12- The Big Apple is really very big

New York is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States, and is the country's third most populous state. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and shares a water border with Rhode Island as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario. New York is often referred to as New York State to distinguish it from New York City.
New York City, which is the largest city in the United States, is known for its history as a gateway for immigration to the United States and its status as a financial, cultural, transportation, and manufacturing center. It was named after the 17th century Duke of York, James Stuart, future James II and VII of England and Scotland.
When we went to New York City, we visited six famous places: the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chinatown and the United Nations. Here are some more information about these places and some photos which I took during the trip.
1- The Statue of Liberty:
The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World was a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States and is a universal symbol of freedom and democracy. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886, designated as a National Monument in 1924 and restored for her centennial on July 4, 1986.
A "Monument Access" reservation system has been implemented by the National Park Service for visitors who plan on entering the monument. The "Monument Access" Reserved Ticket enables you to visit the museum gallery and pedestal observation levels only. There is no access beyond the top of the statue's pedestal.
2- Ellis Island - Part of Statue of Liberty:
Ellis Island is part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. It was added to the National Park System in May of 1965 and through extensive restoration, its main building opened over a quarter century later on September 10, 1990 as a national museum of immigration. Ellis Island is federal property partly within the territorial jurisdiction of the both the States of New York and New Jersey.
3- The Empire State Building:
At Fifth Avenue and 34th Street stands New York City’s most famous fixture - starring in over 90 movies, a star of gigantic proportions.
Once again the world’s tallest skyscraper in NYC (it was for 40 years until they built the World Trade Center) the symbol of this city was constructed in only two years - 1930 to 31 and the 1,453 foot colossus instantly became a tourist magnet. Even King Kong came to visit!
The epitome of big buildings, billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World at its opening, the Empire State Building broke records in many categories, including height (1250 feet) and construction time (it took only one year and forty-five days to build).Planned during the booming 1920's, it was constructed during the Depression. Largely vacant in its early years, it was said that the building relied on the stream of sightseers to the observation decks to pay its taxes.On July 28, 1945, a ten-ton B-25 bomber, lost in the fog, slammed into the north wall of the 78th and 79th floors. The plane's wings were sheared off by the impact, while the fuselage and other parts tore through inner walls, some parts coming out the opposite side of the building. Despite massive holes in those two walls, as well as damage to two supporting steel beams, there was no important structural damage done to the building.
Details
102 floors / 1252 feet (381 meters) high / Built in just 16 months.
4- Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Met is a universal museum: every category of art in every known medium from every part of the world during every epoch of recorded time is represented here and thus available for contemplation or study -- not in isolation but in comparison with other times, other cultures, and other media.
There are several large museums in New York but the Metropolitan Museum of Art is truly gigantic. From the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, the Met, with its tall columns and windows, immense stairways and water fountains, looks like it could be an emperor’s palace. The size and diversity of the artwork on display is even more impressive; the museum’s collection contains works from every part of the world, spanning the Stone Age to the twentieth century. The Egyptian Art gallery includes a whole temple that was shipped to America as a gift.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue. John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum, served as its first President, and the publisher George Palmer Putnam was its founding Superintendent. In 1873, occasioned by the Met's purchase of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot antiquities, the museum took up temporary residence at the Douglas Mansion on West 14th Street; after negotiations with the City of New York, the Met acquired land on the east side of Central Park, where it built its permanent home, a red-brick Gothic Revival stone "mausoleum" designed by American architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould.[5] The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986.[6]HYPERLINK \l "cite_note-nrhpinv-6"[7]HYPERLINK \l "cite_note-nrhpphotos-7"[8]
5- Chinatown :
New York City’s Chinatown, the largest Chinatown in the United States—and the site of the largest concentration of Chinese in the western hemisphere—is located on the lower east side of Manhattan. Its two square miles are loosely bounded by Kenmore and Delancey streets on the north, East and Worth streets on the south, Allen street on the east, and Broadway on the west. With a population estimated between 70,000 and 150,000, Chinatown is the favored destination point for Chinese immigrants, though in recent years the neighborhood has also become home to Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos among others.
Today’s Chinatown is a tightly-packed yet sprawling neighborhood which continues to grow rapidly despite the satellite Chinese communities flourishing in Queens. Both a tourist attraction and the home of the majority of Chinese New Yorkers, Chinatown offers visitor and resident alike hundreds of restaurants, booming fruit and fish markets and shops of knickknacks and sweets on torturously winding and overcrowded streets.
6- The United Nations:
The United Nations was founded as a successor to the League of Nations, which was widely considered to have been ineffective in its role as an international governing body insofar as it had been unable to prevent World War II.
The term "United Nations" was decided by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston ChurchillHYPERLINK \l "cite_note-0"[1] during World War II, to refer to the Allies. Its first formal use was in the 1 January 1942 Declaration by the United Nations, which committed the Allies to the principles of the Atlantic Charter and pledged them not to seek a separate peace with the Axis powers. Thereafter, the Allies used the term "United Nations Fighting Forces" to refer to their alliance.
The idea for the UN was adopted in declarations signed at the wartime Allied conferences in Moscow, Cairo, and Tehran in 1943. From August to October 1944, representatives of the Republic of China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union met to elaborate the plans at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C.HYPERLINK \l "cite_note-UN-History_of_the_UN-1"[2] Those and later talks produced proposals outlining the purposes of the organization, its membership and organs, and arrangements to maintain international peace and security and international economic and social cooperation.
On 25 April 1945, the UN Conference on International Organization began in San Francisco. In addition to the governments, a number of non-governmental organizations were invited to assist in drafting the charter. The 50 nations represented at the conference signed the Charter of the United Nations two months later on 26 June. Poland had not been represented at the conference, but a place had been reserved for it among the original signatories, and it added its name later. The UN came into existence on 24 October 1945, after the Charter had been ratified by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the Republic of China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States — and by a majority of the other 46 signatories. That these countries are the permanent members of the Security Council, and have veto power on any Security Council resolution, reflects that they are the main victors of World War II or their successor states: the People's Republic of China replaced the Republic of China in 1971 and Russia replaced the Soviet Union in 1991.[3]
Initially, the body was known as the United Nations Organization, or UNO. However, by the 1950s, English speakers were referring to it as the United Nations, or the UN. In many other languages it is called ONU (Organisation des Nations Unies in French, Organización de las Naciones Unidas in Spanish, Organizzazione delle Nazioni Unite in Italian, Organização das Nações Unidas in Portuguese, and Organizaţia Naţiunilor Unite in Romanian).