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ROBERT DOWNEY JR. SIGNED AFTRA CONTRACT EXCEEDINGLY SCARCE 1987 IRON MAN:
$1778.08
AN EXCESSIVELY RARE 1987 AFTRA CONTRACT SIGNED BY ROBERT DOWNEY JR IN 1987. I HAVE BLOCKED OUT HIS SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER. ALSO INITIALED BOTTOM OF THE 1ST PAGE AND SIGNED THE 2ND PAGE. HIS AGENT ALSO SIGNED BELOW HIS NAME ON THE 2ND PAGE!
Robert John Downey Jr. (born April 4, 1965)[1] is an American actor. His career has been characterized by critical and popular success in his youth, followed by a period of substance abuse and legal troubles, before a resurgence of commercial success later in his career. In 2008, Downey was named by Time magazine among the 100 most influential people in the world,[2][3] and from 2013 to 2015, he was listed by Forbes as Hollywood's highest-paid actor.[2][3]
At the age of five, he made his acting debut in his father Robert Downey Sr.'s film Pound in 1970. He subsequently worked with the Brat Pack in the teen films Weird Science (1985) and Less than Zero (1987). In 1992, Downey portrayed the title character in the biopic Chaplin, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and won a BAFTA Award. Following a stint at the Corcoran Substance Abuse Treatment Facility on drug charges, he joined the TV series Ally McBeal, for which he won a Golden Globe Award. He was fired from the show in the wake of drug charges in 2000 and 2001. He stayed in a court-ordered drug treatment program and has maintained his sobriety since 2003.
Initially, completion bond companies would not insure Downey, until Mel Gibson paid the insurance bond for the 2003 film The Singing Detective.[4] He went on to star in the black comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), the thriller Zodiac (2007), and the action comedy Tropic Thunder (2008); for the latter, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Downey gained global recognition for starring as Tony Stark/Iron Man in ten films within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with Iron Man (2008), and leading up to Avengers: Endgame (2019). He has also played the title character in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009), which earned him his second Golden Globe, and its sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). Downey has also taken on dramatic parts in The Judge (2014) and Oppenheimer (2023).
Early lifeRobert John Downey Jr. was born on April 4, 1965, in Manhattan, New York City,[5] the younger of two children. His father, Robert Downey Sr., was an actor and filmmaker, while his mother, Elsie Ann (née Ford), was an actress who appeared in Downey Sr.'s films.[6] Downey's father was of half Lithuanian Jewish, one-quarter Hungarian Jewish, and one-quarter Irish descent,[7][8][9][10] while Downey's mother had Scottish, German, and Swiss ancestry.[11][12][13] He and his older sister Allyson grew up in Greenwich Village.[14]
As a child, Downey was "surrounded by drugs." His father, a drug addict, allowed Downey to use marijuana at age six, an incident which his father later said he regretted.[14] Downey later stated that drug use became an emotional bond between him and his father: "When my dad and I would do drugs together, it was like him trying to express his love for me in the only way he knew how." Eventually, Downey began spending every night abusing alcohol and "making a thousand phone calls in pursuit of drugs".[15][16]
During his childhood, Downey had minor roles in his father's films. He made his acting debut at the age of five, playing a sick puppy in the absurdist comedy Pound (1970), and then at seven appeared in the surrealist Western Greaser's Palace (1972).[12] At the age of 10, he was living in England and studied classical ballet as part of a larger curriculum.[17][18] He attended the Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center in upstate New York as a teenager. When his parents divorced in 1978, Downey moved to California with his father, but in 1982, he dropped out of Santa Monica High School, and moved back to New York to pursue an acting career full-time.[19]
Downey and Kiefer Sutherland, who shared the screen in the 1988 drama 1969, were roommates for three years when he first moved to Hollywood to pursue his career in acting.[20]
Career1983–1995: Early work and critical acclaim
Downey at the premiere of Air America in 1990Downey began building upon theater roles, including in the short-lived off-Broadway musical American Passion at the Joyce Theater in 1983, produced by Norman Lear. In 1985, he was part of the new, younger cast hired for Saturday Night Live, but following a year of poor ratings and criticism of the new cast's comedic talents, he and most of the new crew were dropped and replaced.[19] Rolling Stone magazine named Downey the worst SNL cast member in its entire run, stating that the "Downey Fail sums up everything that makes SNL great."[21] That same year, Downey had a dramatic acting breakthrough when he played James Spader's character's sidekick in Tuff Turf and then a bully in John Hughes's Weird Science. He was considered for the role of Duckie in John Hughes's film Pretty in Pink (1986),[22] but his first lead role was with Molly Ringwald in The Pick-up Artist (1987). Because of these and other coming-of-age films Downey did during the 1980s, he is sometimes named as a member of the Brat Pack.[19][23]
In 1987, Downey played Julian Wells, a drug-addicted rich boy whose life rapidly spirals out of his control, in the film version of the Bret Easton Ellis novel Less than Zero. His performance, described by Janet Maslin in The New York Times as "desperately moving",[24] was widely praised, though Downey has said that for him "the role was like the ghost of Christmas Future" since his drug habit resulted in his becoming an "exaggeration of the character" in real life.[25] Zero drove Downey into films with bigger budgets and names, such as Chances Are (1989) with Cybill Shepherd and Ryan O'Neal, Air America (1990) with Mel Gibson, and Soapdish (1991) with Sally Field, Kevin Kline, and Whoopi Goldberg.[26][27][28]
In 1992, he starred as Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin, a role for which he prepared extensively, learning how to play the violin as well as tennis left-handed. He had a personal coach in order to help him imitate Chaplin's posture, and a way of carrying himself.[29] The role garnered Downey an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor at the Academy Awards 65th ceremony, losing to Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman.[30]
In 1993, he appeared in the films Heart and Souls with Alfre Woodard and Kyra Sedgwick and Short Cuts with Matthew Modine and Julianne Moore, along with a documentary that he wrote about the 1992 presidential campaigns titled The Last Party (1993).[31][32][33] He starred in the 1994 films, Only You with Marisa Tomei, and Natural Born Killers with Woody Harrelson.[34][35] He then subsequently appeared in Restoration (1995), Richard III (1995), Home for the Holidays (1995), Two Girls and a Guy (1997),[36] as Special Agent John Royce in U.S. Marshals (1998), and in Black and White (1999).[37][38][39][40]
1996–2001: Career setbacksFrom 1996 through 2001, Downey was arrested several times on charges related to drugs including cocaine, heroin, and marijuana.[41] He went through drug treatment programs, explaining in 1999 to a judge: "It's like I have a shotgun in my mouth, and I've got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal." He said he had been addicted to drugs since the age of eight, due to the fact that his father, also an addict, had been giving them to him.[42]
In April 1996, Downey was arrested for possession of heroin, cocaine, and an unloaded .357 Magnum handgun while he was speeding down Sunset Boulevard. A month later, while on parole, he trespassed into a neighbor's home while under the influence of a controlled substance and fell asleep in one of the beds.[43][44] He received three years' probation and was ordered to undergo compulsory drug testing. In 1997, he missed one of the court-ordered drug tests and had to spend six months in the Los Angeles County jail.[45]
A mugshot of actor Robert Downey Jr smiling for his headshot in 1999Mugshot from his arrest in August 1999A mugshot of actor Robert Downey Jr in 2001Mugshot from his arrest in April 2001After Downey missed another required drug test in 1999, he was arrested again. Despite Downey's lawyer, Robert Shapiro, assembling the same team of lawyers that had successfully defended O. J. Simpson during his criminal trial for murder,[42] Downey was sentenced to a three-year prison term at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran, California. At the time of the arrest, all of Downey's film projects had wrapped and were close to release. He had been hired to provide the voice of the devil on the NBC animated television series God, the Devil and Bob, but was fired when he failed to attend rehearsals.[46][47]
After spending nearly a year in the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison, Downey, on condition of posting a $5,000 bail, was unexpectedly freed when a judge ruled that his collective time in incarceration facilities (from the initial 1996 arrests) had qualified him for early release.[14] A week after his 2000 release, Downey joined the cast of the hit television series Ally McBeal, playing a new love interest.[48] He was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film.[49][50] He also appeared as a writer and singer on Vonda Shepard's Ally McBeal: For Once in My Life album, and sang with Sting a duet of "Every Breath You Take" in an episode of the series. Despite the apparent success, Downey claimed that his performance on the series was overrated and said, "It was my lowest point in terms of addictions. At that stage, I didn't give a whether I ever acted again."[25] In January 2001, Downey was scheduled to play the role of Hamlet in a Los Angeles stage production directed by Mel Gibson.[51]
Before the end of his first season on Ally McBeal, over the Thanksgiving 2000 holiday, Downey was arrested when his room at Merv Griffin's Hotel and Givenchy Spa in Palm Springs, California, was searched by the police, who were responding to an anonymous 911 call. Downey was under the influence of a controlled substance and in possession of cocaine and Valium.[52][53] Despite the fact that, if convicted, he would have faced a prison sentence of up to four years and eight months, he signed on to appear in at least eight more Ally McBeal episodes.[54]
In April 2001, while Downey was on parole, a Los Angeles police officer found him wandering barefooted in Culver City. He was arrested for suspicion of being under the influence of drugs, but was released a few hours later,[55] even though tests showed he had cocaine in his system.[56] After this last arrest, Ally McBeal executives ordered last-minute rewrites and reshoots and fired Downey, despite the fact that Downey's character had resuscitated Ally McBeal's ratings.[57] The Culver City arrest also cost him a role in the high-profile film America's Sweethearts,[56] and the subsequent incarceration prompted Gibson to cancel his Hamlet production. In July 2001, Downey pleaded no contest to the Palm Springs charges, avoiding jail time. Instead, he was sent into drug rehabilitation and received three years of probation, benefiting from California Proposition 36, which had been passed the year before with the aim of helping nonviolent drug offenders overcome their addictions instead of sending them to jail.[14][58]
The book Conversations with Woody Allen reports that director Woody Allen wanted to cast Downey and Winona Ryder in his film Melinda and Melinda in 2003, but was unable to do so, because he could not get insurance on them, stating, "We couldn't get bonded. The completion bonding companies would not bond the picture unless we could insure them. We were heartbroken because I had worked with Winona before [on Celebrity] and thought she was perfect for this and wanted to work with her again. And I had always wanted to work with Bob Downey and always thought he was a huge talent."[59]
In a December 18, 2000, article for People magazine entitled "Bad to Worse", Downey's stepmother Rosemary told author Alex Tresnlowski that Downey had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder "a few years ago" and added that this was "the reason he has a hard time staying sober. What hasn't been tried is medication and intensive psychotherapy".[60] In the same article, Dr. Manijeh Nikakhtar, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and co-author of Addiction or Self-Medication: The Truth, claimed she received a letter from Downey in 1999, during his time at Corcoran II, asking for advice on his condition. She discovered that "no one had done a complete [psychiatric] evaluation [on him] ... I asked him flat out if he thought he was bipolar, and he said, 'Oh yeah. There are times I spend a lot of money and I'm hyperactive, and there are other times I'm down.'"[60]
In an article for the March 2007 issue of Esquire, Downey stated that he wanted to address "this whole thing about the bipolar" after receiving a phone call from "the Bipolar Association" asking him about being bipolar. When Downey denied he had ever said he was bipolar, the caller quoted the People article, to which Downey replied, "'No! Dr. Malibusian said [I said I was bipolar] ... ', and they go, 'Well, it's been written, so we're going to quote it.'"[61] Downey flatly denied being "depressed or manic" and that previous attempts to diagnose him with any kind of psychiatric or mood disorder have always been skewed because "the guy I was seeing didn't know I was smokin' crack in his bathroom. You can't make a diagnosis until somebody's sober."[61]
2001–2007: ResurgenceAfter five years of substance abuse, arrests, rehab, and relapse, Downey was ready to work toward a full recovery from drugs and return to his career. In discussing his failed attempts to control his addictive behavior in the past, Downey told Oprah Winfrey in November 2004 that "when someone says, 'I really wonder if maybe I should go to rehab?' Well, uh, you're a wreck, you just lost your job, and your wife left you. Uh, you might want to give it a shot."[62] He added that after his last arrest in April 2001, when he knew he would likely be facing another stint in prison or another form of incarceration such as court-ordered rehab, "I said, 'You know what? I don't think I can continue doing this.' And I reached out for help, and I ran with it. You can reach out for help in kind of a half-assed way and you'll get it and you won't take advantage of it. It's not that difficult to overcome these seemingly ghastly problems ... what's hard is to decide to do it."[62]
Downey got his first post-rehabilitation acting job in August 2001, lip-syncing in the video for Elton John's single "I Want Love".[63] Video director Sam Taylor-Wood shot 16 takes of the video and used the last one because, according to John, Downey looked completely relaxed and "The way he underplays it is fantastic".[64]
Downey was able to return to the big screen after Mel Gibson, who had been a close friend to Downey since both had co-starred in Air America, paid Downey's insurance bond for the 2003 film The Singing Detective (directed by his Back to School co-star Keith Gordon).[4] Gibson's gamble paved the way for Downey's comeback and Downey returned to mainstream films in the mid-2000s with Gothika, for which producer Joel Silver withheld 40% of Downey's salary until after production wrapped as insurance against his addictive behavior. Similar clauses became standard in his contracts throughout the 2000s.[65] Silver, who was getting closer to Downey as he dated his assistant Susan Downey (née Levin), also got the actor the leading role in the comedy thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the directorial debut of screenwriter Shane Black.[66]
After Gothika, Downey was cast in a number of leading and supporting roles, including well-received work in a number of semi-independent films: A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Good Night, and Good Luck, Richard Linklater's dystopian, rotoscoped A Scanner Darkly (in which Downey plays the role of a drug addict), and Steven Shainberg's fictional biographical film of Diane Arbus, Fur, where Downey's character represented the two biggest influences on Arbus's professional life, Lisette Model and Marvin Israel.[67] Downey also received great notice for his roles in more mainstream fare such as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Disney's poorly received The Shaggy Dog.[68]
On November 23, 2004, Downey released his debut musical album, The Futurist, on Sony Classical, for which he designed the cover art and designed the track listing label on the CD with his son Indio.[69] The album received mixed reviews,[70][71] but Downey stated in 2006 that he probably will not do another album, as he felt that the energy he put into doing the album was not compensated.[72]
In 2006, Downey returned to television when he did voice acting on Family Guy in the episode "The Fat Guy Strangler". Downey had previously telephoned the show's production staff and asked if he could produce or assist in an episode creation, as his son Indio is a fan of the show. The producers of the show accepted the offer and created the character of Patrick Pewterschmidt, Lois Griffin's long lost, mentally disturbed brother, for Downey.[73]
Downey signed on with publishers HarperCollins to write a memoir, which in 2006, was already being billed as a "candid look at the highs and lows of his life and career". In 2008, however, Downey returned his advance to the publishers, and canceled the book without further comment.[74]
In 2007, Downey appeared in David Fincher's mystery thriller Zodiac, which was based on a true story. He played the role of San Francisco Chronicle journalist Paul Avery, who was reporting the Zodiac Killer case.[75]
2008–2019: Iron Man and further success
Downey at an event for Iron Man in 2008Despite all of the critical success Downey had experienced throughout his career, he had not appeared in a "blockbuster" film. That changed in 2008 when Downey starred in two critically and commercially successful films, Iron Man and Tropic Thunder. In the article Ben Stiller wrote for Downey's entry in the 2008 edition of The Time 100, he offered an observation on Downey's commercially successful summer at the box office:
Yes, Downey is Iron Man, but he really is Actor Man ... In the realm where box office is irrelevant and talent is king, the realm that actually means something, he has always ruled, and finally this summer he gets to have his cake and let us eat him up all the way to the multiplex, where his mastery is in full effect.
