Welcome to New York! The state so nice, it was covered in ice (until 22,000 years ago).
To your left you can see what the map of NY’s congressional districts looked like in 2008. If you look up, you’ll see the current CDs scraping the sky. We have 27 districts. Howaboutdat!
12 of our 27 districts are in New York City (5-16 roughly speaking).
Did you know that every faucet in NYC serves the champagne of tap waters? And they run 24x7.
So what is New York about?
We’ve got Niagara Falls (so named by the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois), we’ve got the Finger Lakes (best Riesling in the country!), the Adirondacks (hike the High Peaks!), and the Catskills (Nobody puts baby in a corner! and Woodstock!). We’ve got Lake George (Andiatarocte to the Mohawk), Lake Placid (John Brown is buried here but his soul keeps marching on), the Thousand Islands (Manitouana to the Haudenosaunee), West Point and the Hudson River. The Mohican tribe called the Hudson the Muhheakunnetuk, or “river that flows two ways”. That’s because the lower half is virtually flat (2ft elevation at Troy), making it a tidal estuary sitting in a fjord. The Hudson is also called a “drowned river”, the rising tide sends salt water all the way up to Troy, a 150 miles north of NYC! And yes Virginia, we have fjords in New York, morther nature carved out some skyscrapers for us too! Alexander Hamilton died on the banks of the Hudson. We’ve also got some of the best public beaches in the world, plus the Hamptons!
Oh yeah, almost forgot, we also have New York City. That means we’ve got Central Park, Van Cortlandt park, Prospect Park, Alley Pond Park has the oldest tree in New York, it’s 400 years old. We’ve got Hell’s Kitchen, Washington Heights, and Harlem, which used to be the Dutch village of Haarleem, just as the city itself was New Amsterdam before it was New York, and it was Manhattan to the Lenape before that. We’ve got a county for Kings, and a county for Queens, two baseball teams, two basketball teams, two airports (three if you count Newark, five if you count Teeterboro and Westchester) five boroughs, and I’m sure we have hobbits, because Frodo Lives!. We’ve got the Empire State Building, the Verrazano Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, a bridge (renamed) for RFK, the Throgs Neck Bridge and the Whitestone Bridge and a bridge for Ed Koch. The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority is a front for the Men in Black. We’ve got Times Square, Broadway, the West Village, the East Village, Chelsea, the Bowery, Madison Ave, Fifth Ave, the Avenue of the Americas, the meatpacking district and Soho. We’ve got the place where Lincoln gave the speech that sent him to the White House, and after that we built Union Square, Grant’s Tomb, and Grand Army Plaza. We’ve got Loisaida, and Alphabet City, Sugar Hill and Spanish Harlem, we’ve got hipsters and hasidim in Williamsburg, Greenpoint used to be Polish now it’s condos, Bay Ridge is still Italian, and Bayside used to be but the Koreans are moving in. Flushing is Asian and Astoria is still kinda Greek Opa!, Elmhurst’s little public library has books in dozens of languages and Jackson Heights has the rest, the Russians are in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn Heights is genteel and Park Slope has valet parking for strollers. The longshoremen are long gone from Red Hook, Bushwick is still edgy, Bed-Stuy is gentrifying and East New York may someday too. We’ve got Columbia, NYU, Cooper Union and FIT, CUNY (25 colleges, 400,000 students), Fordham and the New School (Bernie’s an alum, it’s a socialist utopia in the den of Mammon and Senator Bob Kerrey was once it’s president). We had Zika and Ebola, and everyone still rides the subway! Coz you only live once.
You name it, we got it. And I’m not even going to start on the art, or the literature, or the music, or the fashion, or the money.
We’ve sent a half dozen presidents to DC (you’re welcome America). Grover Cleveland was sworn in twice, but he won the popular vote three times! Teddy Roosevelt had the best result of any third-party candidate in a Presidential election, plus he was fit as a Bull Moose. We sent Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rescue the country from the Great Depression and you liked him so much you elected him four times! Then you had to amend the constitution to make sure no one ever did that again.
And I’m leaving out a lot of stuff so we can begin to…