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The modern city of New York — the five boroughs — was created in 1898, with the consolidation of the cities of New York (then Manhattan and the Bronx) and Brooklyn with the largely then-rural areas of Queens and Staten Island.

Manhattan is connected by bridges and tunnels to New Jersey to the west, and three New York City boroughs: the Bronx to the northeast and Brooklyn and Queens on Long Island to the east and south. Its only direct connection with the fifth New York City borough is the Staten Island Ferry, whose terminal is at Battery Park at its southern tip.

New York City serves as an enormous engine for the global economy, and is home to more Fortune 500 companies than anywhere else in the country. Its estimated gross metropolitan product of US$488.8 billion in 2003 was the largest of any city in the United States and the sixth largest if compared to any U.S. State. If it were a nation, the city would have the 16th highest gross domestic product in the world, exceeding that of Russia ($433 billion).

Though there was opposition, and the canal was derisively called "Clinton's Ditch" or worse, "Clinton's Folly," the canal was finally completed in 1825. Officially the event was celebrated by cannon shots along the length, and by Governor Clinton ceremonially pouring Lake Erie water into the New York Harbor in the "Wedding of the Waters."

Following the American Revolution, western New York was opened up for American development as soon as New York and Massachusetts compromised and settled their competing claims for the area in December 1786 by the Treaty of Hartford. The compromise was that, while New York would have sovereignty over the land, Massachusetts would have the "pre-emptive" right to obtain title from the Indians.

In the Sixteenth Century, the island was part of a larger area known as Lenapehoking that was inhabited by the Lenape, an Algonquin people also called the "Delaware". The band that occupied the southern part of the island was called the Raritans. To the Lenape, the island was called "Aquehonga Manacknong" and "Eghquaons" (Jackson, 1995).

The Dutch were the first European settlers in the colony known as New Netherland (Nova Belgica in Latin). Fort Nassau was founded near Albany, New York in 1614 and abandoned in 1618.

The southern tip of New York State – New York City, its suburbs, and the southern portion of the Hudson Valley – can be considered to form the central core of a "megalopolis", a super-city stretching from the northern suburbs of Boston to the southern suburbs of Washington and therefore occasionally called BosWash.

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 bedrock of the island is a diabase sill formed during the volcanic eruptions that created much of the bedrock of northern New Jersey, including the Palisades, approximately 200 million years ago. As an island, Staten Island was formed in the wake of the last ice age. In the late Pleistocene between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago, the ice sheet that covered northeastern North America reached to as far south as present day New York City, to a depth of approximately the same height as the Empire State Building. At one point, during its maximum reach, the ice sheet precisely ended at the center of present day Staten Island, forming a terminal moraine on the existing diabase sill. The central moraine of the island is sometimes called the Serpentine ridge because it contains large amounts of that particular mineral.

By far the least populated, most ethnically homogeneous, and most remote borough of New York City, Staten Island is sometimes the object of humor by residents of the other boroughs as being somewhat enigmatic and rustically suburban. Indeed, much of the central and southern sections of the island were once dominated by farms, primarily dairy and poultry farms, some of which were still in existence as recently as the early 1960s.