An often ignored force of change in New York is the constant internal migration it attracts. Over the years a large proportion of America’s brightest and most ambitious and driven individuals have been drawn to Manhattan. New York displaced Boston as the national cultural centre as early as the mid-19th century, as its newspapers, magazines, and artistic freedom lured the different-minded. By 1900 both Mark Twain and William Dean Howells had found it necessary to live in New York, and Greenwich Village emerged as a haven for nonconformity before World War I. Modern sculpture, Beat poetry, and Abstract Expressionism are only three of the 20th-century artistic movements that trace their origins to the Village scene.

After 1900 the largest group of internal refugees were African Americans fleeing the restrictions of life in the rural South. New York was one of their preferred destinations, and the growth of Harlem as the “Black metropolis” was the unintended result. In the first decade of the 20th century, the Afro-American Realty Company began to rent homes to Black Americans in what was then a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood, and the churches they attended downtown soon relocated to the north. Growing ethnic and economic hostility led to a white exodus, although East Harlem did remain largely Italian, and by 1930 more than 200,000 Black Americans lived in Harlem. Their artistic talents led to the Harlem Renaissance, and their musicians were leaders of the Jazz Age, but the reality remained that the Harlem they dominated was becoming the largest disadvantaged neighbourhood in the city. The Great Depression destroyed economic opportunity, and high rents forced the subdivision of apartments. Harlem endured a long decline from which it did not emerge until the 1990s.

Some white ethnics found no difficulty in deciding that African Americans were ignorant, lazy, and prone to engage in criminal activities. As the first large group entitled to the social reforms of the New Deal era, African Americans were accused of being parasitic users of the welfare system. Similar accusations were later directed at Puerto Ricans, long a presence in the city but whose numbers soared after World War II. However, within a generation, the influx of Dominicans, Cubans, Colombians, and, more recently, Mexicans and Ecuadorans altered the fabric of New York in an unexpected manner. In the 1990s the Hispanic population of the city grew by about 400,000; between 2010 and 2020 that component of the city’s population expanded by more than 150,000. Today some 2.5 million New Yorkers of Hispanic origin constitute the largest single group in the city, and it is estimated that nearly one-fourth of the city speaks Spanish at home. At times there have been tensions between Black Americans and Latinx, reflecting the tendency of one wave of early migrants to disdain those who come later.

Early industries

The seal of the city of New York, adopted in 1686, includes the beaver and the flour barrel, images that document the first major phase of Manhattan’s economic history. New Amsterdam was important to the Dutch because it offered access to the immensely valuable fur trade of a continent. One of the richest men in 19th-century New York was John Jacob Astor, whose fortune was based on fur before he became a real estate speculator. After the British conquest in 1664, the city won a monopoly to grind and pack grain and sent its flour to all world markets. Merchant incomes soared as commerce, both legitimate and via smuggling, became the lifeblood of New York. Any threat to city prosperity was harshly dealt with, and William Kidd’s turn from privateering to piracy led him to the gallows (in London) in 1701.

Shipping and transportation

The shipping enterprise has always characterized New York. Its Dutch-English merchant class dominated the colonial assembly and after 1756 controlled the annual salary grant awarded to the royal governor. A group of 20 merchants organized the country’s first chamber of commerce (1768) at a time when small manufacturing establishments—cloth, timber processing, ropes, and sails—were becoming more common. Rapidly overcoming years of British occupation during the American Revolution, the city filled Caribbean, European, and coastal ports with its vessels within a decade of independence. New Yorkers were the ones who sent the Empress of China on its historic first voyage to East Asia in 1784, and Manhattan was the national leader in both exports and imports by the late 1790s. When inventor Robert Fulton’s steamboat, the Clermont, made its first trip to Albany in 32 hours in 1807, it revolutionized transportation. New York launched the first scheduled shipping to Europe, and its thriving boatyards constructed every type of vessel from harbour lighters to inland steamers to transatlantic passenger ships. Walt Whitman was enthralled by the “tall masts” that turned South Street into a forest. The yacht America (1851), first winner of the race henceforth called America’s Cup, was built there as were many of the fabled clipper ships, the fastest sailing vessels in history. From 1830 until the 1950s New York ranked as the busiest port in the world.

