Tourism in New York City

The Circle Line XVII touring the Harlem River

European visitors at Rockaways shore

Tourists gather round a busker in Columbus Circle

Tourism in New York City includes nearly 47 million foreign and American tourists each year. Major destinations include the Empire State Building, Ellis Island, Broadway theatre productions, museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other tourist attractions including Central Park, Washington Square Park, Rockefeller Center, Times Square, the Bronx Zoo, South Street Seaport, New York Botanical Garden, luxury shopping along Fifth and Madison Avenues, and events such as the Tribeca Film Festival, and free performances in Central Park at Summerstage and Delacorte Theater. The Statue of Liberty is a major tourist attraction and one of the most recognizable icons of the United States. Many New York City ethnic enclaves, such as Jackson Heights, Flushing, and Brighton Beach are major shopping destinations for first and second generation Americans up and down the East Coast.

New York City has over 28,000 acres (110 km2) of parkland and 14 linear miles (22 km) of public beaches. Manhattan's Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, is the most visited city park in the United States. Prospect Park in Brooklyn, also designed by Olmsted and Vaux, has a 90 acres (36 ha) meadow.Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, the city's third largest, was the setting for the 1939 World's Fair and 1964 World's Fair.

New York's food culture, influenced by the city's immigrants and large number of dining patrons, is diverse. Jewish and Italian immigrants made the city famous for bagels, cheesecake and New York-style pizza. Some 4,000 mobile food vendors licensed by the city, many immigrant-owned[clarification needed], have made Middle Eastern foods such as falafel and kebabs standbys of contemporary New York street food. The city is also home to many of the finest haute cuisine restaurants in the United States.

The famed Dakota on Central Park West

View from Central Park of buildings along Central Park South, including Essex House

Tour guide lecturing in Italian at Morris-Jumel Mansion

Sporting events are also tourist events. Major venues include Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, and Madison Square Garden. Street fairs and street events such as the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village, and New York Marathon also attract tourists.

Industry

Tourism in New York City is a large industry. According to NYC & Company (the official destination marketing organization for the city of New York), the top producing countries for international visitors to New York City in 2005 were the United Kingdom (1,169,000), Canada (815,000), Germany (401,000), Japan (299,000), Italy (292,000), France (268,000), Ireland (253,000), Australia (235,000), Spain (205,000), Greece (148,000), and the Netherlands (147,000).

Unlike many other destinations, New York City does not have a distinctive tourist season. With the exception of slight peaks around Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's, visitor arrival rates are roughly the same year-round. New York also has one of the highest hotel-occupancy rates in the country. Arrivals have remained relatively high even since the global economic crisis, due to heavy discounting and value-added pricing.

Spearheading the city's tourism efforts is NYC & Company, the city's official convention and visitor bureau currently headed by George Fertitta. It has offices in 14 countries, including Argentina, Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Japan, Korea and China. NYC & Company is the official source of tourism statistics for the city. The research department develops and distributes comprehensive information on NYC domestic and international visitor statistics and monitors the travel industry's impact on New York City's economy. The department also produces 14 official New York City tourism marketing publications that feature information on member hotels, museums, attractions, theaters, stores, restaurants, meeting venues, and service providers.

Double decker tour buses and boats with tour guides bring sightseers to various parts of Manhattan and other boroughs, while pedicabs and horse cabs serve those with a taste for more personal service. More adventurous tourists rent bicycles at neighborhood shops or along the Hudson River Greenway or simply walk, which is often the quickest way to get around in congested, busy commercial districts and always the best way to appreciate street life.

Many visitors investigate their genealogy at historic immigration sites such as Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Other tourist destinations include the Empire State Building, for 41 years the world's tallest building after its construction in 1931, Radio City Music Hall, home of The Rockettes, a variety of Broadway shows, the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, housed on a World War II aircraft carrier, and city landmarks such as Central Park, one of the finest examples of landscape architecture in the world. New York City has encouraged tourist shopping by eliminating its sales tax on clothing and footwear.