— Ben Stiller, The 2008 Time 100, entry No. 60, "Robert Downey Jr."[76]In 2007, Downey was cast as the title character in the film Iron Man,[77] with director Jon Favreau explaining the choice by stating: "Downey wasn't the most obvious choice, but he understood what makes the character tick. He found a lot of his own life experience in 'Tony Stark'."[78] Favreau insisted on having Downey as he repeatedly claimed that Downey would be to Iron Man what Johnny Depp is to the Pirates of the Caribbean series: a lead actor who could both elevate the quality of the film and increase the public's interest in it.[43][79][80][81] For the role, Downey had to gain more than 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of muscle in five months to look like he "had the power to forge iron".[82]
Iron Man was released worldwide between April 30 and May 3, 2008, grossing over $585 million worldwide[83] and receiving rave reviews which cited Downey's performance as a highlight of the film.[84][85][86] By October 2008, Downey had agreed to star in two Iron Man sequels, as part of the Iron Man franchise, as well as The Avengers, featuring the superhero team that Stark joins, based on Marvel's comic book series The Avengers.[87] He first reprised the role in a small appearance as Iron Man's alter ego Tony Stark in the 2008 film The Incredible Hulk, as a part of Marvel Studios' depicting the same Marvel Universe on film by providing continuity among the movies.[88]
After Iron Man, Downey appeared alongside Ben Stiller and Jack Black in the Stiller-directed Tropic Thunder. The three actors play a Hollywood archetype – with Downey playing self-absorbed multi-Oscar-winning Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus – as they star in an extremely expensive Vietnam-era film called Tropic Thunder. Lazarus undergoes a "controversial skin pigmentation procedure" in order to take on the role of African-American platoon sergeant Lincoln Osiris, which required Downey to wear dark makeup and a wig. Both Stiller and Downey feared Downey's portrayal of the character could become controversial:
Stiller says that he and Downey always stayed focused on the fact that they were skewering insufferable actors, not African Americans. "I was trying to push it as far as you can within reality", Stiller explains. "I had no idea how people would respond to it". Stiller screened a rough cut of the film [in March 2008] and it scored high with African Americans. He was relieved at the reaction. "It seems people really embrace it", he said.[89]
When asked by Harry Smith on CBS's The Early Show who his model was for Lazarus, Downey laughed before responding, "Sadly, my sorry-ass self."[90]
Released in the United States on August 13, 2008, Tropic Thunder received good reviews with 83% of reviews positive and an average normalized score of 71, according to the review aggregator websites Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.[91][92] It earned US$26 million in its North American opening weekend and retained the number one position for its first three weekends of release. The film grossed $180 million in theaters before its release on home video on November 18, 2008. Downey was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Lazarus.[93]
Opening in late April 2009 was a film Downey finished in mid-2008, The Soloist. The film was delayed from a November 2008 release by Paramount Pictures due to the studio's tight end-of-year release schedule.[94] Critics who had seen the film in 2008 were mentioning it as a possible Academy Award candidate.[95] Downey picked up an Academy Award nomination for the 2008 release year for his role in Tropic Thunder.[96]
The first role Downey accepted after Iron Man was the title character in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes. Warner Bros. released it on December 25, 2009.[97] The film set several box office records in the United States for a Christmas Day release, beating the previous record-holder, 2008's Marley & Me, by nearly $10M, and finished second to Avatar in a record-setting Christmas weekend box office. Sherlock Holmes ended up being the 8th highest-grossing film of 2009.[98][99] When Downey won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for his role as Sherlock Holmes, he noted in his acceptance speech that he had prepared no remarks because "Susan Downey (his wife and Sherlock Holmes producer) told me that Matt Damon (nominated for his role in The Informant!) was going to win so don't bother preparing a speech".[100]
Downey returned as Tony Stark in the first of two planned sequels to Iron Man, Iron Man 2, which released in May 2010. Iron Man 2 grossed over $623M worldwide, becoming the 7th highest-grossing film of 2010.[101] Downey's other commercial film release of 2010 was the comedy road film, Due Date. The movie, co-starring Zach Galifianakis, was released in November 2010[102] and grossed over $211M worldwide, making it the 36th highest-grossing movie of 2010.[103] Downey's sole 2011 film credit was the sequel to the 2009 version of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, which opened worldwide on December 16, 2011.[104]Downey speaking at the 2019 Disney Legends AwardsIn 2012, Downey reprised the role of Tony Stark in The Avengers. The film received positive reviews[105] and was highly successful at the box office, becoming the third highest-grossing film of all time both in the United States and worldwide.[106] His film, the David Dobkin-directed dramedy The Judge,[107] a project co-produced by his production company Team Downey, was the opening film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014.[108] Downey played Tony Stark again in Iron Man 3 (2013),[109] Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017),[110] Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019).[110] Three of his scenes from The Avengers and Avengers: Endgame were used as archive footage in the first episode of the Disney+ series Loki.[111]
Downey hosted The Age of A.I., a YouTube documentary series released in 2019.[112]
2020–present: Post Marvel careerIn 2020, Downey starred in Dolittle, playing the titular character, depicted in the film as a 19th-century Welsh veterinarian who can communicate with animals. This was the second film from Team Downey. It was a box office disappointment, and received negative reviews from critics, who called it "too long [and] lifeless".[113] In 2023, Downey took the role of Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, whose performance received critical acclaim.[114][115]
Upcoming projectsOn July 15, 2021, it was announced that Downey would co-star in the television adaptation of novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel, The Sympathizer.[116] It was also announced he would star in the film Play Dirty, reuniting with Shane Black, the director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3.[117]Downey will reprise his role as Holmes in a third film, initially scheduled for release on December 22, 2021, but later put on hold indefinitely according to director Dexter Fletcher.[118][119] In March 2023, Downey was announced to be in talks to star in a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo from a screenplay by Steven Knight. Also in March 2023, it was announced that Downey would star in a political comedy starring Robert Pattinson titled Average Height, Average Build from Adam McKay.[120][121]
Other venturesMusicDowney has sung on several soundtracks for his films, including for Chaplin, Too Much Sun, Two Girls and a Guy, Friends and Lovers, The Singing Detective, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. In 2001, he appeared in the music video for Elton John's song, "I Want Love". He released a CD in 2004 called The Futurist, and while promoting his film Tropic Thunder, he and his co-stars Ben Stiller and Jack Black were back-up singers "The Pips" to Gladys Knight singing "Midnight Train to Georgia".[122]
Downey's most commercially successful recording venture to date (combining sales and radio airplay) has been his remake of the 1973 Joni Mitchell Christmas song "River", which was included on the Ally McBeal tie-in album Ally McBeal: A Very Ally Christmas, released in 2000; Downey's character Larry Paul performs the song in the Ally McBeal episode "Tis the Season".[123]
Production companyOn June 14, 2010, Downey and his wife Susan opened their own production company called Team Downey. Their first project was The Judge.[124]
Personal lifeRelationships and familyDowney started dating actress Sarah Jessica Parker in 1984 after meeting her on the set of Firstborn. The couple later separated in 1991 due to his drug addiction.[125]
Downey married actress and singer Deborah Falconer on May 29, 1992, after a 42-day courtship.[126] Their son, Indio Falconer Downey, was born in September 1993.[127] The strain on their marriage from Downey's repeated trips to rehab and jail finally reached a breaking point; in 2001, in the midst of Downey's last arrest and sentencing to an extended stay in rehab, Falconer left Downey and took their son with her.[126] Downey and Falconer finalized their divorce on April 26, 2004.Downey with wife Susan Downey at the 2010 Academy AwardsIn 2003, Downey met producer Susan Levin, an executive vice-president of production at Joel Silver's film company, Silver Pictures, on the set of Gothika.[4] Though Susan twice turned down his romantic advances, she and Downey did quietly strike up a romance during production.[128] Despite Susan's worries that the romance would not last after the completion of shooting given that "he's an actor; I have a real job",[128] the couple's relationship continued after production wrapped on Gothika, and Downey proposed to Susan on the night before her thirtieth birthday.[128] In August 2005, the couple were married, in a Jewish ceremony, at Amagansett, New York.[129][130] A tattoo on one of his biceps reads "Suzie Q" in tribute to her.[131] The Downeys' first child, a son named Exton Elias, was born in February 2012,[132] and their second, a daughter named Avri Roel, was born in November 2014.[133][134][135]
Downey has been a close friend of Mel Gibson since they starred in Air America. Downey defended Gibson during the controversy surrounding The Passion of the Christ, and said "nobody's perfect" in reference to Gibson's 2006 DUI.[136] Gibson said of Downey: "He was one of the first people to call and offer the hand of friendship. He just said, 'Hey, welcome to the club. Let's go see what we can do to work on ourselves.'"[137] In October 2011, Downey was being honored at the 25th American Cinematheque Awards; Downey chose Gibson to present him with his award for his life's work and used his air time to say a few kind words about Gibson and explain why he chose him to present the award.[138]
SobrietyDowney says he has been drug-free since July 2003[139] and credited his wife with helping him overcome his drug and alcohol habits, along with his family, therapy, meditation, twelve-step recovery programs, yoga, and the practice of Wing Chun kung fu,[25] the martial art he learned from Eric Oram, who is also a fight consultant in several of Downey's movies.[140][141] Oram was Downey's personal fight coordinator in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War.[142] In December 2015, Downey received a full and unconditional pardon from Governor of California Jerry Brown for his prior drug convictions.[143][144] Oram wrote a letter in support of Downey's pardon to Governor Brown.[145] When asked on The Oprah Winfrey Show how he was able to make his sobriety stick this time, Downey said: "It's really not that difficult to overcome these seemingly ghastly problems. What's hard is to decide to do it."[146]Downey Jr. with William Cheung and Eric Oram (2005)Religious beliefsDowney has described his religious beliefs as "Jewish Buddhist",[147] and he is reported to have consulted astrologers.[148] In the past, Downey has been interested in Christianity and the Hare Krishna movement.[147]
Political viewsIn a 2008 interview, Downey stated that his time in prison changed his political point of view somewhat, saying: "I have a really interesting political point of view, and it's not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can't go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can't. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics ever since."[149] However, when asked about the quote in a 2015 interview to promote Avengers: Age of Ultron, he denied that his previous statement reflected any longstanding beliefs on his part, and stated: "I wouldn't say that I'm a Republican or a liberal or a Democrat."[150]
Downey serves on the board of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition.[151]
In January 2020, during the promotions of his film Dolittle, Downey announced that he had made the decision to adopt a vegan diet, in response to the debate about the climate crisis, stating that "I'm a one-man carbon footprint nightmare colossus"[152] and believes he can do his part to contribute. Downey previously announced his opening of The Footprint Coalition, an organization he launched to reduce carbon footprints around the world using advanced technology.[153] The Footprint Coalition promotes technologies that protect the Environment such as French insect-farming startup Ynsect,[154] the bio-based alternative to plastic manufacturer RWDC,[155] and bamboo toilet paper manufacturer Cloud Paper.[156][157]
Filmography and awardsMain articles: Robert Downey Jr. filmography and List of awards and nominations received by Robert Downey Jr.DiscographyStudio albumThe Futurist (2004)Soundtrack appearancesYearSongSoundtrackNotes1992"Smile"Chaplin OSTOn The Futurist1993"The Star-Spangled Banner"Heart and Souls OSTWith B.B. King2000"White Christmas"Ally McBeal: A Very Ally ChristmasWith Vonda Shepard"River"2001"Every Breath You Take"Ally McBeal: For Once in My Life featuring Vonda ShepardWith Sting"Chances Are"With Vonda Shepard"Snakes"2003"In My Dreams"The Singing Detective OST2005"Broken"Kiss Kiss Bang Bang OSTOn The FuturistWho Is Robert Downey Jr?Born in New York City on April 4, 1965, Robert Downey Jr. began acting as a young child. He made his first film appearances and was a cast member on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, but his growing success was marred by years of struggles with drug abuse. Eventually turning his life around, he earned a resurgence of critical and popular acclaim, and is considered one of Hollywood's A-list actors.
Robert Downey Jr.Robert Downey Jr. in an ’Iron Man’ publicity still.(Photo: Marvel Studios)Net WorthAs of 2019, Robert Downey Jr. has an estimated net worth of $300 million and is one of the highest-paid actors in the industry.
HeightDowney is 5 feet 9 inches tall.
Early Movies and 'SNL'Downey made his earliest feature film appearances in such films as Baby, It's You (1983), Firstborn (1984), Weird Science (1985) and Back to School (1986). From 1985 to '86, he was a regular cast member of Saturday Night Live, NBC's popular sketch-comedy program.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below'The Pick-up Artist,' 'Less Than Zero'Downey's first leading role on the big screen was a charming womanizer in The Pick-up Artist (1987), a romantic comedy co-starring Molly Ringwald that was written and directed by James Toback. His breakthrough performance came in 1987 with Less Than Zero (1987), in which he co-starred with Andrew McCarthy. Downey played the party loving, cocaine-addicted Julian Wells in the film.
Substance Abuse ProblemsSadly, the story line and character rang especially true for Downey, who had been introduced to drugs at the age of eight by his father, and developed a full-fledged addiction as he headed into his 20s.
"Until that movie, I took my drugs after work and on the weekends," he later explained. "Maybe I'd turn up hungover on the set, but no more so than the stuntman. That changed on Less Than Zero. I was playing this junkie-faggot guy, and, for me, the role was like the ghost of Christmas future. The character was an exaggeration of myself. Then things changed, and, in some ways, I became an exaggeration of the character. That lasted far longer than it needed to last."
A stint in drug rehabilitation followed shortly afterward, but Downey's struggles with drugs and alcohol would continue. And yet, his career continued to advance forward. By the early 1990s, Downey had established a reputation as a critically acclaimed A-List actor. He earned praise for his comic turn as a shifty soap opera producer in Soapdish (1991), co-starring Sally Field, Kevin Kline and Whoopi Goldberg. More adoration followed when Downey landed a featured role in Short Cuts (1993), the critically lauded ensemble film by Robert Altman.
