Building the NYC Empire

Part of what makes New York City fascinating -- but also sometimes tough to talk about and understand -- is that this "city" isn't really a city in the traddional sense. The Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries define a city simply as a "large or important municipality in the U.S. governed under a charter granted by the state." 

That's it. And NYC certainly fits that definition.

But its size and geography and population make it unlike most other cities, both in the United States and the world at large. (This list gives 10 examples of the differences between NYC and just about every other city in the world.) As I've blogged about before, NYC isn't a single city -- its several cities joined up together. 

And that's what makes NYC not a city but an empire -- dozens of islands containing several different cites and towns and villages and arable land stiched together to become a whole greater than the sum of its parts. 

The size and scope and unwieldy nature of the five boroughs is so complex, so various, so wild and huge that the best way to understand NYC is not as a city but as an urban empire -- or, as the poet Emma Lazarus famously called it, a collossus. 

Empires don't just spring to life out of nowhere, they are built over time. And here's the story of building the NYC empire -- past, present, and future: