New York City, or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States.   New York has several nicknames also: The Big Apple, The Capital of the World, The Center of the Universe, The City So Nice They Named It Twice ("New York, New York"), The City That Never Sleeps, The Empire City, The Five Boroughs, Gotham, The Melting Pot, Metropolis, and New Amsterdam.   It's located at the mouth of the Hudson River in southeastern New York state.   The city is made up of five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island.   New York City is the financial and cultural center of the United States.   It's known for its iconic attractions, hidden gems, and globally recognizable skyline.   The lifestyle in New York City is vibrant, exciting and ever-changing.   There is a plethora of restaurants, nightlife hotspots, shopping destinations and events to enjoy, not to mention an abundance of theatre, arts and culture venues, health and beauty centres, and sports facilities.   The city also features over 120 colleges and universities, including some of the world's top universities.   People of every nationality live in New York.   The city is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the United States, the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world.

It is the most visited U.S. city by international visitors.   In fact, more than 600 languages are spoken in New York, making it one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the world.   The city's diversity can be witnessed in its food, art, music, culture, and neighborhoods.   New York City became the most populous urbanized area in the world in the early 1920s, overtaking London.   The metropolitan area surpassed the 10 million mark in the early 1930s, becoming the first megacity in human history.   The majority of the most high-profile tourist destinations to the city are situated in Manhattan.   These include Times Square; Broadway theater productions; the Empire State Building; the Statue of Liberty; Ellis Island; the United Nations headquarters; the World Trade Center; the art museums along Museum Mile; green spaces such as Central Park, Washington Square Park, the High Line, and the medieval gardens of The Cloisters; the Stonewall Inn; Rockefeller Center; ethnic enclaves including the Manhattan Chinatown, Koreatown, Curry Hill, Harlem, Spanish Harlem, Little Italy, and Little Australia; luxury shopping along Fifth and Madison Avenues; and events such as the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village; the Brooklyn Bridge; the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade; the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree; the St. Patrick's Day Parade; seasonal activities such as ice skating in Central Park in the wintertime; the Tribeca Film Festival; and free performances in Central Park at SummerStage.

Providing continuous 24/7 service and contributing to the nickname The City That Never Sleeps, the New York City Subway is the largest single-operator rapid transit system in the world with 472 passenger rail stations, and Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan is the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere.   The 14-lane George Washington Bridge, connecting Manhattan to New Jersey across the Hudson River, is the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge.   The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, spanning the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, is the longest suspension bridge in the Americas and one of the world's longest.   The Brooklyn Bridge, with its stone neo-Gothic suspension towers, is an icon of the city itself; opened in 1883, it was the first steel-wire suspension bridge and was the longest suspension bridge in the world until 1903.   The Queensboro Bridge was the longest cantilever span in North America from 1909 to 1917.   The Manhattan Bridge, opened in 1909, is considered to be the forerunner of modern suspension bridges, and its design served as the model for the major long-span suspension bridges of the early 20th century.   The Throgs Neck Bridge and Whitestone Bridge connect Queens and the Bronx, while the Triborough Bridge connects the three boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx.   The Lincoln Tunnel, which carries 120,000 vehicles a day under the Hudson River between New Jersey and Midtown Manhattan, is the busiest vehicular tunnel in the world.   The tunnel was built instead of a bridge to allow unfettered passage of large passenger and cargo ships that sailed through New York Harbor and up the Hudson River to Manhattan's piers.   The Holland Tunnel, connecting Lower Manhattan to Jersey City, New Jersey, was the first mechanically ventilated vehicular tunnel when it opened in 1927.   The Queens–Midtown Tunnel, built to relieve congestion on the bridges connecting Manhattan with Queens and Brooklyn, was the largest non-federal project in its time when it was completed in 1940.   The Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel runs underneath Battery Park and connects the Financial District in Lower Manhattan to Red Hook in Brooklyn.