Kill Van Kull Channel (between Staten Island and New Jersey).

Brooklyn was named by the Dutch, who called it “Breuck–Landt,” or broken land, because many small ponds broke up the marshy landscape. The Dutch were also particularly fond of rabbit stew, and named the southernmost section of Brooklyn “Konijn Eiland,” or Rabbit Island, for the good hunting that was found there. The rabbits are long gone but the name stuck; over the years konijn was transliterated to coney, giving us the present–day name Coney Island.

Despite these difficulties, New York City has more than 160 miles of tunnels for transportation—mostly subway tunnels, along with tunnels for cars, PATH trains, and other railroads. New techniques had to be pioneered for some of this work and mistakes often proved lethal. Twenty men were killed in 1880 when a digging shield failed in the first attempt to tunnel from New Jersey to Manhattan. The tunneling projects gave rise to an entire breed of construction worker, known as “sandhogs.” It also led to various technical innovations, such as the cut–and–cover method for subway tunnels and the development of large boring machines that allowed workers to reinforce the tunnel as the machine moved along, which helped give the sandhogs a modicum of safety.

One of New York City’s first recorded daredevils was Frederick Laws. He was the first parachutist in the city, successfully jumping from the torch of the Statue of Liberty in February of 1912. During the same decade, Harry “The Human Fly” Gardiner, a stuntman known throughout the country, climbed the façade of the Flatiron Building—at the time one of the tallest buildings in the city.

Perhaps the most famous New York daredevil is tightrope walker Philippe Petit. In 1974, he and a friend installed a wire cable between the roofs of 1 and 2 World Trade Center. Braving high winds, Petit stepped out onto the cable above the morning rush hour crowds below, and performed for more than an hour before stepping off the cable and into the arms of the police. As an artist–in–residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine over the subsequent years, he performed repeatedly on a tightrope strung within the church.

Just one year later, in 1975, construction worker Owen James Quinn parachuted from 1 World Trade Center; he was almost caught before he made it to the roof, but a friend who was photographing the event distracted the security guard while Quinn climbed the final flight of stairs and jumped off. He was arrested and charged with trespassing, but the case was eventually thrown out of court.

As the tallest structures in the city, the twin towers continued to lure the bravest of New York’s daredevils. Over the years, several other parachutists successfully jumped from the top of these buildings: Nic Feteris, John Vincent, Van Refuse, Thor Alex Kappfjell, and one who successfully eluded the police and so remained anonymous. In 1977, Brooklyn toy maker George Willig decided to go the harder route: instead of jumping down, he wanted to climb all the way up. Using homemade equipment to help him grip the metal tracks used by window–washers, he climbed up the outside of 1 World Trade Center, a monumental three and a half hour ordeal. He was arrested at the top but the public loved his courageous stunt so much that the city reduced his fine to one penny for every floor he’d climbed—$1.10 total.

Thor Alex Kappfjell was the last person to parachute from the World Trade Center in 1999. He was a dedicated daredevil who had already parachuted from the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building in 1998. After his first jump from the Empire State Building, he made a clean escape by jumping in a cab; he wasn’t so lucky with his later jumps, though, and was charged with reckless endangerment and criminal trespassing.

In 2001, Frenchman Terry DeBaux tried and failed to bungee jump from the torch of the Statue of Liberty. This part of the statue had been closed to the public for years, so he attempted to fly to the platform with a motorized parasail, which unfortunately got stuck on the torch and left him dangling until police cut him down.

What motivates people to attempt stunts like this? It’s hard to say; perhaps it’s a desperate wish to stand out in a city of ten million, or a more inscrutable appetite for danger. What is clear is that wherever there is a tall building or a famous landmark, there’ll be someone with an insatiable desire to get to the top—and jump off.

The most visible remnant from the 1964–1965 World’s Fair, the Unisphere is a 140–foot–tall globe displaying the continents of the Earth in shining stainless steel and is meant to signify the coming together of all nations. It weighs 900,000 pounds and is the largest globe in the world. The fair was a magnificent event but a financial disaster, costing the city millions of dollars.

The incomparable Miss Liberty is, without a doubt, the most famous statue in the world. Her full title is Liberty Enlightening the World, a wonderful summation of the United States’ mission to demonstrate that a free and equal democracy can be sustainable and effective. Known to most of us as Miss Liberty, she was a gift from France in 1886. At the time, the United States was a young nation, but already powerful, and New York was the busiest port in the world. Since Miss Liberty was first erected, she has been the defining image of New York Harbor, telling immigrants and visitors for more than a century that they have arrived at the capitol of the free world.

The New Colossus
(1883)
by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea–washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon–hand
Glows world–wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air–bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest–tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

In the Greek pantheon Prometheus was a Titan who lived on Mt. Olympus. Struck by pity for the savage humans of Earth, he brought them a spark of divine fire hidden in a hollow reed that warmed and brightened their lives. General Electric—which also built the GE Building on the east side of Rockefeller Center—considered themselves to be the Prometheus of the 20th century and commissioned the statue as a form of high–class advertising. The bronze statue is covered in gold leaf and is one of the most famous symbols of Midtown New York.

The stone mascots of the New York Public Library were originally named Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, after the library’s founders John Jacob Astor and James Lenox, but Mayor LaGuardia renamed them during the Great Depression for the virtues he thought most important: “Patience” (on the south side) and “Fortitude” (on the north).

The full name of this well–known feature of the Brooklyn landscape is the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch. It was built in memory of those who died in the Civil War, in the style of Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. The arch features a giant bronze chariot mounted on top of an 80–foot–tall limestone arch built in the style of the Arc de Triomphe.

“I feel this way about it. World trade means world peace and consequently the World Trade Center buildings in New York… has a bigger purpose than just to provide room for tenants. The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace… beyond the compelling need to make this a monument to world peace, the World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and through cooperation, his ability to find greatness.”

–Minoru Yamasaki, Chief Architect of the World Trade Center, from Architects on Architecture: New Directions in America, Paul Heyer, 1978