The Superlative City? Let New Yorkers Count the Ways, in Almost Every Language
By SAM ROBERTS
Published: June 19, 2005
Vincent Laforet/The New York Times
A multitude on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan at lunchtime on one warm day in March.
Angel Franco/The New York Times
Gordo Salinas, left, and Gladys Hernandez on Friday at an American Indian powwow in Brooklyn.
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
A sea of taxis at Kennedy International Airport, where drivers line up as they wait to be dispatched.
Deriding the elitist 19th-century notion that there were only 400 people who really counted in New York City, O. Henry credited "a wiser man" - the census taker - with a "larger estimate of human interest," which he memorialized in fiction as "The Four Million." Though enormous as New York must have seemed then, his four million of a century ago have doubled to more than eight million. More than ever, New York today is a city of superlatives.
But just how big is it?
So big that convening the region's largest American Indian gathering in Brooklyn, of all places, this weekend was not as incongruous as it might seem. The 11th annual Gateway to Nations powwow is being celebrated in the original homeland of the Canarsie Indians at Gateway National Recreation Area in a metropolis that, modern census takers estimate, is home to more American Indians than any other city with a population of more than 100,000 in the United States.
So big that New York has more Yiddish speakers (they outnumber the American Indians) and more who speak Spanish, Urdu, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and English, and more people who identify their heritage as Italian, German, Scottish, Nigerian or Swiss than in any big American city. It has more who claim Irish ancestry than any city in the world except Dublin.
More people born in Pakistan, France, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Ghana, New Zealand, the Dominican Republic and almost every other country (except, primarily, Cuba and Mexico), live in New York than in any other city in the country.
New York even ranks first in the number of people who describe themselves as having been born at sea.
The city also has more lawyers, doctors, teachers, security guards, construction workers, firefighters, railway workers and more people who work in arts and entertainment than any large city in the country and more people employed in manufacturing. It does not lead in agriculture, although the city, with 1,464 workers in related fields, ranks a respectable 10th nationwide among cities whose residents say their occupation is farming, fishing or forestry. New York has more students enrolled in every grade, from kindergarten through graduate school; more who have not graduated from high school and more with doctoral degrees.
The city also ranks first with more people in every age group (including about 540,000 under age 5 and 121,000 who are 85 and older).
New York has more people than any other city in the United States who do not own a car, and who car-pool to work or take public transportation, including taxis and ferries; more who ride their bicycles or walk to work, and more who work at home. San Francisco edges New York in the number who say they commute by motorcycle.
More New Yorkers live in jails, nursing homes, college dorms, mental wards and religious quarters - like convents - than in any other city, according to the latest Census Bureau figures.
A few of those numbers might be statistical anomalies, of course, especially since the census relies largely on self-identification. For example, there are undoubtedly a lot of American Indians in New York, but the total is probably inflated by some Asian Indians who also consider themselves American and described themselves that way - incorrectly by the government's definition - on the census forms.
With so many superlatives, no group categorized by ancestry or age or birthplace abroad or occupation or degree of education dominates, because, as Theodore Dreiser once wrote, New York "is so preponderantly large."
New York has more than twice as many people as the nation's second biggest city, Los Angeles. New York is home to more people than the next four top-ranked cities in population: Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia and Phoenix, combined.
Which means that in every category, each separate New York superlative is subsumed by the biggest superlative of them all: The Eight Million.>
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