Manhattan (coterminous with New York County) is one of the five boroughs of New York City. With a 2007 population of 1,620,867 living in a land area of 22.96 square miles (59.47 km²), it is the most densely populated county in the United States at 70,595 residents per square mile (27,267/km²). It is also the wealthiest county in the United States, with a 2005 personal per capita income above $100,000. The borough consists of Manhattan Island, Roosevelt Island, Randalls Island, almost one-tenth of Ellis Island, the above-water portion of Liberty Island, several much smaller islands, and a small section on the mainland of New York State adjacent to the Bronx.
Manhattan is a major commercial, financial, and cultural center of the United States and the world. Most major radio, television, and telecommunications companies in the United States are based here, as well as many news, magazine, book, and other media publishers. Manhattan has many famous landmarks, tourist attractions, museums, and universities. It is also home to the headquarters of the United Nations. Manhattan has the largest central business district in the United States, is the site of both the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, and is the home to the largest number of corporate headquarters in t
he nation. It is indisputably the center of New York City and the New York metropolitan region, holding the seat of city government, and the largest fraction of employment, business, and recreational activities.
The name Manhattan derives from the word Manna-hata, as written in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on Henry Hudson's yacht Halve Maen (Half Moon). A 1610 map depicts the name Manahata twice, on both the west and east sides of the Mauritius River (later named the Hudson River). The word "Manhattan" has been translated as "island of many hills" from the Lenape language. The Encyclopedia of New York City offers other derivations, including from the Munsee dialect of Lenape: manahachtanienk ("place of general inebriation"), manahatouh ("place where timber is procured for bows and arrows"), or menatay ("island").
Manhattan has been the scene of many important American cultural movements. In 1912, about 20,000 workers, a quarter of them women, marched on Washington Square Park to commemorate the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 workers on March 25, 1911. Many of the women wore fitted tucked-front blouses like those manufactured by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a clothing style that became the working woman's uniform and a symbol of female independence, reflecting the alliance of labor and suffrage movements. The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s established the African-American literary canon in the United States. Manhattan's vibrant visual art scene in the 1950s and 1960s was a center of the American pop art movement, which gave birth to such giants as Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Perhaps no other artist is as associated with the downtown pop art movement of the late 1970s as Andy Warho
l, who socialized at clubs like Serendipity 3 and Studio 54.
A popular haven for art, the downtown neighborhood of Chelsea is widely known for its galleries and cultural events, with more than 200 art galleries that are home to modern art from upcoming artists and respected artists as well.
Broadway theatre is often considered the highest professional form of theatre in the United States. Plays and musicals are staged in one of the 39 larger professional theatres with at least 500 seats, almost all in and around Times Square. Off-Broadway theatres feature productions in venues with 100-500 seats. A little more than a mile from Times Square is the Lincoln Center, home to one of the world's most prestigious opera houses, that of the Metropolitan Opera.
Manhattan is also home to some of the most extensive art collections, both contemporary and historical, in the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum.
Manhattan is the borough most closely associated with New York City by non-residents; even some natives of New York City's outer boroughs will describe a trip to Manhattan as "going to the city".
The borough has a place in several American idioms. The phrase "a New York minute" is meant to convey a very short period of time, sometimes in hyperbolic form, as in "perhaps faster than you would believe is possible". It refers to the rapid pace of life in Manhattan. The term "melting pot" was first popularly coined to describe the densely populated immigrant neighborhoods on the Lower East Side in Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot, which was an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet set by Zangwill in New York City in 1908. Th
e iconic Flatiron Building is said to have been the source of the phrase "23 skidoo" or scram, from what cops would shout at men who tried to get glimpses of women's dresses being blown up by the winds created by the triangular building. The "Big Apple" dates back to the 1920s, when a reporter heard the term used by New Orleans stablehands to refer to New York City's racetracks and named his racing column "Around The Big Apple." Jazz musicians adopted the term to refer to the city as the world's jazz capital, and a 1970s ad campaign by the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau helped popularize the term.