The World Trade Center was an important tourist destination before the September 11, 2001 attacks, which devastated the city and its tourist industry. Tourists were scarce for months, and it took two years for the numbers to fully rebound with fewer international, but more domestic visitors, due in part to an emphasis on "patriotic tourism". The World Trade Center site itself became an important place to visit.

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New York City Tourism Statistics

Year	Total Visitors (millions)	Domestic Visitors	International Visitors	Total Visitor Spending Billions(US$)
1991	29.1	23.6	5.5	10.1
1995	28.5	23.1	5.4	11.7
1998	33.1	27.1	6.0	14.7
1999	36.4	29.8	6.6	15.6
2000	36.2	29.4	6.8	17.0
2001	35.2	29.5	5.7	15.1
2002	35.3	30.2	5.1	14.1
2003	37.8	33.0	4.8	18.5
2004	39.9	33.8	6.2	21.1
2005	42.6	35.8	6.8	22.8
2006	43.8	36.5	7.3	24.7
2007	46.0	37.1	8.8	28.9
2008	47.0	37.2	9.8	30.0

(source:wikipedia)

Silicon Alley

Silicon Alley is a nickname for an area with a concentration of Internet and new media companies in Manhattan, New York City. Originally, the term referred to the cluster of such companies extending from the Flatiron District down to SoHo and TriBeCa along the Broadway corridor, but as the location of these companies spread out, it became a general term referring to the dot com industry in New York City as a whole.

The term was in most common use in the late 1990s, when companies such as Agency.com, Razorfish, Medscape, inet-d and The Mining Company (now About.com), became success stories with successful private buyouts or IPOs.

The first publication to cover Silicon Alley was @NY, an online newsletter founded in the summer of 1995 by Tom Watson and Jason Chervokas. The first magazine to focus on the venture capital opportunities in Silicon Alley, AlleyCat News co-founded by Anna Copeland Wheatley and Janet Stites, was launched in the fall of 1996. Courtney Pulitzer branched off from her @The Scene column with @NY and created Courtney Pulitzer's Cyber Scene and her popular networking events Cocktails with Courtney. First Tuesday, co-founded by Vincent Grimaldi de Puget and John Grossbart, became the largest gathering of Silicon Alley, welcoming 500 to 1000 venture capitalists and entrepreneurs every month. It was an initiative of law firm Sonnenschein and the Kellogg School of Management, as well as other corporate founders, including Accenture (then Andersen Consulting), AlleyCat News and Merrill Lynch. Silicon Alley Reporter started publishing in October 1996. It was founded by Jason Calacanis and was in business from 1996-2001. @NY, print magazines, and the attending media coverage by the larger New York press helped to popularize both the name, and the idea of New York City as a dot-com center.

In 1997, over 200 members and leaders of Silicon Alley joined NYC entrepreneurs, Andrew Rasiej and Cecilia Pagkalinawan to help wire Washington Irving High School to the internet. This response and the Department of Education's growing need for technology integration marked the birth of MOUSE, an organization that today serves tens of thousands of underserved youth in schools in five states and over 20 countries. After the bubble burst, Silicon Alley Reporter was rebranded as Venture Reporter in September 2001 and sold to Dow Jones. Self-financed AlleyCat News ceased publication in October 2001.

A couple of years after the internet bust, Silicon Alley began making its comeback with the help of NY Tech meetup and NextNY. Since 2003 Silicon Alley has seen a steady growth in the number of start-ups and has joined the ranks of Boston and San Francisco as one of the three leading technology centers in the United States. As of 2007 Google's second largest office is located in New York. And, as of 2009, New York's Silicon Alley has become the startup leader in advertising, new media, financial technologies such as Eyeblaster, DoubleClick, Roo, IAC, meetup.com and a slew of web 2.0 companies. According to the National Venture Capital Association, 247 venture capital deals worth $1.4 billion closed in New York in 2009, despite the recession and rocky market. New York still ranks third behind Silicon Valley and Boston in the number of deals and overall investment rates, but New York is holding its own against the other big hubs and possibly beginning to increase its share.