Movies of Critical Acclaim'Chaplin'A particular high point in Downey's career came in 1993, when he was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Actor) for his performance in Chaplin (1992), directed by Richard Attenborough. In the highly acclaimed film, which didn't go over nearly as well with audiences as with critics, Downey nimbly portrayed the legendary Charlie Chaplin from ages 19 to 83. The role displayed his dramatic range as well as his considerable talent for physical comedy. By this time, the 27-year-old Downey had come to be seen as one of the most gifted actors of his generation, but he had also earned a reputation as a troubled and controversial figure in Hollywood.
'Natural Born Killers,' 'Richard III'In the wake of his critical success with Chaplin, Downey anchored a documentary about the 1992 presidential election, The Last Party. In 1994, he appeared in the romantic comedy Only You, as well as in Oliver Stone's acclaimed but controversial Natural Born Killers. The following year, the actor starred in the period film Restoration alongside Meg Ryan and Sam Neill; an updated film version of Richard III, co-starring Ian McKellen and Annette Bening; and the Jodie Foster-directed Home for the Holidays, also starring Holly Hunter.
Personal Life and ChallengesDowney's personal life had expanded, too. In May 1992, he married actress Deborah Falconer. Two years later, the couple had a son, Indio, naming friend and actor, Anthony Michael Hall, as the boy's godfather.
If Downey was ever really grounded by his new status as husband and father, it was short-lived. In June 1996, the actor was stopped by police after driving naked in his Porsche on Sunset Boulevard, and found not only to be without clothes, but in possession of cocaine, heroin and a .357 Magnum. Less than a month later, and just a few hours before he was slated to be charged, Downey ran afoul of the law again after he was found passed out in a neighbor's house.
Advertisement - Continue Reading BelowFor the next several years, Downey's life was a haze of headline-generating, dependency induced mistakes and their consequences. There was a 12-month stay in prison, and another visit to drug rehab. In November 2000, Downey was again arrested, this time in a Palm Springs hotel room, where he was discovered with cocaine and in a Wonder Woman costume. He was charged with felony drug possession.
Downey's trial, originally set for late January, was delayed for several months while his lawyers negotiated with prosecutors. In March 2001, the two sides failed to reach a plea bargain, and the case was set for a preliminary hearing at the end of April. On April 24, 2001, Downey was arrested for allegedly being under the influence of an undisclosed "stimulant." Downey's personal life was in turmoil, too, as Falconer sued him for divorce in 2004.
Television'Ally McBeal'Despite his personal turmoil in the early 2000s, Downey continued working. He gave a memorable performance in Wonder Boys (2000) and had roles in several other films, including Auto Motives and Lethargy. Additionally, Downey made the move to the small screen in 2000, becoming a regular cast member of the popular show Ally McBeal, starring Calista Flockhart. With this new role, Downey once again reminded fans and critics of his talent, likeability and versatility. He went on to pick up a 2001 Golden Globe Award, and won a Screen Actor's Guild Award soon after.
But Downey's increasingly complicated personal life pressed his employer's patience. After that second arrest in April 2001, Downey's tenure on Ally McBeal came to an end; producers had decided to wrap production of the final episodes of the season without the actor. Around this same time, lawyers reached an agreement with prosecutors that required Downey to plead no contest to cocaine-related charges. He was sentenced to three years' probation — a ruling that allowed him to continue live-in drug treatment instead of returning to prison.
Marriage to Susan LevinDespite his troubled history with the law, Downey has a much more stable home life these days. He married producer Susan Levin in 2005, and the couple welcomed their first child together on February 7, 2012. They named their son Exton Elias. On November 4, 2014, Downey and Levin welcomed their second child, a daughter named Avri. In December 2015, California Governor Jerry Brown pardoned Downey for the 1996 drug conviction that sent him to prison for a year.
One of the people to play a key role in the actor's turnaround was Mel Gibson, with whom Downey co-starred in Air America (1990). Gibson stuck by his friend's side, even as Downey's life was completely unraveling, and when Downey was unable to get something as routine as an insurance bond due to his past troubles with the law, Gibson found him work, casting him in the 2003 film The Singing Detective. The two actors remain close friends today.
Box Office Hits'Gothika,' 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' 'Zodiac'Working his way back to prominence, Downey in 2003 starred opposite Halle Berry in Gothika, which fared better at the box office than it did with the critics. He continued to dedicate himself to his craft, playing a supporting role in the critically acclaimed Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) and the lead in the independent drama A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006), which he also co-produced. In Zodiac (2007), Downey played a journalist who gets wrapped up in the hunt for the infamous Zodiac Killer.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below'Iron Man,' 'Tropic Thunder'In 2008 Downey transformed from an often critically admired actor to a box office star. He played the wealthy industrialist-turned-crime fighter Tony Stark in the smash hit Iron Man, based on the Marvel Comics superhero, which grossed more than $318 million domestically and led to the release of sequels in 2010 and 2013.
Taking a huge risk, Downey also starred in the comedy Tropic Thunder (2008) with Ben Stiller and Jack Black; he played a white actor pretending to be a Black actor in this war movie spoof. His efforts received mostly positive reviews, with Variety magazine's Todd McCarthy stating that "the audacity of Downey's performance" was one of "the best reasons to see the film." Downey garnered numerous accolades for his performance in Tropic Thunder, including Oscar (Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role), Golden Globe (Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture) and Screen Actors Guild (Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role) award nominations.
'The Soloist' and 'Sherlock Holmes'Downey went on to share top billing with Jamie Foxx in The Soloist (2009), which tells the story about the friendship between a Los Angeles journalist (Downey) and a homeless Juilliard-trained musician (Foxx). The film registered a respectable showing at the box office and earned the praise from critics, who lauded Downey and Foxx for their performances.
Demonstrating he isn't afraid of blockbusters (or English accents), Downey co-starred in the Guy Ritchie directed Sherlock Holmes in 2009, alongside Jude Law as Dr. John Watson. The duo teamed up again for the 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
'The Avengers' FranchiseThe crime fighting picked up again in 2012, when Downey's Iron Man character was back in action in The Avengers, a movie that featured a bevy of Hollywood talent, including Don Cheadle (Colonel James "Rhodey" Rhodes), Mark Ruffalo (Hulk), Samuel Jackson (Nick Fury) and Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), among others.
After a turn as sharp city lawyer Hank Palmer opposite Robert Duvall in the drama The Judge (2014), Downey reprised his Tony Stark/Iron Man dual role for Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015); Captain America: Civil War (2016); Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017); Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).
'Dolittle'After a half-decade of appearing solely in Marvel-branded features, Downey reemerged as host of the YouTube series The Age of AI beginning in late 2019. In January 2020, he starred as a veterinarian who talks to animals in Dolittle, based on the classic children's book series by British author Hugh Lofting.
Upcoming ProjectsSome of Downey's upcoming projects include Marvel's Black Widow and the sports comedy-drama All-Star Weekend.
For his part, Downey isn't taking this professional and personal resurgence for granted. "I think part of my destiny has to be realizing that I'm not the poster boy for drug abuse," he told reporters in 2005. "I'm just this guy who has a really strong sense of wanting home and wanting foundation and having not had it, I now choose to create it."
Advertisement - Continue Reading BelowEarly LifeFamed actor Robert Downey Jr. was born on April 4, 1965, in New York City, the son of the avant-garde filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., who is best known for the 1969 film Putney Swope. Downey began acting as a young child. His mother, Elsie, was an actress who instilled in her son a love of performing. Raised in Greenwich Village with his older sister, Alison, Downey made his film debut playing a puppy in his father's film, Pound (1970), in which actors played dogs. He would go on to have small parts in several more of his father's films.
Downey's parents divorced when he was 13, and the young actor ended up living in Los Angeles with his father. At the age of 16, however, he dropped out of high school and was on the move again, relocating to New York to live with his mother.
VideosRelated VideosQUICK FACTSName: RobertBirth Year: 1965Birth date: April 4, 1965Birth State: New YorkBirth City: New YorkBirth Country: United StatesGender: MaleBest Known For: Robert Downey Jr. is an American actor known for roles in a wide variety of films, including 'Iron Man,' 'The Avengers, 'Sherlock Holmes' and 'Chaplin.'Astrological Sign: AriesInteresting FactsRobert Downey Jr. was once stopped by police after driving naked in his Porsche, and found not only to be without clothes, but in possession of cocaine, heroin and a .357 Magnum.Fact CheckWe strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right,contact us!CITATION INFORMATIONArticle Title: Robert Downey Jr. BiographyAuthor: Biography.com EditorsWebsite Name: The Biography.com websiteUrl: Date:Publisher: A&E; Television NetworksLast Updated: September 16, 2022Original Published Date: April 3, 2014QUOTESI think part of my destiny has to be realizing that I'm not the poster boy for drug abuse. I'm just this guy who has a really strong sense of wanting home and wanting foundation and having not had it, I now choose to create it.I don't drink these days. I am allergic to alcohol and narcotics. I break out in handcuffs.Until ['Less Than Zero'], I took my drugs after work and on the weekends. Maybe I'd turn up hungover on the set, but no more so than the stuntman. ...I was playing this junkie-faggot guy, and, for me, the role was like the ghost of Christmas future. The character was an exaggeration of myself. Then things changed, and, in some ways, I became an exaggeration of the character. That lasted far longer than it needed to last.
Manhattan (/mænˈhætən, mən-/) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state of New York. Located near the southern tip of the State of New York, Manhattan is based in the Eastern Time Zone and constitutes both the geographical and demographic center of the Northeast megalopolis and the urban core of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass.[7] Over 58 million people live within 250 miles of Manhattan,[8] which serves as New York City's economic and administrative center, cultural identifier, center of glamor,[9] and the city's historical birthplace.[10] Residents of the outer boroughs of New York City often refer to Manhattan as "the City".[11]
Manhattan has been described as the cultural, financial, media, and entertainment capital of the world,[12][13][14][15] and hosts the United Nations headquarters.[16] Manhattan also serves as the headquarters of the global art market, with numerous art galleries and sale houses collectively hosting half of the world's art sales.[17]
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, the borough consists mostly of Manhattan Island, bounded by the Hudson, East, and Harlem rivers along with several small adjacent islands, including Roosevelt, U Thant, and Randalls and Wards Islands. The Borough of Manhattan also includes the small neighborhood of Marble Hill on the U.S. mainland, which was separated from Manhattan Island by construction of the Harlem Ship Canal and was later connected using landfill to the Bronx. Manhattan Island is divided into three informally bounded components, each cutting across the borough's long axis: Lower, Midtown, and Upper Manhattan.
Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial and fintech center of the world,[18][19][20][21] and Manhattan is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.[22][23] Many multinational media conglomerates are based in Manhattan, and the borough has been the setting for numerous books, films, and television shows. Manhattan's residential and commercial real estate markets are the most expensive in the world,[24] with the value of Manhattan Island, including real estate, estimated to exceed US$4 trillion in 2021, and with Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan commanding the highest retail rents in the world, at US$3,000 per square foot ($32,000/m2) per year in 2017.[25] In 2022, the average monthly apartment rent in Manhattan climbed over US$5,000 for the first time.[26]
The area of present-day Manhattan was originally part of Lenape territory.[27] European settlement began with the establishment of a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan; the post was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The territory and its surroundings came under English control in 1664[28] and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York.[29] New York, based in present-day Manhattan, served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790.[30] The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor greeted millions of immigrants as they came to America by ship in the late 19th century[31] and is a world symbol of the United States and its ideals of liberty and peace.[32] Manhattan became a borough during the consolidation of New York City in 1898.
New York County is the smallest county by land area in the contiguous United States, as well as the most densely populated U.S. county.[33] Manhattan is one of the most densely populated locations in the world, with a 2020 census population of 1,694,251 living in a land area of 22.83 square miles (59.13 km2),[34][35][5] or 72,918 residents per square mile (28,154 residents/km2), one of the highest urban densities in the world and higher than the density of any individual U.S. city.[36] On business days, the influx of commuters increases this number to over 3.9 million,[37] or more than 170,000 people per square mile (66,000 people/km2). Manhattan has the third-largest population of New York City's five boroughs, after Brooklyn and Queens, and is the smallest borough in terms of land area.[38] If each borough were ranked as a city, Manhattan would rank as the sixth-most populous in the U.S.
Many districts and landmarks in Manhattan are well known, as New York City received a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017,[39] and Manhattan hosts three of the world's 10 most-visited tourist attractions in 2013: Times Square, Central Park, and Grand Central Terminal.[40] The Empire State Building has become the global standard of reference to describe the height and length of other structures.[41] Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan is the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere.[42] The borough hosts many prominent bridges, including the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Queensboro, Triborough, and George Washington Bridges; tunnels such as the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels; skyscrapers including the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and One World Trade Center;[43] and parks, such as Central Park. Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere,[44] and Koreatown is replete with karaoke bars.[45] The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, part of the Stonewall National Monument, is considered the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement, cementing Manhattan's central role in LGBT culture.[46][47] The City of New York was founded at the southern tip of Manhattan,[48] and the borough houses New York City Hall, the seat of the city's government.[49] Numerous colleges and universities are located in Manhattan,[50] including Columbia University, New York University, Cornell Tech, Weill Cornell Medical College, and Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top 40 in the world.[51][52] The Metropolitan Museum of Art is both the largest and most visited art museum in the United States and hosts the globally focused Met Gala haute couture fashion event annually. Governors Island in New York Harbor is planned to host a US$1 billion research and education center poised to make New York City the global leader in addressing the climate crisis.[53]
EtymologyThe name Manhattan originated from the Lenapes language, Munsee, manaháhtaan (where manah- means "gather", -aht- means "bow", and -aan is an abstract element used to form verb stems). The Lenape word has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the (wood to make) bows".
According to a Munsee tradition recorded by Albert Seqaqkind Anthony in the 19th century, the island was named so for a grove of hickory trees at its southern end that was considered ideal for the making of bows.[54] It was first recorded in writing as Manna-hata, in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on Henry Hudson's yacht Halve Maen (Half Moon).[55]
A 1610 map depicts the name Manna-hata twice, on both the east and west sides of the Mauritius River, later named the North River and ultimately the Hudson River. Alternative etymologies in folklore include "island of many hills",[56] "the island where we all became intoxicated" and simply "island", as well as a phrase descriptive of the whirlpool at Hell Gate.[57] It is thought that the term Manhattoe may originally have referred only to a location at the southern tip of the island before eventually signifying the entire island to the Dutch through pars pro toto.
