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Since navigation was primarily by water, there were limitations on the settlement of western New York. One could navigate up the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers to Central New York, but then had to pass overland to reach the west. Likewise one could come up the St. Lawrence River to Lake Ontario but had to move overland from its southern shore, and the way westward to the remaining Great Lakes was also blocked by Niagara Falls.

In 1661, the first permanent Dutch settlement was established at Oude Dorp (Dutch for "Old Village"), just south of the Narrows near South Beach, by a small group of Dutch Walloon and Huguenot families.

Manhattan stretches so far northward from Midtown that some in the southern parts of Manhattan jokingly refer to the Inwood neighborhood as "Upstate Manhattan," "Arctic Manhattan," or "NoFair" (short for "North of Fairway," Fairway being a popular supermarket at 132nd St. and the Hudson River).

New York is a state in the northeastern United States whose U.S. postal abbreviation is NY. It is sometimes called New York State when there is need to distinguish it from New York City

Its borough president is Republican James Molinaro, elected in 2001. Two of the three Republicans who sit on the New York City Council are also from Staten Island; however, the portion of the island north of the Staten Island Expressway votes mainly Democratic.

The origin of the NYSE can be traced to May 17, 1792 when the Buttonwood Agreement was signed by twenty-four stock brokers outside of 68 Wall Street in New York under a buttonwood tree. On March 8, 1817 the organization drafted a constitution and renamed itself the "New York Stock & Exchange Board". This name was shortened to its current form in 1863.

The building of the New York Subway, as the separate IRT and BMT systems, and the later IND, was a later force for population spread and development. The first IRT line opened in 1904.

In 2002, 16,892 laws were introduced in the New York legislature, more than twice as many as in the Illinois General Assembly, whose members are the second most prolific. Of those bills, only 4 percent, 693, actually became law, the lowest passing percentage in the country.