Silicon Alley has also become the home to a significant number of European, Australian, and particularly Israeli startups that have taken advantage of New York City's central location and the 7 hours time difference between the developing team in Israel and the business team in New York that is more manageable than the 10 hours difference between Israel and California's Silicon Valley.

The name is derived from Silicon Valley, California.

See also

History of internet

(source:wikipedia)

Economy of New York

Rockefeller Center

New York's economy is dominated by New York City but has other productive cities, suburbs and rural areas. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis the Total Personal Income of the state in 2007 was $847 billion.

During the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, New York was the largest economy within the USA. The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that in 2005, the total gross state product was $963.5 billion, ranking 3rd behind California and Texas. If New York were a nation, it would rank as the 16th largest economy in the world, behind South Korea. The state economy grew 3.3%, slightly slower than the 3.5% growth rate for the US. It was the 25th fastest growing economy in the US in 2005. Its 2005 per capita personal income was $50,038, an increase of 5.9% from 2004, placing it 5th in the nation behind Massachusetts, and 8th in the world behind Ireland. New York's agricultural outputs are dairy products, cattle and other livestock, vegetables, nursery stock, and apples. Its industrial outputs are printing and publishing, scientific instruments, electric equipment, machinery, and chemical products.

New York City dominates the economy of the state. It is the leading center of banking, finance and communication in the United States and is the location of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Wall Street, Manhattan. Many of the world's largest corporations locate their home offices in Manhattan or in nearby Westchester County, New York.

Further information: Economy of New York City

The state also has a large manufacturing sector which includes printing and the production of garments, furs, railroad rolling stock, and bus line vehicles. Some industries are concentrated in upstate locations also, such as ceramics (the southern tier of counties), microchips and nanotechnology (Albany), and photographic equipment (Rochester).

Long Island

Main article: Economy of Long Island

The counties of Nassau and Suffolk have long been renowned for their affluence. Long Island has a very high standard of living with residents paying some of the highest property taxes in the country. In opulent pockets of the North Shore of Long Island and South Shore, assets have passed from one generation to the next over time.

From about 1930 to about 1990, Long Island was considered one of the aviation centers of the United States, with companies such as Grumman Aircraft having their headquarters and factories in the Bethpage area. Grumman was long a major supplier of Carrier-based aircraft.

Long Island is home to the East Coast's largest industrial park, the Hauppauge Industrial Park. The park has over 1,300 tenant companies employing over 55,000 Long Islanders.

Long Island has played a prominent role in scientific research and in engineering. It was the home of the Brookhaven National Laboratories in nuclear physics and Department of Energy research. In recent decades companies such as Sperry Rand and Computer Associates, headquartered in Islandia, have made Long Island a center for the computer industry. Gentiva Health Services, a national provider of home health and pharmacy services, also is headquartered in Long Island.

Tourism is a good part of the Long Island economy in certain regions. Tourism thrives primarily in the summer, especially on the east end of Suffolk County, which is known for fishing villages, quaint towns, ferries across to Connecticut or other northern states, and for wineries. Golf, equestrian, boating, and surfing attract many tourists. The eastern end of the island is still partly agricultural, now including many vineyards and pumpkin farms as well as traditional truck farming.

Fishing also continues to be an important industry, especially at Northport and Montauk. A moderately large saltwater commercial fishery operates on the Atlantic side of Long Island. The principal catches by value are clams, lobsters, squid, and flounder. There was in past centuries a large oyster fishery in New York waters as well, but at present, oysters comprise only a small portion of the total value of seafood harvested.

Perhaps the best known aspect of the fishing sector is the famous Fulton Fish Market in New York City, which distributes not only the New York catch but imported seafood from all over the world. At the turn of the 21st century the market moved from Fulton Street in Manhattan to The Bronx.