HistorySee also: History of New York CityHistory of New York CityLenape and New Netherland, to 1664New AmsterdamBritish and Revolution, 1665–1783Federal and early American, 1784–1854Tammany and Consolidation, 1855–1897(Civil War, 1861–1865)Early 20th century, 1898–1945Post–World War II, 1946–1977Modern and post-9/11, 1978–presentSee alsoTransportationTimelines: NYC • Bronx • Brooklyn • Queens • Staten IslandCategoryvteLenape settlementManhattan was historically part of the Lenapehoking territory inhabited by the Munsee Lenape[58] and Wappinger tribes.[59] There were several Lenape settlements in the area of Manhattan including Sapohanikan, Nechtanc, and Konaande Kongh that were interconnected by a series of trails. The primary trail on the island ran from what is now Inwood in the north to Battery Park in the south. There were various sites for fishing and planting established by the Lenape throughout Manhattan.[27] The 48-acre (19 ha) Collect Pond, which fed the fresh water streams and marshes around it, was also an important meeting and trading location for the people in the area.[60][61]
Colonial eraMain articles: New Netherland, New Amsterdam, and Province of New York
Peter Minuit, who founded New Sweden in 1638
Pieter Schaghen's 1626 letter saying Manhattan had been purchased for 60 Dutch guilders
The Castello Plan showing the Dutch city of New Amsterdam at Manhattan's southern tip in 1660
New Amsterdam centered in what eventually became Lower Manhattan in 1664, the year England took control and renamed it New YorkIn 1524, Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing in service of King Francis I of France, became the first documented European to visit the area that would become New York City. Verrazzano entered the tidal strait now known as The Narrows and named the land around Upper New York Harbor New Angoulême, in reference to the family name of King Francis I that was derived from Angoulême in France; he sailed far enough into the harbor to sight the Hudson River, which he referred to in his report to the French king as a "very big river"; and he named the Bay of Santa Margarita – what is now Upper New York Bay – after Marguerite de Navarre, the elder sister of the king.[62][63]
Manhattan was first mapped during a 1609 voyage of Henry Hudson, an Englishman who worked for the Dutch East India Company.[64] Hudson came across Manhattan Island and the native people living there, and continued up the river that would later bear his name, the Hudson River, until he arrived at the site of present-day Albany.[65]
A permanent European presence in New Netherland began in 1624, with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement on Governors Island. In 1625, construction was started on the citadel of Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, later called New Amsterdam (Nieuw Amsterdam), in what is now Lower Manhattan.[66][67] The 1625 establishment of Fort Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan Island is recognized as the birth of New York City.[68]
According to a letter by Pieter Janszoon Schagen, Peter Minuit and Walloon colonists of the West India Company acquired the island of Manhattan on May 24, 1626, from unnamed native people, who are believed to have been Canarsee Indians of the Manhattoe, in exchange for traded goods worth 60 guilders,[69] often said to be worth US$24. The figure of 60 guilders comes from a letter by a representative of the Dutch Estates General and member of the board of the Dutch West India Company, Pieter Janszoon Schagen, to the Estates General in November 1626.[70] In 1846, New York historian John Romeyn Brodhead converted the figure of Fl 60 (or 60 guilders) to US$24 (he arrived at $24 = Fl 60/2.5, because the US dollar was erroneously equated with the Dutch rijksdaalder having a standard value of 2.5 guilders).[71] "[A] variable-rate myth being a contradiction in terms, the purchase price remains forever frozen at twenty-four dollars," as authors Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace remarked in their history of New York.[72] Sixty guilders in 1626 was valued at approximately $1,000 in 2006 and $963 in 2020, according to the Institute for Social History of Amsterdam.[73] Based on the price of silver, "The Straight Dope" newspaper column calculated an equivalent of $72 in 1992.[74] Historians James and Michelle Nevius revisited the issue in 2014, suggesting that using the prices of beer and brandy as monetary equivalencies, the price Minuit paid would have the purchasing power of somewhere between $2,600 and $15,600 in current dollars.[75] According to the writer Nathaniel Benchley, Minuit conducted the transaction with Seyseys, chief of the Canarsee, who were willing to accept valuable merchandise in exchange for the island that was mostly controlled by the Weckquaesgeeks, a band of the Wappinger.[76]
In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant was appointed as the last Dutch Director-General of the colony.[77] New Amsterdam was formally incorporated as a city on February 2, 1653.[78] In 1674, the English bought New Netherland, after Holland lost rentable sugar business in Brazil, and renamed it "New York" after the English Duke of York and Albany, the future King James II.[79] The Dutch, under Director General Stuyvesant, successfully negotiated with the English to produce 24 articles of provisional transfer, which sought to retain for the extant citizens of New Netherland their previously attained liberties (including freedom of religion) under their new English rulers.[80][67]
The Dutch Republic re-captured the city in August 1673, renaming it "New Orange". New Netherland was ultimately ceded to the English in November 1674 through the Treaty of Westminster.[81]
American Revolution and the early United StatesFurther information: American Revolution
Washington's statue in front of Federal Hall on Wall Street, where in 1789 he was sworn in as the first U.S. president[82]Manhattan was at the heart of the New York Campaign, a series of major battles in the early stages of the American Revolutionary War. The Continental Army was forced to abandon Manhattan after the Battle of Fort Washington on November 16, 1776. The city, greatly damaged by the Great Fire of New York during the campaign, became the British military and political center of operations in North America for the remainder of the war.[83] The military center for the colonists was established in neighboring New Jersey.[84][85] British occupation lasted until November 25, 1783, when George Washington returned to Manhattan, as the last British forces left the city.[86]
From January 11, 1785, to the fall of 1788, New York City was the fifth of five capitals of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, with the Continental Congress meeting at New York City Hall (then at Fraunces Tavern). New York was the first capital under the newly enacted Constitution of the United States, from March 4, 1789, to August 12, 1790, at Federal Hall.[87] Federal Hall was also the site where the United States Supreme Court met for the first time,[88] the United States Bill of Rights were drafted and ratified,[89] and where the Northwest Ordinance was adopted, establishing measures for adding new states to the Union.[90]
19th century
Manhattan in 1873; the Brooklyn Bridge, connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn, was constructed between 1870 and 1883.New York grew as an economic center, first as a result of Alexander Hamilton's policies and practices as the first Secretary of the Treasury and, later, with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which connected the Atlantic port to the vast agricultural markets of the Midwestern United States and Canada.[91][92] By 1810, New York City, then confined to Manhattan, had surpassed Philadelphia as the largest city in the United States.[93] The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 laid out the island of Manhattan in its familiar grid plan.
Tammany Hall, a Democratic Party political machine, began to grow in influence with the support of many of the immigrant Irish, culminating in the election of the first Tammany mayor, Fernando Wood, in 1854. Tammany Hall dominated local politics for decades. Central Park, which opened to the public in 1858, became the first landscaped public park in an American city.[94][95]
New York City played a complex role in the American Civil War. The city's strong commercial ties to the southern United States existed for many reasons, including the industrial power of the Hudson River, which allowed trade with stops such as the West Point Foundry, one of the great manufacturing operations in the early United States; and the city's Atlantic Ocean ports, rendering New York City the American powerhouse in terms of industrial trade between the northern and southern United States. Anger arose about conscription, with resentment at those who could afford to pay $300 to avoid service leading to resentment against Lincoln's war policies and fomenting paranoia about free Blacks taking the poor immigrants' jobs,[96] culminating in the three-day-long New York Draft Riots of July 1863. These intense war-time riots are counted among the worst incidents of civil disorder in American history, with an estimated 119 participants and passersby massacred.[97]
The rate of immigration from Europe grew steeply after the Civil War, and Manhattan became the first stop for millions seeking a new life in the United States, a role acknowledged by the dedication of the Statue of Liberty on October 28, 1886, a gift from the people of France.[98][99] New York's growing immigrant population, which had earlier consisted mainly of German and Irish immigrants, began in the late 1800s to include waves of impoverished Italians and Central and Eastern European Jews flowing in en masse. This new European immigration brought further social upheaval. In a city of tenements packed with poorly paid laborers from dozens of nations, the city became a hotbed of revolution (including anarchists and communists among others), syndicalism, racketeering, and unionization.
In 1883, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge established a road connection to Brooklyn, across the East River. In 1874, the western portion of the present Bronx County was transferred to New York County from Westchester County, and in 1895 the remainder of the present Bronx County was annexed.[100] In 1898, when New York City consolidated with three neighboring counties to form "the City of Greater New York", Manhattan and the Bronx, though still one county, were established as two separate boroughs. On January 1, 1914, the New York State Legislature created Bronx County and New York County was reduced to its present boundaries.[101]The "Sanitary & Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York", commonly known as the Viele Map, developed by Egbert Ludovicus Viele in 186520th centuryFurther information: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and Stonewall riots
Manhattan's Little Italy on the Lower East Side, c. 1900The construction of the New York City Subway, which opened in 1904, helped bind the new city together, as did additional bridges to Brooklyn. In the 1920s Manhattan experienced large arrivals of African-Americans as part of the Great Migration from the southern United States, and the Harlem Renaissance, part of a larger boom time in the Prohibition era that included new skyscrapers competing for the skyline. New York City became the most populous city in the world in 1925, overtaking London, which had reigned for a century.[102] Manhattan's majority white ethnic group declined from 98.7% in 1900 to 58.3% by 1990.[103]
On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village killed 146 garment workers. The disaster eventually led to overhauls of the city's fire department, building codes, and workplace regulations.[104]
The period between the World War I and World War II saw the election of reformist mayor Fiorello La Guardia and the fall of Tammany Hall after 80 years of political dominance.[105] As the city's demographics stabilized, labor unionization brought new protections and affluence to the working class, the city's government and infrastructure underwent a dramatic overhaul under La Guardia.Manhattan personified in the early 20th centuryDespite the Great Depression, some of the world's tallest skyscrapers were completed in Manhattan during the 1930s, including numerous Art Deco masterpieces that are still part of the city's skyline, most notably the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the 30 Rockefeller Plaza.[106]
Returning World War II veterans created a postwar economic boom, which led to the development of huge housing developments targeted at returning veterans, the largest being Peter Cooper Village-Stuyvesant Town, which opened in 1947.[107] In 1951–1952, the United Nations relocated to a new headquarters the East Side of Manhattan.[108][109]
The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent protests by members of the gay community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. They are widely considered to constitute the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement[110][111] and the modern fight for LGBT rights.[112][113]
In the 1970s, job losses due to industrial restructuring caused New York City, including Manhattan, to suffer from economic problems and rising crime rates.[114] While a resurgence in the financial industry greatly improved the city's economic health in the 1980s, New York's crime rate continued to increase through the decade and into the beginning of the 1990s.[115]
The 1980s saw a rebirth of Wall Street, and Manhattan reclaimed its role at the center of the worldwide financial industry. The 1980s also saw Manhattan at the heart of the AIDS crisis, with Greenwich Village at its epicenter. The organizations Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) were founded to advocate on behalf of those stricken with the disease.
By the 1990s, crime rates started to drop dramatically due to revised police strategies, improving economic opportunities, gentrification, and new residents, both American transplants and new immigrants from Asia and Latin America. Murder rates that had reached 2,245 in 1990 plummeted to 537 by 2008, and the crack epidemic and its associated drug-related violence came under greater control.[116] The outflow of population turned around, as the city once again became the destination of immigrants from around the world, joining with low interest rates and Wall Street bonuses to fuel the growth of the real estate market.[117] Important new sectors, such as Silicon Alley, emerged in Manhattan's economy.
The newly completed Singer Building towering above the city, 1909The newly completed Singer Building towering above the city, 1909
A construction worker atop the Empire State Building as it was being built in 1930; to the right is the Chrysler BuildingA construction worker atop the Empire State Building as it was being built in 1930; to the right is the Chrysler Building
Aerial view of the tip of Lower Manhattan, 1931Aerial view of the tip of Lower Manhattan, 1931
Lower East Side and Lower Manhattan skyline photographed using Agfacolor, 1938Lower East Side and Lower Manhattan skyline photographed using Agfacolor, 1938
V-J Day in Times Square in Times Square, 1945V-J Day in Times Square in Times Square, 1945
The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, a designated U.S. National Historic Landmark and National Monument, as the site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots and the cradle of the modern gay rights movement[110][118][119]The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, a designated U.S. National Historic Landmark and National Monument, as the site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots and the cradle of the modern gay rights movement[110][118][119]
21st centurySee also: September 11 attacks
United Airlines Flight 175 hits the South Tower on September 11, 2001.
Flooding on Avenue C caused by Hurricane Sandy on October 29, 2012[120]On September 11, 2001, two of four hijacked planes were flown into the Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center, and the towers subsequently collapsed in the September 11 attacks launched by al-Qaeda terrorists. 7 World Trade Center collapsed due to fires and structural damage caused by heavy debris falling from the collapse of the Twin Towers. The other buildings within the World Trade Center complex were damaged beyond repair and soon after demolished. The collapse of the Twin Towers caused extensive damage to other surrounding buildings and skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, and resulted in the deaths of 2,606 people, in addition to those on the planes. Many rescue workers and residents of the area developed several life-threatening illnesses that have led to some of their subsequent deaths.[121]
Since 2001, most of Lower Manhattan has been restored, although there has been controversy surrounding the rebuilding. A memorial at the site was opened to the public on September 11, 2011, and the museum opened in 2014. In 2014, the new One World Trade Center, at 1,776 feet (541 m) and formerly known as the Freedom Tower, became the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere,[122] while other skyscrapers were under construction at the site.
The Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan began on September 17, 2011, receiving global attention and spawning the Occupy movement against social and economic inequality worldwide.[123]
On October 29 and 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused extensive destruction in the borough, ravaging portions of Lower Manhattan with record-high storm surge from New York Harbor,[124] severe flooding, and high winds, causing power outages for hundreds of thousands of city residents[125] and leading to gasoline shortages[126] and disruption of mass transit systems.[127][128][129][130] The storm and its profound impacts have prompted the discussion of constructing seawalls and other coastal barriers around the shorelines of the borough and the metropolitan area to minimize the risk of destructive consequences from another such event in the future.[131] Around 15 percent of the borough is considered to be in flood-risk zones.[132]
On October 31, 2017, a terrorist took a rental pickup truck and deliberately drove down a bike path alongside the West Side Highway in Lower Manhattan, killing eight people and injuring a dozen others before crashing into a school bus.[133]
GeographySee also: Geography of New York City
Satellite image of Manhattan, bounded by the Hudson River to the west, the Harlem River to the north, the East River to the east, and New York Harbor to the south, with rectangular Central Park prominently visible. Roosevelt Island, in the East River, belongs to Manhattan.
Location of Manhattan (in red) and the rest of New York City (in yellow)
A 2019 USGS map of Central Park, covering part of ManhattanComponentsThe borough consists of Manhattan Island, Marble Hill, and several small islands, including Randalls Island and Wards Island, and Roosevelt Island in the East River, and Governors Island and Liberty Island to the south in New York Harbor.[134]
According to the United States Census Bureau, New York County has a total area of 33.6 square miles (87 km2), of which 22.8 square miles (59 km2) is land and 10.8 square miles (28 km2) (32%) is water.[2] The northern segment of Upper Manhattan represents a geographic panhandle. Manhattan Island is 22.7 square miles (59 km2) in area, 13.4 miles (21.6 km) long and 2.3 miles (3.7 km) wide, at its widest (near 14th Street).[135] Icebergs are often compared in size to the area of Manhattan.[136][137][138]
Manhattan IslandManhattan Island is loosely divided into Downtown (Lower Manhattan), Midtown (Midtown Manhattan), and Uptown (Upper Manhattan), with Fifth Avenue dividing Manhattan lengthwise into its East Side and West Side. Manhattan Island is bounded by the Hudson River to the west and the East River to the east. To the north, the Harlem River divides Manhattan Island from the Bronx and the mainland United States.
