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The NYSE was closed from September 11 until September 17, 2001 as a result of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. On September 17, 2003, NYSE chairman and chief executive Richard Grasso stepped down as a result of controversy concerning the size of his deferred compensation package. He was replaced as Chairman by John S. Reed, the former Chairman and CEO of Citicorp

In Manhattan, uptown means north and downtown means south, either in direction of motion or in relative location. The terms uptown and downtown are most often used in the relative sense of north and south; however, uptown can also refer to the northern part of Manhattan (above 59th Street) and downtown to the southern part (below 23rd Street or 14th Street). The area in the middle, between 23rd and 59th Streets, is Midtown.

New York was cosmopolitan from the first, established and governed largely as a strategic trading post. Jews expelled from Brazil were welcome in New York. St. Patrick's Day was celebrated in New York City for the first time at the Crown and Thistle Tavern on March 17, 1756. This holiday has since become a yearly city-wide celebration that is famous around the world as the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

At the onset of the Revolutionary War, there lay a vast tract of land from the upper Mohawk River to Lake Erie, that was thinly occupied by the Iroquois and virtually unknown to the colonists. Since the colonial charters of both Massachusetts and New York granted unlimited westward expansion, the claim to this tract was disputed.

On November 1, 1683, the government was reorganized into a pattern still followed, and the state was divided into twelve counties, each of which was subdivided into towns. While the number of counties has been increased to 62, the pattern still remains that a town in New York State is a subdivision of a county, rather than an incorporated municipality as in most (but not all) other States.

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.

The island played a signficant role in the American Revolution. In the summer of 1776, the British forces under William Howe evacuated Boston and prepared to attack New York City. Howe used the strategic location of Staten Island as a staging ground for the attack. Howe established his headquarters in New Dorp at the Rose and Crown tavern near the junction of present New Dorp Lane and Amboy Road. It is here that the representatives of the British government reportedly received their first notification of the Declaration of Independence.

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.

The Holland Land Company opened a land sales office in Batavia in 1802, and sales of the tract commenced. The phrase "doing a land office business," which denotes prosperity, dates from this era. The land office still exists and is a museum today.

New York's legislature is notoriously dysfunctional. The Assembly has long been controlled by the Democrats, the Senate has long been controlled by the Republicans. No budget has been passed on time for twenty years, and for many years the legislature was unable to pass legislation for which there was supposed to be a consensus, such as reforming the so-called Rockefeller drug laws.

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).

The human interaction and expert judgement as to order execution differentiates the NYSE from fully electronic markets. The hybrid market structure is constantly in need of improvement and has trouble keeping up with new innovations in trading technology with too many humans on the floor. The frenzied commotion of men in colored smoks has been captured in several movies, including Wall Street.