New York Trivia

Why is NYC Called the Big Apple?
In the 1920s, a sportswriter for the Morning Telegraph named John Fitzgerald overheard stable hands in New Orleans refer to NYC's racetracks as "the Big Apple." He named his column "Around the Big Apple." A decade later, jazz musicians adopted the term to refer to New York City, and especially Harlem, as the jazz capital of the world. There are many apples on the trees of success, they were saying, but when you pick New York City, you pick the big apple.

Why Cabs Are Yellow?
John Hertz, who founded the Yellow Cab Company in 1907, chose yellow because he had read a study conducted by the University of Chicago that indicated it was the easiest color to spot.

Statue of Liberty
The Lady in the Harbor is 101 feet tall from base to torch, 305 feet tall from pedestal foundation to torch.
She has a 35-foot waist and an 8-foot index finger, and she weighs 450,000 pounds.


New York Stock Exchange
The trading area of the New York Stock Exchange is about two-thirds the size of a football field.
The New York Stock Exchange is the world's largest exchange with an annual trading volume of $5.5 trillion.
The New York Stock Exchange began in 1792 when 24 brokers met under a buttonwood tree facing 68 Wall Street.

NYC Fun Facts
Downtown Manhattan was the site of the nation's first capital.
As late as the 1840s, thousands of pigs roamed Wall Street to consume garbage - an early sanitation system.
Under the Dutch, Wall Street - where there really was a wall - was the city limit.
St. Paul's Chapel is Manhattan's oldest public building in continuous use.
New York City's first theater was on Beaver Street.
Forty-six percent of leisure visitors to Downtown come from outside the United States.
When built, 120 Broadway's Equitable Building cast a 7-acre shadow, leading to the creation of zoning setback laws.
In 1664, the city's tallest structure was a 2-story windmill.
Legend has it that Peter Minuit paid $24 in trinkets to purchase the island of Manhattan from Leni Lenape Indians at Bowling Green.
The vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank on Maiden Lane store more than one-quarter of the world's gold bullion.
Without firing a shot, the British seized control of Nieuwe Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664 and renamed it New York City.
A 7,000-pound bronze 'Charging Bull' mysteriously appeared one day in 1989 in front of the New York Stock Exchange - the bull is now at Bowling Green.The Brooklyn Bridge was the first bridge to be lit using electricity.
On completion, the Brooklyn Bridge was the world's longest suspension bridge and the city's tallest structure.
When it built its headquarters at 26 Broadway, Standard Oil Company was the largest U.S. corporation and its founder, John D. Rockefeller, was the wealthiest person in the world.
Phillippe Petit walked a tightrope between the rooftops of the World Trade Center towers in 1974.
The triangular shape of the Flatiron Building (an early skyscraper on 23rd Street) produced wind currents that made women’s skirts billow and caused police to create the term ’23 skiddoo’ to shoo gapers from the area.
In 1898, the five boroughs – The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island – were incorporated into a single entity, known as Greater New York.
There are 6,374.6 miles of streets in New York City.
Broadway's Original Name was the Wiechquaekeck Trail. It was an old Algonquin trade route.
The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the only museum in America dedicated exclusively to medieval art.
The Caribbean Cultural Center is the only cultural organization in the U.S. that represents all of the diverse artistic expressions and traditions of the African Diaspora.
Ellis Island Immigration Station officially opened its doors to the world on Friday, January 1, 1892. Annie Moore, a 15-year-old Irish girl, was the first to be questioned in the immigration station’s second-floor Registry Room.
From 1892 to 1924, 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island.The Titanic was scheduled to arrive at Chelsea Piers on April 16, 1912 at the conclusion of her maiden voyage. Fate intervened, and the “unsinkable” ship struck an iceberg and sank on April 14, 1912. Of the 2,200 passengers aboard, 675 were rescued by the Cunard liner Carpathia, which arrived at the Chelsea Piers on April 20th.

The Numbers:
The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long – 4,260 feet – that the towers are a few inches out of parallel to accommodate the curvature of the earth. New York City has 578 miles of waterfront.
The 2½ mile boardwalk at Staten Island's South Beach (718/390-8000) is the fourth longest in the world.
The New York City Department of Transportation is responsible for approximately 5,700 miles of streets and highways and 753 bridge structures and tunnels.
The world’s largest gothic cathedral is the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine – and it’s still under construction. Its first stone was laid in 1892. The nation’s largest public Halloween parade is the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade
Macy’s, the world’s largest store, covers 2.1 million square feet of space and stocks over 500,000 different items.
The New York Botanical Garden is home to the nation’s largest Victorian glasshouse, the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a New York City landmark that has showcased NYBG’s distinguished tropical, Mediterranean, and desert plant collections since 1902.
The Panorama of the City of New York in the Queens Museum of Art is the world’s largest architectural model, containing 895,000 individual structures at a scale of 1 inch equals 100 feet.

Oldest:
The Sandy Ground Historical Society offers a look at the oldest continuously inhabited free black settlement in the nation.
The oldest schoolhouse still standing, built in 1695, is situated in Historic Richmond Town.
The country’s oldest municipal golf course, opened in 1895, is in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.
Number of bird species in Central Park is 215.

First in the Field:
The Brooklyn Children’s Museum is the world’s first museum for kids.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, America’s first performing arts center, held its first performance on September 23, 1962.
Babe Ruth hit the first home run in Yankee Stadium in the first game ever played there. Opened in 1633 in the Market Field, which is now the financial district, was the first public brewery in America. Colonists loved their beer and often had a mug with their breakfast.