Early in the 19th century, landfill was used to expand Lower Manhattan from the natural Hudson shoreline at Greenwich Street to West Street.[139] When building the World Trade Center in 1968, 1.2 million cubic yards (917,000 m3) of material was excavated from the site.[140] Rather than dumping the spoil at sea or in landfills, the fill material was used to expand the Manhattan shoreline across West Street, creating Battery Park City.[141] The result was a 700-foot (210 m) extension into the river, running six blocks or 1,484 feet (452 m), covering 92 acres (37 ha), providing a 1.2-mile (1.9 km) riverfront esplanade and over 30 acres (12 ha) of parks;[142] Hudson River Park was subsequently opened in stages beginning in 1998.[143] Little Island opened on the Hudson River in May 2021, connected to the western termini of 13th and 14th Streets by footbridges.[144]
Marble HillOne neighborhood of New York County, Marble Hill, is contiguous with the U.S. mainland. Marble Hill at one time was part of Manhattan Island, but the Harlem River Ship Canal, dug in 1895 to improve navigation on the Harlem River, separated it from the remainder of Manhattan as an island between the Bronx and the remainder of Manhattan.[145] Before World War I, the section of the original Harlem River channel separating Marble Hill from the Bronx was filled in, and Marble Hill became part of the mainland.[146]
Marble Hill is one example of how Manhattan's land has been considerably altered by human intervention. The borough has seen substantial land reclamation along its waterfronts since Dutch colonial times, and much of the natural variation in its topography has been evened out.[56]
Smaller islandsSee also: List of smaller islands in New York CityWithin New York Harbor, there are three smaller islands:
Ellis Island, shared with New JerseyGovernors IslandLiberty IslandOther smaller islands, in the East River, include (from north to south):
Randalls and Wards Islands, joined by landfillMill RockRoosevelt IslandU Thant Island (legally Belmont Island)GeologyBedrock
A schist outcropping in Central ParkThe bedrock underlying much of Manhattan is a mica schist known as Manhattan schist[147] of the Manhattan Prong physiographic region. It is a strong, competent metamorphic rock that was created when Pangaea formed. It is well suited for the foundations of tall buildings. In Central Park, outcrops of Manhattan schist occur and Rat Rock is one rather large a predominant feature of the substrata of Manhattan is that the underlying bedrock base of the island rises considerably closer to the surface near Midtown Manhattan, dips down lower between 29th Street and Canal Street, then rises toward the surface again in Lower Manhattan. It has been widely believed that the depth to bedrock was the primary underlying reason for the clustering of skyscrapers in the Midtown and Financial District areas, and their absence over the intervening territory between these two areas.[151][152] However, research has shown that economic factors played a bigger part in the locations of these skyscrapers.[153][154][155]
Updated seismic analysisAccording to the United States Geological Survey, an updated analysis of seismic hazard in July 2014 revealed a "slightly lower hazard for tall buildings" in Manhattan than previously assessed. Scientists estimated this lessened risk based upon a lower likelihood than previously thought of slow shaking near New York City, which would be more likely to cause damage to taller structures from an earthquake in the vicinity of the city.[156]
LocationsA tall green statue on an island in a harbor.Liberty Island, an exclave of Manhattan, New York City, and New York state, that is surrounded by New Jersey watersAdjacent countiesBergen County, New Jersey—west and northwestHudson County, New Jersey—west and southwestBronx County (The Bronx)—north and northeastQueens County (Queens)—eastKings County (Brooklyn)—south and southeastRichmond County (Staten Island)—southwestNational protected areasAfrican Burial Ground National MonumentCastle Clinton National MonumentFederal Hall National MemorialGeneral Grant National MemorialGovernors Island National MonumentHamilton Grange National MemorialLower East Side Tenement National Historic SiteStatue of Liberty National Monument (part)Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic SiteNeighborhoodsMain articles: Neighborhoods in New York City and List of Manhattan neighborhoods
The Empire State Building (in foreground) looking south from the top of Rockefeller Center with One World Trade Center (in background); the Midtown South Community Council acts as a civic caretaker for much of the neighborhood between the skyscrapers of Midtown and Lower Manhattan.Manhattan's many neighborhoods are not named according to any particular convention, nor do they have official boundaries. Some are geographical (the Upper East Side), or ethnically descriptive (Little Italy). Others are acronyms, such as TriBeCa (for "TRIangle BElow CAnal Street") or SoHo ("SOuth of HOuston"), or the far more recent vintages NoLIta ("NOrth of Little ITAly").[157][158] and NoMad ("NOrth of MADison Square Park").[159][160][161] Harlem is a name from the Dutch colonial era after Haarlem, a city in the Netherlands.[162] Alphabet City comprises Avenues A, B, C, and D, to which its name refers. Some have simple folkloric names, such as Hell's Kitchen, alongside their more official but lesser used title (in this case, Clinton).
Some neighborhoods, such as SoHo, which is mixed use, are known for upscale shopping as well as residential use. Others, such as Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, Alphabet City and the East Village, have long been associated with the Bohemian subculture.[163] Chelsea is one of several Manhattan neighborhoods with large gay populations and has become a center of both the international art industry and New York's nightlife.[164] Chinatown has the highest concentration of people of Chinese descent outside of Asia.[165][166] Koreatown is roughly bounded by 6th and Madison Avenues,[167][168][169] between 31st and 33rd Streets, where Hangul signage is ubiquitous. Rose Hill features a growing number of Indian restaurants and spice shops along a stretch of Lexington Avenue between 25th and 30th Streets which has become known as Curry Hill.[170] Washington Heights in Uptown Manhattan is home to the largest Dominican immigrant community in the United States.[171] Harlem, also in Upper Manhattan, is the historical epicenter of African American culture. Since 2010, a Little Australia has emerged and is growing in Nolita, Lower Manhattan.[172]
In Manhattan, uptown means north (more precisely north-northeast, which is the direction the island and its street grid system are oriented) and downtown means south (south-southwest).[173] This usage differs from that of most American cities, where downtown refers to the central business district. Manhattan has two central business districts, the Financial District at the southern tip of the island, and Midtown Manhattan. The term uptown also refers to the northern part of Manhattan above 72nd Street and downtown to the southern portion below 14th Street,[174] with Midtown covering the area in between, though definitions can be rather fluid depending on the situation.
Fifth Avenue roughly bisects Manhattan Island and acts as the demarcation line for east/west designations (e.g., East 27th Street, West 42nd Street); street addresses start at Fifth Avenue and increase heading away from Fifth Avenue, at a rate of 100 per block on most streets.[174] South of Waverly Place, Fifth Avenue terminates and Broadway becomes the east/west demarcation line. Although the grid does start with 1st Street, just north of Houston Street (the southernmost street divided in west and east portions; pronounced HOW-stin), the grid does not fully take hold until north of 14th Street, where nearly all east–west streets are numerically identified, which increase from south to north to 220th Street, the highest numbered street on the island. Streets in Midtown are usually one-way, with the few exceptions generally being the busiest cross-town thoroughfares (14th, 23rd, 34th, and 42nd Streets, for example), which are offerirectional across the width of Manhattan Island. The rule of thumb is that odd-numbered streets run west, while even-numbered streets run east.[135]
Climate
Central Park in autumnUnder the Köppen climate classification, using the 0 °C (32 °F) isotherm, New York City features both a humid subtropical climate (Cfa) and a humid continental climate (Dfa);[175] it is the northernmost major city on the North American continent with a humid subtropical climate. The city averages 234 days with at least some sunshine annually.[176] The city lies in the USDA 7b plant hardiness zone.[177]
Winters are cold and damp, and prevailing wind patterns that blow offshore temper the moderating effects of the Atlantic Ocean; yet the Atlantic and the partial shielding from colder air by the Appalachians keep the city warmer in the winter than inland North American cities at similar or lesser latitudes such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. The daily mean temperature in January, the area's coldest month, is 32.6 °F (0.3 °C);[178] temperatures usually drop to 10 °F (−12 °C) several times per winter,[178][179] and reach 60 °F (16 °C) several days in the coldest winter month.[178] Spring and autumn are unpredictable and can range from chilly to warm, although they are usually mild with low humidity. Summers are typically warm to hot and humid, with a daily mean temperature of 76.5 °F (24.7 °C) in July.[178] Nighttime conditions are often exacerbated by the urban heat island phenomenon, while daytime temperatures exceed 90 °F (32 °C) on average of 17 days each summer[180] and in some years exceed 100 °F (38 °C). Extreme temperatures have ranged from −15 °F (−26 °C), recorded on February 9, 1934, up to 106 °F (41 °C) on July 9, 1936.[180]
Summer evening temperatures are elevated by the urban heat island effect, which causes heat absorbed during the day to be radiated back at night, raising temperatures by as much as 7 °F (4 °C) when winds are slow.[181] Manhattan receives 49.9 inches (1,270 mm) of precipitation annually, which is relatively evenly spread throughout the year. Average winter snowfall between 1981 and 2010 has been 25.8 inches (66 cm); this varies considerably from year to year.[180] Governors Island in New York Harbor is planned to host a US$1 billion research and education center with the intention of making New York City the global leader in addressing the climate crisis.[53]
vteClimate data for New York (Belvedere Castle, Central Park), 1991–2020 normals,[b] extremes 1869–present[c]MonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecYearRecord high °F (°C)72(22)78(26)86(30)96(36)99(37)101(38)106(41)104(40)102(39)94(34)84(29)75(24)106(41)Mean maximum °F (°C)60.4(15.8)60.7(15.9)70.3(21.3)82.9(28.3)88.5(31.4)92.1(33.4)95.7(35.4)93.4(34.1)89.0(31.7)79.7(26.5)70.7(21.5)62.9(17.2)97.0(36.1)Average high °F (°C)39.5(4.2)42.2(5.7)49.9(9.9)61.8(16.6)71.4(21.9)79.7(26.5)84.9(29.4)83.3(28.5)76.2(24.6)64.5(18.1)54.0(12.2)44.3(6.8)62.6(17.0)Daily mean °F (°C)33.7(0.9)35.9(2.2)42.8(6.0)53.7(12.1)63.2(17.3)72.0(22.2)77.5(25.3)76.1(24.5)69.2(20.7)57.9(14.4)48.0(8.9)39.1(3.9)55.8(13.2)Average low °F (°C)27.9(−2.3)29.5(−1.4)35.8(2.1)45.5(7.5)55.0(12.8)64.4(18.0)70.1(21.2)68.9(20.5)62.3(16.8)51.4(10.8)42.0(5.6)33.8(1.0)48.9(9.4)Mean minimum °F (°C)9.8(−12.3)12.7(−10.7)19.7(−6.8)32.8(0.4)43.9(6.6)52.7(11.5)61.8(16.6)60.3(15.7)50.2(10.1)38.4(3.6)27.7(−2.4)18.0(−7.8)7.7(−13.5)Record low °F (°C)−6(−21)−15(−26)3(−16)12(−11)32(0)44(7)52(11)50(10)39(4)28(−2)5(−15)−13(−25)−15(−26)Average precipitation inches (mm)3.64(92)3.19(81)4.29(109)4.09(104)3.96(101)4.54(115)4.60(117)4.56(116)4.31(109)4.38(111)3.58(91)4.38(111)49.52(1,258)Average snowfall inches (cm)8.8(22)10.1(26)5.0(13)0.4(1.0)0.0(0.0)0.0(0.0)0.0(0.0)0.0(0.0)0.0(0.0)0.1(0.25)0.5(1.3)4.9(12)29.8(76)Average precipitation days (≥ 0.01 in)10.810.011.111.411.511.210.510.08.89.59.211.4125.4Average snowy days (≥ 0.1 in)3.73.22.00.20.00.00.00.00.00.00.22.111.4Average relative humidity (%)61.560.258.555.362.765.264.266.067.865.664.664.163.0Average dew point °F (°C)18.0(−7.8)19.0(−7.2)25.9(−3.4)34.0(1.1)47.3(8.5)57.4(14.1)61.9(16.6)62.1(16.7)55.6(13.1)44.1(6.7)34.0(1.1)24.6(−4.1)40.3(4.6)Mean monthly sunshine hours162.7163.1212.5225.6256.6257.3268.2268.2219.3211.2151.0139.02,534.7Percent possible sunshine54555757575759635961514857Average ultraviolet index2346788864215Source 1: NOAA (relative humidity and sun 1961–1990; dew point 1965–1984)[180][178][176][183]Source 2: Weather Atlas[184]See Climate of New York City for additional climate information from the outer boroughs.
