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On July 4, 1827, the end of slavery in New York state was celebrated at Swan Hotel, West Brighton. Rooms at the hotel were reserved months in advance as local abolitionists and prominent free blacks prepared for the festivities. Speeches, pageants, picnics, and fireworks marked the celebration, which lasted for two days.

In 1609, Henry Hudson entered the harbor a commission from the Dutch East India Company in search of the Northwest Passage. Hudson may have interacted with Native Americans on Manhattan, and sailed up the river that now bears his name as far as Albany. Although Hudson did not find the passage he was seeking, his reports led to further commercial expeditions financed by Dutch East India Company with the intent of establishing fur trading factorijs in the area.

The northernmost area of "uptown" is Upper Manhattan, encompassing the neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood, and often Harlem. A less famous and hectic area, and given the distance from Midtown, Upper Manhattan is often thought of as an outer borough, given the similarities the region has to the adjacent western section of the South Bronx.

The Revolution began with the Six Nations officially neutral, but this quickly broke down as British and Tory agents courted them on the one hand, and the American rebels on the other. In fact the Revolution effectively broke the Iroquois confederacy forever, with the Oneida Nation and Tuscarora Nations supporting the American side, and the Mohawk Nation, Onondaga Nation, Cayuga Nation and Seneca Nations going with the British and Tories. It was a strategic error for the latter four nations, as they picked the eventual loser in the Revolution.

New Yorkers lived through the city's bloodiest and perhaps most tragic day on September 11, 2001, when hijackers linked to the jihadist organization Al-Qaeda piloted two airliners into each of the World Trade Center towers.

Notable landmarks on the Hudson include West Point, the Thayer Hotel, Bannerman's Castle, Metro-North Railroad's Hudson River Line (formerly part of the New York Central system), Hudson River Park, Liberty State Park, and Stevens Institute of Technology. Cities and towns on the New Jersey side include Fort Lee, Weehawken, Weehawken Cove, Hoboken, and Jersey City. Cities and towns on the New York side include Albany, Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Yonkers, and New York City (Manhattan, The Bronx).

Long Island is home to numerous colleges, including Stony Brook University, Southampton College, Hofstra University, and SUNY-Old Westbury. It is also home to the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League. The world's largest thoroughbred racetrack, Belmont Park, is located in the Nassau County community of Elmont.

On-going efforts have been made to re-introduce native fauna that had been lost in the park during earlier exploitation. Animals in various stages of re-introduction include: Beaver, Fisher, American Marten, Moose, Lynx, and Osprey. Not all of these restoration efforts have been successful yet.

After Jerome Kern's Show Boat, the Broadway musical developed into a characteristically American art, while Tin Pan Alley cranked out the tunes America danced to before rock and roll.

There were fields of corn and gardens with potatoes, turnips, onions, pumpkins, squashes and vegetables of various kinds. The Iroquois did not live in simple hovels as expected, but had handsome multi-family houses, often called castles. The community of Seneca Castle is derived from one such Iroquois village. Fish were abundant, and the natives also had herds of milk cows and hogs for meat. They were amazingly prosperous.

Critics argue, however, that the drop in crime came at the price of greater friction between police and some of the city's ethnic groups, and less concern for civil liberties, while others point out that other cities achieved similar drops in crime. Supporters of the former mayor reply that crime in the city fell more rapidly during Giuliani's term than in most other major U.S. cities, such as Detroit or Los Angeles

In the 1800s these social antipodes could be found in the contrast between rich commercial stretches of Broadway and residential stretches moving with fashion, from Lafayette Street (1820s) and Washington Square and Gramercy Park (1830s), to take up even more extravagant residence on Fifth Avenue— and the almost unbelievably squalid enclave of Five Points (abject poverty later to occupy the Lower East Side).

The Hudson and its tributaries—notably the Mohawk River—drain a large area, and the river is navigable for a great distance. The Erie Canal, opened December 26, 1825, connected the Hudson River to Lake Erie, enabling shipping between cities on the Great Lakes and Europe via the Atlantic Ocean.