Banking and finance

Commercial banking began in Manhattan in 1784 when the Bank of New York opened for business. It was soon joined by a branch of the First Bank of the United States (1792) and the Manhattan Company (1799), ancestor of what is now The Chase Manhattan Corporation. The origins of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) can be traced to the Buttonwood Agreement of 1792, although the Exchange Board itself was not organized until 1817. After the Erie Canal opened in 1825, banking services became even more centred in the city, and when its merchants entered the cotton trade the commerce of the entire nation flowed into the port. Several financial panics in the 19th century could not prevent the city from dominating the national money markets. Investors and banks from the metropolis provided much of the capital that financed the industrialization of the United States. So great was the influence of New York that the country’s largest firms found it expedient to locate their headquarters there even though—as with Carnegie Steel, American Tobacco, and Standard Oil—the focus of their manufacturing was elsewhere.

The development of industry and trade

Shipping and finance secured New York’s international standing, but manufacturing provided jobs for its teeming population. A multitude of small businesses were centred in Manhattan by the 1850s, and the clothing, furniture, pianos, cigars, and dozens of other products they created boosted city exports. By mid-century New York was the printing centre of the United States with more than 1,000 establishments; in the period 1865–85 the number of magazines published in the city quintupled to 3,300. The influx of skilled Jewish immigrants transformed an already dominant clothing industry into a gargantuan one, employing nearly half of all city workers by 1910. Thus, the interaction of capital, cheap labour, access to raw materials, entrepreneurial initiative, and transportation facilities made New York the ideal place of business. It quickly developed advertising, insurance, and legal services to deal with the needs of its burgeoning manufacturing sector.

The centre of business

By the beginning of the 20th century, New York was the headquarters for more than two-thirds of the top 100 American corporations, and its 25,000 factories manufactured several hundred different industrial products. It led the nation in total factory workers, number of factories, capital valuation, and product value. New York held its leadership position for another three generations and provided nearly one million industrial jobs into the 1950s. In 1960–75 the city lost more than 600,000 of these jobs, as its old economy collapsed and an information age took shape. Banking and financial services became the new engine of development—abetted by the traditional print and advertising sectors of the economy—while white-collar workers with computer skills replaced most of the blue-collar labourers of the past. In the early 2020s, 45 Fortune 500 companies called New York home, and the city contained a talent pool of some 330,000 financial workers. Although much has been made of the move of clothing production out of New York, more fashion design and retail firms are based in New York than in any other American city. Moreover, the roughly 180,000 individuals who worked in the industry in the second decade of the 21st century constituted about 6 percent of the city’s workers.

The 1970s represented a low point for New York. Its national reputation collapsed as the government experienced virtual bankruptcy. High rents, congestion, arson, and crime led to an exodus by businesses and the middle class even after the city began the rebuilding process. Industrial parks, where businesses were given cheaper rents, better utilities, and safety, were authorized in response to the crisis, and major tax incentives were granted to those corporations that remained in the city. The NYSE even threatened to leave, but in the late 1990s it agreed to remain in Manhattan and to construct a new facility. By constantly enhancing its key economic advantages, New York has remained prosperous even as it underwent change, its strength lying in its diversity..

The Port of New York and New Jersey, where facilities were outmoded and corruption endemic, converted its docks for containerized shipping and dredged deeper channels. Old piers were dismantled or converted to other uses, such as amusement centres. Although the port lost some percentage of its shipping to other cities, it is still the busiest port on the East Coast and the third largest in the United States. It generates billions of dollars of revenue and creates thousands of jobs. Major container terminals are located on Staten Island and in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Red Hook and Manhattan also have major passenger ship terminals.

. While the ready-made clothing industry remains important in New York, other traditional manufactures have declined significantly. However, they have been replaced by a growing number of advanced manufacturing companies that use new technologies (from 3D printing to robotic automation) to produce a wide range of products in new or revamped and repurposed production hubs such as the Brooklyn Army Terminal. As the “knowledge economy” took hold in the 21st century, New York evolved into one of the country’s leading centres for technology-based start-up companies (many of them software producers), and it has retained its prime position as a site for creative businesses such as advertising, motion picture and video production, sound recording, and all varieties of design. New York is also one of the countries leading centres of health care and medical and scientific research, boasting a number of major academic medical centres, including Weill Cornell Medical College, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the medical schools of New York and Columbia universities.

The city’s continuing financial supremacy was apparent in the 1990s, a decade in which the Dow Jones average quadrupled, and profits for the members of the NYSE soared. New York marketed its monetary expertise to the globe. Its banks dealt with the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s as well as the Asian financial meltdown of the late 1990s, and in the process the city became the “economic capital of the world.” Even after the catastrophic financial crisis that gave rise to the Great Recession of 2007–09, New York City remained the epicentre of international finance. The vast numbers of bars, restaurants, hotels, health clubs, and theatres across New York that care for and feed the millions of visitors who come to the city annually underwent their own existential crisis during the economic lockdown imposed to combat the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic, the first cases of which had been reported in China in December 2019.