Sea temperature data for New YorkMonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecYearAverage sea temperature °F (°C)41.7(5.4)39.7(4.3)40.2(4.5)45.1(7.3)52.5(11.4)64.5(18.1)72.1(22.3)74.1(23.4)70.1(21.2)63.0(17.2)54.3(12.4)47.2(8.4)55.4(13.0)Source: Weather Atlas[184]Boroughscape
Ten-mile Manhattan skyline panorama from 120th Street to the Battery, taken February 21, 2018, from across the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey.Riverside ChurchTime Warner Center220 Central Park SouthCentral Park TowerOne57432 Park Avenue53W53Chrysler BuildingBank of America TowerConde Nast BuildingThe New York Times BuildingEmpire State BuildingManhattan Westa: 55 Hudson Yards, b: 35 Hudson Yards, c: 10 Hudson Yards, d: 15 Hudson Yards56 Leonard Street8 Spruce StreetWoolworth Building70 Pine Street30 Park Place40 Wall StreetThree World Trade CenterFour World Trade CenterOne World Trade CenterDemographicsLooking at crowds down BroadwayBroadway in Midtown Manhattan. As of the 2020 U.S. census, Manhattan was 74,870.7 inhabitants per square mile (28,907.7/km2), rendering it the most densely populated municipality in the United States.In 2020, 1,694,251 people lived in Manhattan. At the 2010 U.S. census, there were 1,585,873 people living in Manhattan, an increase of 3.2% since 2000. Since 2010, Manhattan's population was estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau to have increased 2.7% to 1,628,706 as of 2018, representing 19.5% of New York City's population of 8,336,817 and 8.4% of New York State's population of 19,745,289.[34][185]
Racial composition2020[186]2010[187]2000[188]1990[189]1950[189]1900[189]White50.0%57.4%54.3%58.3%79.4%97.8%—Non-Hispanic46.8%48%45.7%48.9%n/an/aBlack or African American13.5%15.6%17.3%22.0%19.6%2.0%Hispanic or Latino (of any race)23.8%25.4%27.1%26.0%n/an/aAsian13.1%11.3%9.4%7.4%0.8%0.3%
Ethnic origins in ManhattanNew York City's five boroughsvteJurisdictionPopulationLand areaDensity of populationGDP †BoroughCountyCensus(2020)squaremilessquarekmpeople/sq. milepeople/sq. kmbillions(2012 US$) 2The BronxBronx1,472,65442.2109.334,92013,482$38.726BrooklynKings2,736,07469.4179.739,43815,227$92.300ManhattanNew York1,694,25122.758.874,78128,872$651.619QueensQueens2,405,464108.7281.522,1258,542$88.578Staten IslandRichmond495,74757.5148.98,6183,327$14.806City of New York8,804,190302.6783.829,09511,234$885.958State of New York20,215,75147,126.4122,056.8429166$1,514.779† GDP = Gross Domestic Product Sources:[190][191][192][193] and see individual borough articles.As of the 2020 census, the population density of New York County was 74,870.7 inhabitants per square mile (28,907.7/km2), the highest population density of any county in the United States.[34] In 1910, at the height of European immigration to New York, Manhattan's population density reached a peak of 101,548 people per square mile (39,208 people/km2).[34][185]
Historical populationYearPop.±%16561,000— 16984,937+393.7%17125,841+18.3%17237,248+24.1%17318,622+19.0%174611,717+35.9%175613,040+11.3%177121,863+67.7%178623,614+8.0%179033,131+40.3%180060,489+82.6%181096,373+59.3%1820123,706+28.4%1830202,589+63.8%1840312,710+54.4%1850515,547+64.9%1860813,669+57.8%1870942,292+15.8%18801,164,674+23.6%18901,441,216+23.7%19001,850,093+28.4%19102,331,542+26.0%19202,284,103−2.0%19301,867,312−18.2%19401,889,924+1.2%19501,960,101+3.7%19601,698,281−13.4%19701,539,233−9.4%19801,428,285−7.2%19901,487,536+4.1%20001,537,195+3.3%20101,585,873+3.2%20201,694,251+6.8%Sources:[34][194][195][5]Manhattan is one of the highest-income places in the United States with a population greater than one million. As of 2012, Manhattan's cost of living was the highest in the United States.[196] Manhattan is also the United States county with the highest per capita income, being the sole county whose per capita income exceeded $100,000 in 2010.[197] However, from 2011–2015 Census data of New York County, the per capita income was recorded in 2015 dollars as $64,993, with the median household income at $72,871, and poverty at 17.6%.[198] In 2012, The New York Times reported that inequality was higher than in most developing countries, stating, "The wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites made more than 40 times what the lowest fifth reported, a widening gap (it was 38 times, the year before) surpassed by only a few developing countries".[199]
ReligionIn 2010, the largest organized religious group in Manhattan was the Archdiocese of New York, with 323,325 Catholics worshipping at 109 parishes, followed by 64,000 Orthodox Jews with 77 congregations, an estimated 42,545 Muslims with 21 congregations, 42,502 non-denominational adherents with 54 congregations, 26,178 TEC Episcopalians with 46 congregations, 25,048 ABC-USA Baptists with 41 congregations, 24,536 Reform Jews with 10 congregations, 23,982 Mahayana Buddhists with 35 congregations, 10,503 PC-USA Presbyterians with 30 congregations, and 10,268 RCA Presbyterians with 10 congregations. Altogether, 44.0% of the population was claimed as members by religious congregations, although members of historically African-American denominations were underrepresented due to incomplete information.[200] In 2014, Manhattan had 703 religious organizations, the seventeenth most out of all US counties.[201] There is a large Buddhist temple in Manhattan located at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown.[202]
LanguagesAs of 2010, 59.98% (902,267) of Manhattan residents, aged five and older, spoke only English at home, while 23.07% (347,033) spoke Spanish, 5.33% (80,240) Chinese, 2.03% (30,567) French, 0.78% (11,776) Japanese, 0.77% (11,517) Russian, 0.72% (10,788) Korean, 0.70% (10,496) German, 0.66% (9,868) Italian, 0.64% (9,555) Hebrew, and 0.48% (7,158) spoke African languages at home. In total, 40.02% (602,058) of Manhattan's population, aged five and older, spoke a language other than English at home.[203]
As of 2015, 60.0% (927,650) of Manhattan residents, aged five and older, spoke only English at home, while 22.63% (350,112) spoke Spanish, 5.37% (83,013) Chinese, 2.21% (34,246) French, 0.85% (13,138) Korean, 0.72% (11,135) Russian, and 0.70% (10,766) Japanese. In total, 40.0% of Manhattan's population, aged five and older, spoke a language other than English at home.[204]
Landmarks and architectureMain article: Architecture of New York CitySee also: List of skyscrapers in New York City
Estonian House, a main center of Estonian culture among Estonian AmericansPoints of interest on Manhattan Island include the American Museum of Natural History; the Battery; Broadway and the Theater District; Bryant Park; Central Park, Chinatown; the Chrysler Building; The Cloisters; Columbia University; Curry Hill; the Empire State Building; Flatiron Building; the Financial District (including the New York Stock Exchange Building; Wall Street; and the South Street Seaport); Grand Central Terminal; Greenwich Village (including New York University; Washington Square Arch; and Stonewall Inn); Harlem and Spanish Harlem; the High Line; Koreatown; Lincoln Center; Little Australia; Little Italy; Madison Square Garden; Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art); Penn Station, Port Authority Bus Terminal; Rockefeller Center (including Radio City Music Hall); Times Square; and the World Trade Center (including the National September 11 Museum and One World Trade Center).
There are also numerous iconic bridges across rivers that connect to Manhattan Island, as well as an emerging number of supertall skyscrapers. The Statue of Liberty rests on a pedestal on Liberty Island, an exclave of Manhattan, and part of Ellis Island is also an exclave of Manhattan. The borough has many energy-efficient, Environmentally friendly office buildings, such as the Hearst Tower, the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center,[205] and the Bank of America Tower—the first skyscraper designed to attain a Platinum LEED history
Alexander Turney Stewart on 9th Street in Manhattan in 1870
Many tall buildings have setbacks on their facade due to the 1916 Zoning Resolution, exemplified at Park Avenue and 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan.The skyscraper, which has shaped Manhattan's distinctive skyline, has been closely associated with New York City's identity since the end of the 19th century. From 1890 to 1973, the title of world's tallest building resided continually in Manhattan (with a gap between 1894 and 1908, when the title was held by Philadelphia City Hall), with eight different buildings holding the title.[208] The New York World Building on Park Row, was the first to take the title in 1890, standing 309 feet (94 m) until 1955, when it was demolished to construct a new ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge.[209] The nearby Park Row Building, with its 29 stories standing 391 feet (119 m) high, became the world's tallest office building when it opened in 1899.[210] The 41-story Singer Building, constructed in 1908 as the headquarters of the eponymous sewing machine manufacturer, stood 612 feet (187 m) high until 1967, when it became the tallest building ever demolished.[211] The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, standing 700 feet (210 m) at the foot of Madison Avenue, wrested the title in 1909, with a tower reminiscent of St Mark's Campanile in Venice.[212] The Woolworth Building, and its distinctive Gothic architecture, took the title in 1913, topping off at 792 feet (241 m).[213] Structures such as the Equitable Building of 1915, which rises vertically forty stories from the sidewalk, prompted the passage of the 1916 Zoning Resolution, requiring new buildings to contain setbacks withdrawing progressively at a defined angle from the street as they rose, in order to preserve a view of the sky at street level.[214]
The Roaring Twenties saw a race to the sky, with three separate buildings pursuing the world's tallest title in the span of a year. As the stock market soared in the days before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, two developers publicly competed for the crown.[215] At 927 feet (283 m), 40 Wall Street, completed in May 1930 in only eleven months as the headquarters of the Bank of Manhattan, seemed to have secured the title.[216] At Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street, auto executive Walter Chrysler and his architect William Van Alen developed plans to build the structure's trademark 185-foot (56 m) spire in secret, pushing the Chrysler Building to 1,046 feet (319 m) and making it the tallest in the world when it was completed in 1929.[217] Both buildings were soon surpassed with the May 1931 completion of the 102-story Empire State Building with its Art Deco tower reaching 1,250 feet (380 m) at the top of the building. The 203-foot (62 m) high pinnacle was later added bringing the total height of the building to 1,453 ft (443 m).[218][219]
The former Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were located in Lower Manhattan. At 1,368 and 1,362 feet (417 and 415 m), the 110-story buildings were the world's tallest from 1972 until they were surpassed by the construction of the Willis Tower in 1974 (formerly known as the Sears Tower, located in Chicago).[220] One World Trade Center, a replacement for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, is currently the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.[221]
In 1961, the Pennsylvania Railroad unveiled plans to tear down the old Penn Station and replace it with a new Madison Square Garden and office building complex. Organized protests were aimed at preserving the McKim, Mead & White-designed structure completed in 1910, widely considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style and one of the architectural jewels of New York City.[222] Despite these efforts, demolition of the structure began in October 1963. The loss of Penn Station—called "an act of irresponsible public vandalism" by historian Lewis Mumford—led directly to the enactment in 1965 of a local law establishing the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which is responsible for preserving the "city's historic, aesthetic, and cultural heritage".[223] The historic preservation movement triggered by Penn Station's demise has been credited with the retention of some one million structures nationwide, including over 1,000 in New York City.[224] In 2017, a multibillion-dollar rebuilding plan was unveiled to restore the historic grandeur of Penn Station, in the process of upgrading the landmark's status as a critical transportation hub.[225]
Parkland
Central ParkParkland composes 17.8% of the borough, covering a total of 2,686 acres (10.87 km2). The 843-acre (3.41 km2) Central Park, the largest park comprising 30% of Manhattan's parkland, is bordered on the north by West 110th Street (Central Park North), on the west by Eighth Avenue (Central Park West), on the south by West 59th Street (Central Park South), and on the east by Fifth Avenue. Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, offers extensive walking tracks, two ice-skating rinks, a wildlife sanctuary, and several lawns and sporting areas, as well as 21 playgrounds and a 6-mile (9.7 km) road from which automobile traffic is banned.[226] While much of the park looks natural, it is almost entirely landscaped, and the construction of Central Park in the 1850s was one of the era's most massive public works projects, with some 20,000 workers crafting the topography to create the English-style pastoral landscape Olmsted and Vaux sought to create.[227]
The remaining 70% of Manhattan's parkland includes 204 playgrounds, 251 Greenstreets, 371 basketball courts, and many other amenities.[228] The next-largest park in Manhattan, the Hudson River Park, stretches 4.5 miles (7.2 km) on the Hudson River and comprises 550 acres (220 ha).[229] Other major parks include:[230]
Bowling GreenBryant ParkCity Hall ParkDeWitt Clinton ParkEast River GreenwayFort Tryon ParkFort Washington ParkHarlem River ParkHolcombe Rucker ParkImagination PlaygroundInwood Hill ParkIsham ParkJ. Hood Wright ParkJackie Robinson ParkMadison Square ParkMarcus Garvey ParkMorningside ParkRandall's Island ParkRiverside ParkSara D. Roosevelt ParkSeward ParkSt. Nicholas ParkStuyvesant SquareThe BatteryThe High LineThomas Jefferson ParkTompkins Square ParkUnion Square ParkWashington Square ParkEconomyMain article: Economy of New York City
By a significant margin, the New York Stock Exchange is the world's largest stock exchange; the market capitalization of its listed companies[231][232] is US$23.1 trillion as of April 2018, the largest of any stock exchange in the world[233]Manhattan is the economic engine of New York City, with its 2.3 million workers in 2007 drawn from the entire New York metropolitan area accounting for almost two-thirds of all jobs in New York City.[234] In the first quarter of 2014, the average weekly wage in Manhattan (New York County) was $2,749, representing the highest total among large counties in the United States.[235] Manhattan's workforce is overwhelmingly focused on white collar professions, with manufacturing nearly extinct. Manhattan also has the highest per capita income of any county in the United States.
In 2010, Manhattan's daytime population was swelling to 3.94 million, with commuters adding a net 1.48 million people to the population, along with visitors, tourists, and commuting students. The commuter influx of 1.61 million workers coming into Manhattan was the largest of any county or city in the country,[236] and was more than triple the 480,000 commuters who headed into second-ranked Washington, D.C.[237]
Financial sectorMain article: Wall Street
The Financial District of Lower Manhattan, seen from BrooklynManhattan's most important economic sector lies in its role as the headquarters for the U.S. financial industry, metonymously known as Wall Street. Manhattan is home to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), at 11 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, and the Nasdaq, now located at 4 Times Square in Midtown Manhattan, representing the world's largest and second-largest stock exchanges, respectively, when measured both by overall share trading value and by total market capitalization of their listed companies in 2013.[23] The NYSE American (formerly the American Stock Exchange, AMEX), New York Board of Trade, and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) are also located downtown. Financial technology (fintech) and cryptocurrency have emerged as more recent constituents of the financial sector as well as the tech sector.
Corporate sector
Manhattan contains over 520 million square feet (48,000,000 m2) of office space. During the COVID-19 pandemic, hybrid work prompted consideration of commercial-to-residential conversion in Manhattan.[238]New York City is home to the most corporate headquarters of any city in the United States, the overwhelming majority based in Manhattan.[239] Manhattan contained over 520 million square feet (48.3 million m2) of office space in 2022,[240] making it the largest office market in the United States; while Midtown Manhattan, with over 400 million square feet (37.2 million m2) is the largest central business district in the world.[241] New York City's role as the top global center for the advertising industry is metonymously reflected as "Madison Avenue".
