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By about 1970, New York City had become notorious the world over for having high rates of crime and other social disorder, including several incidents in which police officers were ambushed and murdered by black militants. A popular song in the autumn of 1972, "American City Suite," chronicled, in allegorical fashion, the decline in the city's quality of life.

"Upstate" is a common term for New York State north of the New York City metropolitan area; but many of those outside of the NYC metropolitan area find the term demeaning because it is emblematic of the cultural and demographic divide which separates the two areas, one rural and conservative, the other urban and liberal.

The Adirondack State Park, also known as the Adirondack Park is a large state park in northeast New York. It is the largest state park in the United States, covering a land area about the size of Massachusetts (although more than half the land within is privately owned, included several villages and hamlets). It contains the entire Adirondack Mountain range as well as some surrounding areas.

NYSE trades, unlike those on some other more "virtual" exchanges (e.g. NASDAQ), always involve face-to-face communication in a particular physical location. There is one station at each post on the trading floor for each of the exchange's stocks.

In 1670, the Indians ceded all claims to Staten Island to the English in a deed to Gov. Francis Lovelace. In 1671, in order to encourage an expansion of the Dutch settlements, the English resurveyed Oude Dorp (which became known as Old Town) and expanded the lots along the shore to the south. These lots were settled primarily by Dutch and became known as Nieuwe Dorp (meaning "New Village"), which later became anglicized as New Dorp.

Archaeological evidence of wampum manufactured in the New York area has been found throughout the Northeast and Great Lakes area, indicating an extensive trading network that flourished among the Lenape and other Native ethnic groups such as the Iroquois, who at times inhabited the area of present-day western New York State. In effect, New York City was a financial center even before the arrival of the Europeans.

New York is rich in nectar-producing plants and is a major honey-producing state. The honeybees are also used for pollination of fruits and vegetables. Most commercial beekeepers are migratory, taking their hives to southern states for the winter. Most cities have Farmers' markets which are well supplied by local truck farmers.

The French consul's "fictitious capital" betokens the world of credit, on which New Yorkers' confidence has been based. The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 imposed a surveyed grid upon all of Manhattan's varied terrain, in a far-reaching though perhaps topographically insensitive vision. The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, helped the city grow further by increasing river traffic upstate and to the west, making it the Atlantic gateway to the heart of the continent.

On November 9, 1965, the city endured a massive power blackout along with much of eastern North America. The city's experience during the ordeal became the subject of a motion picture entitled Where Were You When The Lights Went Out?

By 1835 Manhattan overtook Philadelphia as the most populous American city and was in the throes of the first of its building booms, unfazed by the summer of cholera in 1832.

Culturally New York became a truly international city, rather than a great American city, with the influx of intellectual, musical and artistic European refugees that started in the late 1930s. After the war New York inherited the role of Paris as center of the art world with Abstract Expressionism, and became a rival to London as an art market. However, the city lost two baseball teams to California, the Dodgers and the Giants, in the late 1950s. They were replaced by the Mets.

Not all of the land within the park is owned by the state, but new sections are purchased or donated frequently. The park contains the highest peaks (High Peaks) in New York State, including Mount Marcy the highest elevation in the state. About one-half of the park's six million acres (24,000 km²) are in the public domain.

About 75,000 years ago, during the last ice age, the area of present day New York City was at the edge of the ice sheet that stretched down from Canada. The ice sheet covered the site of the present city to a depth of approximately 1000 feet (300 m). The glaciers scraped off much of the top layers of material in the region, exposing underlying much-older bedrock, including gneiss and marble that dates from 500 million years ago.

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.