New York

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New York is a state in the northeastern United States. It is sometimes called New York State when there is need to distinguish it from New York City. Because of the preponderance of the population concentrated in the southern portion around New York City, the state is often regionalized into Upstate and Downstate.

Geography

New York State's borders touch (clockwise from the northwest) two Great Lakes (Erie and Ontario, which are connected by the Niagara River); one former Great Lake (Lake Champlain); the provinces of Ontario and Quebec in Canada; three New England states (Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut); the Atlantic Ocean, and two Mid-Atlantic states (New Jersey and Pennsylvania). In addition, Rhode Island shares a water border with New York.
New York is also the site of the only extra-territorial enclave within the boundaries of the U.S., the United Nations compound on Manhattan's East River.
The southern tip of New York State—New York City, its suburbs including Long Island, and the southern portion of the Hudson Valley—can be considered to form the central core of a "megalopolis," a super-city stretching from the northern suburbs of Boston to the southern suburbs of Washington D.C. and therefore occasionally called "BosWash". First described by Jean Gottmann in 1961 as a new phenomenon in the history of world urbanization, the megalopolis is characterized by a coalescence of previous already-large cities of the Eastern Seaboard: a heavy specialization on tertiary activity related to government, trade, law, education, finance, publishing and control of economic activity; plus a growth pattern not so much of more population and more area as more intensive use of already existing urbanized area and ever more sophisticated links from one specialty to another. Several other groups of megalopolis-type super-cities exist in the world, but that centered around New York City was the first described and still is the best example.
While the state is best known for New York City's urban atmosphere, especially Manhattan's skyscrapers, most of the state is in fact dominated by farms, forests, rivers, mountains, and lakes. New York's Adirondack State Park is larger than any U.S. National Park outside of Alaska. Niagara Falls, on the Niagara River as it flows from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, is a popular attraction. The Hudson River begins with Lake Tear of the Clouds and flows south through the eastern part of the state without draining Lakes George or Champlain. Lake George empties at its north end into Lake Champlain, whose northern end extends into Canada, where it drains into the Richelieu and then the St Lawrence Rivers. Four of New York City's five boroughs are on the three islands at the mouth of the Hudson River: Manhattan Island, Staten Island, and Long Island.
"Upstate" is a common term for New York State counties north of suburban Westchester and Rockland counties. Upstate New York typically includes the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains, the Shawangunk Ridge, the Finger Lakes and the Great Lakes in the west; and Lake Champlain, Lake George, and Oneida Lake in the northeast; and rivers such as the Delaware, Genesee, Hudson, Mohawk, and Susquehanna. The highest elevation in New York is Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks.

Its major cities and towns are:
* Amherst
* Albany
* Batavia
* Binghamton
* Buffalo
* Cooperstown
* Cheektowaga
* Glens Falls
* Ithaca
* Jamestown
* Kingston
* Lockport
* Mount Vernon
* New City
* New Rochelle
* New York City
* Niagara Falls
* Oneonta
* Plattsburgh
* Rochester
* Saratoga Springs
* Schenectady
* Syracuse
* Troy
* Utica
* White Plains
* Yonkers

New York City

New York City is home to the most complex and extensive transportation network in the United States, with more than 12,000 iconic yellow cabs, 120,000 daily bicyclists, a massive subway system, bus and railroad systems, immense airports, landmark bridges and tunnels, ferry service and even an aerial commuter tramway. About one in every three users of mass transit in the United States and two-thirds of the nation's rail riders live in New York and its suburbs. Many suburban commuter railroad lines enter and leave New York City, including the Long Island Rail Road, MTA Metro-North, the PATH system and many of NJTransit's rail services.