Mining

New York's mining sector is concentrated in three areas. The first is near New York City. Primarily, this area specializes in construction materials for use in the city, but it also contains the emery mines south of Peekskill in Westchester County, one of two locations in the U.S. where that mineral is extracted. The second area is the Adirondack Mountains. This is an area of very specialized products, including talc, industrial garnets, and zinc. The Adirondacks are not part of the Appalachian system, despite their location, but are structurally part of the mineral-rich Canadian Shield. In the inland southwestern part of the state, in the Allegheny Plateau, is a region of drilled wells. The only major liquid output at present is salt in the form of brine; however, there are also small to moderate petroleum reserves in this area. New York produced 211,292,000 barrels (33,592,700 m3) of crude oil and 55.2 billion cubic feet (1.56×109 m3) of natural gas in 2005 worth $440M. 1.58 billion gallons of Salt Brine were produced in 2005 at a value of about $100M. Geothermal energy potential is being explored in the state, with 24 drilling applications being submitted to the Division of Mineral Resources in 2005.

Exports

New York exports a wide variety of goods such as foodstuffs, commodities, minerals, manufactured goods, cut diamonds, and automobile parts. New York's top five export markets in 2004 were Canada ($30.2 billion), United Kingdom ($3.3 billion), Japan ($2.6 billion), Israel ($2.4 billion), and Switzerland ($1.8 billion). New York's largest imports are oil, gold, aluminum, natural gas, electricity, rough diamonds, and lumber.

Canada has become a very important economic partner of New York. 23% of the state's total worldwide exports went to Canada in 2004. Tourism also constitutes a significant part of the economy. Canadians tourists spent $487 million in New York in 2004. This figure is predicted to increase due to the stronger Canadian dollar.

Agriculture

Dairy farm in Brunswick

The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, opened eastern markets to Midwest farm products. The canal also contributed to the growth of New York City, helped create large cities, and encouraged immigration to the state. Except in the mountain regions, the areas between cities are agriculturally rich. The Finger Lakes region has orchards producing apples, which are one of New York's leading crops. The state is known for wines produced at vineyards in the Finger Lakes region and Long Island. The state also produces other crops, especially grapes, strawberries, cherries, pears, onions, and potatoes. New York is a major supplier of maple syrup and is the third leading producer of dairy goods in the United States.

According to the Department of Agriculture and Markets, New York's agricultural production returned more than $3.6 billion to the farm economy in 2005. 35,600 farms occupy 7.55 million acres (31,000 km²), or about 25 percent of the state’s land area, to produce an array of food products. Here are some of the items in which New York ranks high nationally:

New York is an agricultural leader and is one of the top five states for agricultural products, including dairy, apples, cherries, cabbages, potatoes, onions, maple syrup and many others. The state is the largest producer of cabbage in the U.S. The state has about a quarter of its land in farms and produced $3.4 billion in agricultural products in 2001. The south shore of Lake Ontario provides the right mix of soils and microclimate for apple, cherry, plum, pear and peach orchards. Apples are also grown in the Hudson Valley and near Lake Champlain. The south shore of Lake Erie and the southern Finger Lakes hillsides have vineyards. New York is the nation's third-largest grape-producing state, after California and Washington, and second largest wine producer by volume. In 2004, New York's wine and grape industry brought $6 billion into the state economy. The state has 30,000 acres (120 km²) of vineyards, 212 wineries, and produced 200 million bottles of wine in 2004.

New York was heavily glaciated in the ice age leaving much of the state with deep, fertile, though somewhat rocky soils. Row crops, including hay, corn, wheat, oats, barley, and soybeans, are grown. Particularly in the western part of the state, sweet corn, peas, carrots, squash, cucumbers and other vegetables are grown. The Hudson and Mohawk Valleys are known for pumpkins and blueberries. The glaciers also left numerous swampy areas, which have been drained for the rich humus soils called muckland which is mostly used for onions, potatoes, celery and other vegetables. Dairy farms are present throughout much of the state. Cheese is a major product, often produced by Amish or Mennonite farm cheeseries. New York is rich in nectar-producing plants and is a major honey-producing state. The honeybees are also used for pollination of fruits and vegetables. Most commercial beekeepers are migratory, taking their hives to southern states for the winter. Most cities have Farmers' markets which are well supplied by local farmers.

(source:wikipedia)