Tech and biotechFurther information: Tech companies in Manhattan, Biotech companies in Manhattan, Silicon Alley, and Tech:NYC
The Flatiron District, the birthplace and center of Silicon Alley[242]Manhattan has driven New York's status as a top-tier global high technology hub.[243] Silicon Alley, once a metonym for the sphere encompassing the metropolitan region's high technology industries,[244] is no longer a relevant moniker as the city's tech Environment has expanded dramatically both in location and in its scope. New York City's current tech sphere encompasses a universal array of applications involving artificial intelligence, the internet, new media, financial technology (fintech) and cryptocurrency, biotechnology, game design, and other fields within information technology that are supported by its entrepreneurship ecosystem and venture capital investments.As of 2014, New York City hosted 300,000 employees in the tech sector.[245][246] In 2015, Silicon Alley generated over US$7.3 billion in venture capital investment,[247] most based in Manhattan, as well as in Brooklyn, Queens, and elsewhere in the region. High technology startup companies and employment are growing in Manhattan and across New York City, bolstered by the city's emergence as a global node of creativity and entrepreneurship,[247] social tolerance,[248] and Environmental sustainability,[249][250] as well as New York's position as the leading Internet hub and telecommunications center in North America, including its vicinity to several transatlantic fiber optic trunk lines, the city's intellectual capital, and its extensive outdoor wireless connectivity.[251] Verizon Communications, headquartered at 140 West Street in Lower Manhattan, was at the final stages in 2014 of completing a US$3 billion fiberoptic telecommunications upgrade throughout New York City.[252] As of October 2014, New York City hosted 300,000 employees in the tech sector,[246] with a significant proportion in Manhattan. The technology sector has been expanding across Manhattan since 2010.[253]
The biotechnology sector is also growing in Manhattan based upon the city's strength in academic scientific research and public and commercial financial support. By mid-2014, Accelerator, a biotech investment firm, had raised more than US$30 million from investors, including Eli Lilly and Company, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, for initial funding to create biotechnology startups at the Alexandria Center for Life Science, which encompasses more than 700,000 square feet (65,000 m2) on East 29th Street and promotes collaboration among scientists and entrepreneurs at the center and with nearby academic, medical, and research institutions. The New York City Economic Development Corporation's Early Stage Life Sciences Funding Initiative and venture capital partners, including Celgene, General Electric Ventures, and Eli Lilly, committed a minimum of US$100 million to help launch 15 to 20 ventures in life sciences and biotechnology.[254] In 2011, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had announced his choice of Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to build a US$2 billion graduate school of applied sciences on Roosevelt Island, Manhattan, with the goal of transforming New York City into the world's premier technology capital.[255][256]
TourismMain article: Tourism in New York City
Times Square is the hub of Broadway's theater district and a major Manhattan cultural venue with 50 million tourists annually, making it one of the world's most popular tourist destinations.[40]Tourism is vital to Manhattan's economy, and the landmarks of Manhattan are the focus of New York City's tourists, enumerating an eighth consecutive annual record of approximately 62.8 million visitors in 2017.[39] According to The Broadway League, for the 2018–2019 season (which ended May 26, 2019) total attendance was 14,768,254 and Broadway shows had US$1,829,312,140 in grosses, with attendance up 9.5%, grosses up 10.3%, and playing weeks up 9.3%.[257]
Real estateReal estate is a major force in Manhattan's economy. Manhattan has perennially been home to some of the nation's, as well as the world's, most valuable real estate, including the Time Warner Center, which had the highest-listed market value in the city in 2006 at US$1.1 billion,[258] to be subsequently surpassed in October 2014 by the Waldorf Astoria New York, which became the most expensive hotel ever sold after being purchased by the Anbang Insurance Group, based in China, for US$1.95 billion.[259] When 450 Park Avenue was sold on July 2, 2007, for US$510 million, about US$1,589 per square foot (US$17,104/m²), it broke the barely month-old record for an American office building of US$1,476 per square foot (US$15,887/m²) based on the sale of 660 Madison Avenue.[260] In 2014, Manhattan was home to six of the top ten zip codes in the United States by median housing price.[261] In 2019, the most expensive home sale ever in the United States occurred in Manhattan, at a selling price of US$238 million, for a 24,000-square-foot (2,200 m2) penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park,[262] while Central Park Tower, topped out at 1,550 feet (472 m) in 2019, is the world's tallest residential building, followed globally in height by 111 West 57th Street and 432 Park Avenue, both also located in Midtown Manhattan.
Manhattan had approximately 520 million square feet (48.1 million m²) of office space in 2013,[263] making it the largest office market in the United States.[264] Midtown Manhattan is the largest central business district in the nation based on office space,[265] while Lower Manhattan is the third-largest (after Chicago's Loop).[266][267]
As of the fourth quarter of 2021, the median value of homes in Manhattan was $1,306,208. It ranked second among US counties for highest median home value at the time, second to Nantucket.[268]
MediaMain articles: Media in New York City and New Yorkers in journalismManhattan has been described as the media capital of the world.[269][270] An integral component of this status is the significant array of media outlets and their journalists who report about international, American, business, entertainment, and New York metropolitan area-related matters from Manhattan.
News
The headquarters of The New York Times at 620 Eighth AvenueManhattan is served by the major New York City daily news publications, including The New York Times, which has won the most Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and is considered the U.S. media's "newspaper of record";[271] the New York Daily News; and the New York Post, which are all headquartered in the borough. The nation's largest newspaper by circulation, The Wall Street Journal, is also based in Manhattan. Other daily newspapers include AM New York and The Villager. The New York Amsterdam News, based in Harlem, is one of the leading Black-owned weekly newspapers in the United States. The Village Voice, historically the largest alternative newspaper in the United States, announced in 2017 that it would cease publication of its print edition and convert to a fully digital venture.[272]
Television, radio, filmSee also: List of films set in New York City and List of television shows set in New York CityThe television industry developed in Manhattan and is a significant employer in the borough's economy. The four major American broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, as well as Univision, are all headquartered in Manhattan, as are many cable channels, including CNN, MSNBC, MTV, Fox News, HBO, and Comedy Central. In 1971, WLIB became New York City's first Black-owned radio station and began broadcasts geared toward the African-American community in 1949. WQHT, also known as Hot 97, claims to be the premier hip-hop station in the United States. WNYC, comprising an AM and FM signal, has the largest public radio audience in the nation and is the most-listened to commercial or non-commercial radio station in Manhattan.[273] WBAI, with news and information programming, is one of the few socialist radio stations operating in the United States.
The oldest public-access television cable TV channel in the United States is the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, founded in 1971, offers eclectic local programming that ranges from a jazz hour to discussion of labor issues to foreign language and religious programming.[274] NY1, Time Warner Cable's local news channel, is known for its beat coverage of City Hall and state politics.
EducationSee also: Education in New York City, List of high schools in New York City, and List of colleges and universities in New York City
The notable architectural design of Butler Library at Columbia University, an Ivy League university in Manhattan[275]
Stuyvesant High School in Tribeca[276]
New York Public Library Main Branch at 42nd Street and Fifth AvenueEducation in Manhattan is provided by a vast number of public and private institutions. Non-charter public schools in the borough are operated by the New York City Department of Education,[277] the largest public school system in the United States. Charter schools include Success Academy Harlem 1 through 5, Success Academy Upper West, and Public Prep.
Several notable New York City public high schools are located in Manhattan, including A. Philip Randolph Campus High School, Beacon High School, Stuyvesant High School, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, High School of Fashion Industries, Eleanor Roosevelt High School, NYC Lab School, Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, Hunter College High School, and High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College. Bard High School Early College, a hybrid school created by Bard College, serves students from around the city.
Many private preparatory schools are also situated in Manhattan, including the Upper East Side's Brearley School, Dalton School, Browning School, Spence School, Chapin School, Nightingale-Bamford School, Convent of the Sacred Heart, Hewitt School, Saint David's School, Loyola School, and Regis High School. The Upper West Side is home to the Collegiate School and Trinity School. The borough is also home to Manhattan Country School, Trevor Day School, Xavier High School and the United Nations International School.
Based on data from the 2011–2015 American Community Survey, 59.9% of Manhattan residents over age 25 have a bachelor's degree.[278] As of 2005, about 60% of residents were college graduates and some 25% had earned advanced degrees, giving Manhattan one of the nation's densest concentrations of highly educated people.[279]
Manhattan has various colleges and universities, including Columbia University (and its affiliate Barnard College), Cooper Union, Marymount Manhattan College, New York Institute of Technology, New York University (NYU), The Juilliard School, Pace University, Berkeley College, The New School, Yeshiva University, and a campus of Fordham University. Other schools include Bank Street College of Education, Boricua College, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Manhattan School of Music, Metropolitan College of New York, Parsons School of Design, School of Visual Arts, Touro College, and Union Theological Seminary. Several other private institutions maintain a Manhattan presence, among them Mercy College, St. John's University, Adelphi University, The King's College, and Pratt Institute. Cornell Tech, part of Cornell University, is developing on Roosevelt Island.
The City University of New York (CUNY), the municipal college system of New York City, is the largest urban university system in the United States, serving more than 226,000 degree students and a roughly equal number of adult, continuing and professional education students.[280] A third of college graduates in New York City graduate from CUNY, with the institution enrolling about half of all college students in New York City. CUNY senior colleges located in Manhattan include: Baruch College, City College of New York, Hunter College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the CUNY Graduate Center (graduate studies and doctorate granting institution). The only CUNY community college located in Manhattan is the Borough of Manhattan Community College. The State University of New York is represented by the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York State College of Optometry, and Stony Brook University – Manhattan.
Manhattan is a world center for training and education in medicine and the life sciences.[281] The city as a whole receives the second-highest amount of annual funding from the National Institutes of Health among all U.S. cities,[282] the bulk of which goes to Manhattan's research institutions, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Weill Cornell Medical College, and New York University School of Medicine.
Manhattan is served by the New York Public Library, which has the largest collection of any public library system in the country.[283] The five units of the Central Library—Mid-Manhattan Library, 53rd Street Library, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, and the Science, Industry and Business Library—are all located in Manhattan.[284] More than 35 other branch libraries are located in the borough.[285]
CultureSee also: Culture of New York CityFurther information: Broadway theatre, LGBT culture in New York City, List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City, Music of New York City, Met Gala, New York Fashion Week, NYC Pride March, and Stonewall Riots
The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
The Metropolitan Museum of ArtManhattan is the borough most closely associated with New York City by non-residents; regionally, residents within the New York City metropolitan area, including natives of New York City's boroughs outside Manhattan, will often describe a trip to Manhattan as "going to the City".[286] Journalist Walt Whitman characterized the streets of Manhattan as being traversed by "hurrying, feverish, electric crowds".[287]
Manhattan has been the scene of many important global and American cultural movements. In 1912, about 20,000 workers, a quarter of them women, marched upon Washington Square Park to commemorate the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 workers on March 25, 1911. Many of the women wore fitted tucked-front blouses like those manufactured by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a clothing style that became the working woman's uniform and a symbol of women's liberation, reflecting the alliance of labor and suffrage movements.[288]
The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s established the African-American literary canon in the United States and introduced writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Manhattan's vibrant visual art scene in the 1950s and 1960s was a center of the pop art movement, which gave birth to such giants as Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. The downtown pop art movement of the late 1970s included artist Andy Warhol and clubs like Serendipity 3 and Studio 54, where he socialized.
Broadway theatre is considered the highest professional form of theatre in the United States. Plays and musicals are staged in one of the 39 larger professional theatres with at least 500 seats, almost all in and around Times Square. Off-Broadway theatres feature productions in venues with 100–500 seats.[289][290] Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, anchoring Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is home to 12 influential arts organizations, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, and New York City Ballet, as well as the Vivian Beaumont Theater, the Juilliard School, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Alice Tully Hall. Performance artists displaying diverse skills are ubiquitous on the streets of Manhattan.
Manhattan is also home to some of the most extensive art collections in the world, both contemporary and classical art, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Frick Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum. The Upper East Side has many art galleries,[291][292] and the downtown neighborhood of Chelsea is known for its more than 200 art galleries that are home to modern art from both upcoming and established artists.[293][294] Many of the world's most lucrative art sales are held in Manhattan.[295][296]
The Empire State Building displays the colors of the Rainbow Flag as an LGBT icon, top. The annual NYC Pride March in June (seen here in 2018) is the world's largest LGBT event, imaged below.[297][298]Manhattan is the epicenter of LGBT culture and the central node of the LGBTQ+ sociopolitical ecosystem.[299] The borough is widely acclaimed as the cradle of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, with its inception at the June 1969 Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan – widely considered to constitute the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement[111][300][301] and the modern fight for LGBT rights in the United States.[112][302] Brian Silverman, the author of Frommer's New York City from $90 a Day, wrote the city has "one of the world's largest, loudest, and most powerful LGBT communities", and "Gay and lesbian culture is as much a part of New York's basic identity as yellow cabs, high-rise buildings, and Broadway theatre"—[303] radiating from this central hub, as LGBT travel guide Queer in the World states, "The fabulosity of Gay New York is unrivaled on Earth, and queer culture seeps into every corner of its five boroughs".[304] Multiple gay villages have developed, spanning the length of the borough from the Lower East Side, East Village, and Greenwich Village, through Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen, uptown to Morningside Heights.
The annual NYC Pride March (or gay pride parade) traverses southward down Fifth Avenue and ends at Greenwich Village; the Manhattan parade is the largest pride parade in the world, attracting tens of thousands of participants and millions of sidewalk spectators each June.[298][297] Stonewall 50 – WorldPride NYC 2019 was the largest international Pride celebration in history, produced by Heritage of Pride. The events were in partnership with the I ❤ NY program's LGBT division, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, with 150,000 participants and five million spectators attending in Manhattan.[305]
The borough is represented in several prominent idioms. The phrase New York minute is meant to convey an extremely short time such as an instant,[306] sometimes in hyperbolic form, as in "perhaps faster than you would believe is possible," referring to the rapid pace of life in Manhattan.[307][308] The expression "melting pot" was first popularly coined to describe the densely populated immigrant neighborhoods on the Lower East Side in Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot, which was an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet set by Zangwill in New York City in 1908.[309] The iconic Flatiron Building is said to have been the source of the phrase "23 skidoo" or scram, from what cops would shout at men who tried to get glimpses of women's dresses being blown up by the winds created by the triangular building.[310] The "Big Apple" dates back to the 1920s, when a reporter heard the term used by New Orleans stablehands to refer to New York City's horse racetracks and named his racing column "Around The Big Apple". Jazz musicians adopted the term to refer to the city as the world's jazz capital, and a 1970s ad campaign by the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau helped popularize the term.[311] Manhattan, Kansas, a city of 53,000 people,[312] was named by New York investors after the borough and is nicknamed the "little apple".[313]
Clockwise, from upper left: the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the world's largest parade;[314] the annual Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village, the world's largest Halloween parade, with millions of spectators annually, and with its roots in New York's queer community;[315] the annual Philippine Independence Day Parade, the largest outside the Philippines; and the ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronautsManhattan is well known for its street parades, which celebrate a broad array of themes, including holidays, nationalities, human rights, and major league sports team championship victories. The majority of higher profile parades in New York City are held in Manhattan. The primary orientation of the annual street parades is typically from north to south, marching along major avenues. The annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is the world's largest parade,[314] beginning alongside Central Park and processing southward to the Flagship Macy's Herald Square store;[316] the parade is viewed on telecasts worldwide and draws millions of spectators in person.[314] Other notable parades including the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade in March, the New York City Pride Parade in June, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in October, and numerous parades commemorating the independence days of many nations. Ticker-tape parades celebrating championships won by sports teams as well as other heroic accomplishments march northward along the Canyon of Heroes on Broadway from Bowling Green to City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan. New York Fashion Week, held at various locations in Manhattan, is a high-profile semiannual event featuring models displaying the latest wardrobes created by prominent fashion designers worldwide in advance of these fashions proceeding to the retail marketplace.
