Imperial City

If you think about it, the composition of New York City is crazy -- five counties of varying sizes and shapes, a collection of forty-something islands in a political mishmash, the map of which looks like some kind of modern art masterpiece. 

That's because NYC isn't really a city at all -- it's an empire, an Imperial City.

Prior to 1898, NYC was limited to Manhattan and large swaths of the Bronx (it included villages that had been incorporated). Brooklyn was its own large city. Queens and Richmond (now Staten Island) were like the counties upstate and on Long Island, a collection of towns and villages.

Consolidation, obviously, changed all that, making the political marriage of these cities and counties into one whole place called Greater New York -- but it was not a marriage of five equals. Manhattan, pre-1898 New York City, basically annexed its neighbors with political and economic pressure the same way the other powerful countries have (peacefully and violently) absorbed foreign lands, turning their solitary realms into expansive empires (think Tsarist Russia or Austria-Hungary). 

Today, we take it for granted that NYC is the way it is, the biggest city (by far) in the country, one of the greatest in the entire world. But our Imperial City was not always destined to be so -- it was a long, brutal, slog, and was largely the vision of one man, Andrew Haswell Green.

I've blogged about how consolidation happened before (most recently in 2017) but what I never appreciated until now how this city really does resemble an empire -- and how comparing NYC to any other city in the country is really an exercise in futility. It's so much larger, so much more complex, than any other city in the USA that it's like comparing an calculus problem to an algebra problem -- it's in a different league of complexity.

And, in some ways, geographically, NYC is like many great empires with a core city or country (Manhattan) with territories that spread out in multiple-directions beyond its borders. 

Think I'm wrong? Just think about how we talk about the "outer-boroughs" vs. Manhattan (which I guess we should call the "inner-borough"), think about the understated resentment that exists between Manhattanites and non-Manhattanites, between the "bridge-and-tunnel" crowd and those who live in, and refer to, "the city." 

That's what makes empire and what makes NYC America's Imperial City, a mini-empire inside a country that, if you think about it, is an empire as well.