Sports
The skating pond in Central Park in 1862
Madison Square Garden, home to the New York Rangers of the National Hockey League and the New York Knicks of the National Basketball AssociationManhattan is home to the NBA's New York Knicks and the NHL's New York Rangers, both of which play their home games at Madison Square Garden, the only major professional sports arena in the borough. The Garden was also home to the WNBA's New York Liberty through the 2017 season, but that team's primary home is now the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The New York Jets proposed a West Side Stadium for their home field, but the proposal was eventually defeated in June 2005, and they now play at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.[317]
While Manhattan does not currently have a professional baseball franchise, three of the four Major League Baseball teams to have played in New York City played in Manhattan. The original New York Giants baseball team played in the various incarnations of the Polo Grounds at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue from their inception in 1883—except for 1889, when they split their time between Jersey City, New Jersey and Staten Island, and when they played in Hilltop Park in 1911—until they headed to California with the Brooklyn Dodgers after the 1957 season.[318] The New York Yankees began their franchise as the Highlanders, named for Hilltop Park, where they played from their creation in 1903 until 1912. The team moved to the Polo Grounds with the 1913 season, where they were officially christened the New York Yankees, remaining there until they moved across the Harlem River in 1923 to Yankee Stadium.[319] The New York Mets played in the Polo Grounds in 1962 and 1963, their first two seasons, before Shea Stadium was completed in 1964.[320] After the Mets departed, the Polo Grounds was demolished in April 1964, replaced by public housing.[321][322]
The first national college-level basketball championship, the National Invitation Tournament, was held in New York in 1938 and remains in the city.[323] The New York Knicks started play in 1946 as one of the National Basketball Association's original teams, playing their first home games at the 69th Regiment Armory, before making Madison Square Garden their permanent home.[324] The New York Liberty of the WNBA shared the Garden with the Knicks from their creation in 1997 as one of the league's original eight teams through the 2017 season,[325] after which the team moved nearly all of its home schedule to White Plains in Westchester County.[326] Rucker Park in Harlem is a playground court, famed for its streetball style of play, where many NBA athletes have played in the summer league.[327]
Although both of New York City's football teams play today across the Hudson River in MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, both teams started out playing in the Polo Grounds. The New York Giants played side-by-side with their baseball namesakes from the time they entered the National Football League in 1925, until crossing over to Yankee Stadium in 1956.[328] The New York Jets, originally known as the Titans of New York, started out in 1960 at the Polo Grounds, staying there for four seasons before joining the Mets in Queens at Shea Stadium in 1964.[329]
The New York Rangers of the National Hockey League have played in the various locations of Madison Square Garden since the team's founding in the 1926–1927 season. The Rangers were predated by the New York Americans, who started play in the Garden the previous season, lasting until the team folded after the 1941–1942 NHL season, a season it played in the Garden as the Brooklyn Americans.[330]
The New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League played their home games at Downing Stadium for two seasons, starting in 1974. The playing pitch and facilities at Downing Stadium were in unsatisfactory condition, however, and as the team's popularity grew they too left for Yankee Stadium, and then Giants Stadium. The stadium was demolished in 2002 to make way for the $45 million, 4,754-seat Icahn Stadium, which includes an Olympic-standard 400-meter running track and, as part of Pelé's and the Cosmos' legacy, includes a FIFA-approved floodlit soccer stadium that hosts matches between the 48 youth teams of a Manhattan soccer club.[331][332]
GovernmentMain article: Government of New York City
Manhattan Municipal BuildingSince New York City's consolidation in 1898, Manhattan has been governed by the New York City Charter, which has provided for a strong mayor–council system since its revision in 1989.[333] The centralized New York City government is responsible for public education, correctional institutions, libraries, public safety, recreational facilities, sanitation, water supply, and welfare services in Manhattan.
The office of Borough President was created in the consolidation of 1898 to balance centralization with local authority. Each borough president had a powerful administrative role derived from having a vote on the New York City Board of Estimate, which was responsible for creating and approving the city's budget and proposals for land use. In 1989, the Supreme Court of the United States declared the Board of Estimate unconstitutional because Brooklyn, the most populous borough, had no greater effective representation on the Board than Staten Island, the least populous borough, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause pursuant to the high court's 1964 "one man, one vote" decision.[334]
Since 1990, the largely powerless Borough President has acted as an advocate for the borough at the mayoral agencies, the City Council, the New York state government, and corporations. Manhattan's current Borough President is Mark Levine, elected as a Democrat in November 2021. Levine replaced Gale Brewer, who went on to represent the sixth district of the New York City Council.
Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, is the District Attorney of New York County. Manhattan has ten City Council members, the third largest contingent among the five boroughs. It also has twelve administrative districts, each served by a local Community Board. Community Boards are representative bodies that field complaints and serve as advocates for local residents.
As the host of the United Nations, the borough is home to the world's largest international consular corps, comprising 105 consulates, consulates general and honorary consulates.[335] It is also the home of New York City Hall, the seat of New York City government housing the Mayor of New York City and the New York City Council. The mayor's staff and thirteen municipal agencies are located in the nearby Manhattan Municipal Building, completed in 1914, one of the largest governmental buildings in the world.[336]
PoliticsSee also: Community boards of Manhattan¶ The presidential election results below for the years 1876–1912 are not strictly comparable with the earlier and later ones because New York County included the West Bronx after 1874 and all of what is now the Borough of the Bronx (Bronx County, New York) from 1895 until The Bronx became a separate borough in 1914.
United States presidential election results for New York County, New York[337][338][339]YearRepublican / WhigDemocraticThird partyNo. %No. %No. %202085,18512.21%603,04086.42%9,5881.37%201664,9309.71%579,01386.56%24,9973.74%201289,55914.92%502,67483.74%8,0581.34%200889,94913.47%572,37085.70%5,5660.83%2004107,40516.73%526,76582.06%7,7811.21%200082,11314.38%454,52379.60%34,3706.02%199667,83913.76%394,13179.96%30,9296.27%199284,50115.88%416,14278.20%31,4755.92%1988115,92722.89%385,67576.14%4,9490.98%1984144,28127.39%379,52172.06%2,8690.54%1980115,91126.23%275,74262.40%50,24511.37%1976117,70225.54%337,43873.22%5,6981.24%1972178,51533.38%354,32666.25%2,0220.38%1968135,45825.59%370,80670.04%23,1284.37%1964120,12519.20%503,84880.52%1,7460.28%1960217,27134.19%414,90265.28%3,3940.53%1956300,00444.26%377,85655.74%00.00%1952300,28439.30%446,72758.47%16,9742.22%1948241,75232.75%380,31051.51%116,20815.74%1944258,65033.47%509,26365.90%4,8640.63%1940292,48037.59%478,15361.45%7,4660.96%1936174,29924.51%517,13472.71%19,8202.79%1932157,01427.78%378,07766.89%30,1145.33%1928186,39635.74%317,22760.82%17,9353.44%1924190,87141.20%183,24939.55%89,20619.25%1920275,01359.22%135,24929.12%54,15811.66%1916113,25442.65%139,54752.55%12,7594.80%191263,10718.15%166,15747.79%118,39134.05%1908154,95844.71%160,26146.24%31,3939.06%1904155,00342.11%189,71251.54%23,3576.35%1900153,00144.16%181,78652.47%11,7003.38%1896156,35950.73%135,62444.00%16,2495.27%189298,96734.73%175,26761.50%10,7503.77%1888106,92239.20%162,73559.67%3,0761.13%188490,09539.54%133,22258.47%4,5301.99%188081,73039.79%123,01559.90%6360.31%187658,56134.17%112,53065.66%2890.17%187254,67641.27%77,81458.73%00.00%186847,73830.59%108,31669.41%00.00%186436,68133.23%73,70966.77%00.00%186033,29034.83%62,29365.17%00.00%185617,77122.32%41,91352.65%19,92225.03%185223,12439.98%34,28059.27%4360.75%184829,07054.51%18,97335.57%5,2909.92%184426,38548.15%28,29651.64%1170.21%184020,95848.69%21,93650.96%1530.36%183616,34848.42%17,41751.58%00.00%183212,50640.97%18,02059.03%00.00%18289,63838.44%15,43561.56%00.00%
James A. Farley Post OfficeThe Democratic Party holds most public offices. Registered Republicans are a minority in the borough, constituting 9.88% of the electorate as of April 2016. Registered Republicans are more than 20% of the electorate only in the neighborhoods of the Upper East Side and the Financial District as of 2016. Democrats accounted for 68.41% of those registered to vote, while 17.94% of voters were unaffiliated.[340][341]
No Republican has won the presidential election in Manhattan since 1924, when Calvin Coolidge won a plurality of the New York County vote over Democrat John W. Davis, 41.20%–39.55%. Warren G. Harding was the most recent Republican presidential candidate to win a majority of the Manhattan vote, with 59.22% of the 1920 vote.[citation needed] In the 2004 presidential election, Democrat John Kerry received 82.1% of the vote in Manhattan and Republican George W. Bush received 16.7%.[342] The borough is the most important source of funding for presidential campaigns in the United States; in 2004, it was home to six of the top seven ZIP codes in the nation for political contributions.[343] The top ZIP code, 10021 on the Upper East Side, generated the most money for the United States presidential election for all presidential candidates, including both Kerry and Bush during the 2004 election.[344]
Representatives in the U.S. CongressIn 2018, four Democrats represented Manhattan in the United States House of Representatives.[345]
Nydia Velázquez (first elected in 1992) represents New York's 7th congressional district, which includes the Lower East Side and Alphabet City. The district also covers central and western Brooklyn and a small part of Queens.[345][346][347]Jerry Nadler (first elected in 1992) represents New York's 10th congressional district, which includes the West Side neighborhoods of Battery Park City, Chelsea, Chinatown, the Financial District, Greenwich Village, Hell's Kitchen, SoHo, Tribeca, and the Upper West Side. The district also covers southwestern Brooklyn.[345][348][349]Carolyn Maloney (first elected in 1992) represents New York's 12th congressional district, which includes the East Side neighborhoods of Gramercy Park, Kips Bay, Midtown Manhattan, Murray Hill, Roosevelt Island, Turtle Bay, Upper East Side, and most of the Lower East Side and the East Village. The district also covers western Queens.[345][350][351]Adriano Espaillat (first elected in 2016) represents New York's 13th congressional district, which includes the Upper Manhattan neighborhoods of East Harlem, Harlem, Inwood, Marble Hill, Washington Heights, and portions of Morningside Heights, as well as part of the northwest Bronx.[345][352][353]Federal officesThe United States Postal Service operates post offices in Manhattan. The James Farley Post Office at 421 Eighth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, between 31st Street and 33rd Street, is New York City's main post office.[354] Both the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit are located in Lower Manhattan's Foley Square, and the U.S. Attorney and other federal offices and agencies maintain locations in that area.
Crime and public safetyMain article: Crime in New York City
An 1885 sketch of Five PointsStarting in the mid-19th century, the United States became a magnet for immigrants seeking to escape poverty in their home countries. After arriving in New York, many new arrivals ended up living in squalor in the slums of the Five Points neighborhood, an area between Broadway and the Bowery, northeast of New York City Hall. By the 1820s, the area was home to many gambling dens and brothels, and was known as a dangerous place to go. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited the area and was appalled at the horrendous living conditions he had seen.[355] The area was so notorious that it even caught the attention of Abraham Lincoln, who visited the area before his Cooper Union speech in 1860.[356] The predominantly Irish Five Points Gang was one of the country's first major organized crime entities.
As Italian immigration grew in the early 20th century many joined ethnic gangs, including Al Capone, who got his start in crime with the Five Points Gang.[357] The Mafia (also known as Cosa Nostra) first developed in the mid-19th century in Sicily and spread to the East Coast of the United States during the late 19th century following waves of Sicilian and Southern Italian emigration. Lucky Luciano established Cosa Nostra in Manhattan, forming alliances with other criminal enterprises, including the Jewish mob, led by Meyer Lansky, the leading Jewish gangster of that period.[358] From 1920–1933, Prohibition helped create a thriving black market in liquor, upon which the Mafia was quick to capitalize.[358]
New York City as a whole experienced a sharp increase in crime during the post-war period.[359] The murder rate in Manhattan hit an all time high of 42 murders per 100,000 residents in 1979.[360] Manhattan retained the highest murder rate in the city until 1985 when it was surpassed by the Bronx. Most serious violent crime has been historically concentrated in Upper Manhattan and the Lower East Side, though robbery in particular was a major quality of life concern throughout the borough. Through the 1990s and 2000s, crime in Manhattan plummeted in all categories versus historic highs.[citation needed]
Today crime rates in most of Lower Manhattan, Midtown, the Upper East Side, and the Upper West Side are consistent with other major city centers in the United States. However, crime rates remain high in the Upper Manhattan neighborhoods of East Harlem, Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, and NYCHA developments across the borough despite significant reductions. In more recent years[clarification needed] there has been an increase in violent crime, particularly in Upper Manhattan and NYCHA houses in 1936
At the time of its construction, London Terrace in Chelsea was the largest apartment building in the world.During Manhattan's early history, wood construction and poor access to water supplies left the city vulnerable to fires. In 1776, shortly after the Continental Army evacuated Manhattan and left it to the British, a massive fire broke out destroying one-third of the city and some 500 houses.[364]
The rise of immigration near the turn of the 20th century left major portions of Manhattan, especially the Lower East Side, densely packed with recent arrivals, crammed into unhealthy and unsanitary housing. Tenements were usually five stories high, constructed on the then-typical 25 by 100 feet (7.6 by 30.5 m) lots, with "cockroach landlords" exploiting the new immigrants.[365][366] By 1929, stricter fire codes and the increased use of elevators in residential buildings, were the impetus behind a new housing code that effectively ended the tenement as a form of new construction, though many tenement buildings survive today on the East Side of the borough.[366] Conversely, there were also areas with luxury apartment developments, the first of which was the Dakota on the Upper West Side.[367]
Manhattan offers a wide array of public (NYCHA) and private housing options. Affordable rental and co-operative housing units throughout the borough were created under the Mitchell–Lama Housing Program. There were 852,575 housing units in 2013[34] at an average density of 37,345 units per square mile (14,419/km2). As of 2003, only 20.3% of Manhattan residents lived in owner-occupied housing, the second-lowest rate of all counties in the nation, behind the Bronx.[368] Although the city of New York has the highest average cost for rent in the United States, it simultaneously hosts a higher average of income per capita. Because of this, rent is a lower percentage of annual income than in several other American cities.[369]
Manhattan's real estate market for luxury housing continues to be among the most expensive in the world,[370] and Manhattan residential property continues to have the highest sale price per square foot in the United States.[371] Manhattan's apartments cost $1,773 per square foot ($19,080/m2), compared to San Francisco housing at $1,185 per square foot ($12,760/m2), Boston housing at $751 per square foot ($8,080/m2), and Los Angeles housing at $451 per square foot also: Transportation in New York CityPublic transportation
Grand Central Terminal, a National Historic Landmark
Ferries departing Battery Park City Terminal and helicopters flying above Manhattan
The Staten Island Ferry, seen from the Battery, crosses Upper New York Bay, providing free public transportation between Staten Island and Manhattan.Manhattan is unique in the U.S. for intense use of public transportation and lack of private car ownership. While 88% of Americans nationwide drive to their jobs, with only 5% using public transport, mass transit is the dominant form of travel for residents of Manhattan, with 72% of borough residents using public transport to get to work, while only 18% drove.[373][374] According to the 2000 United States Census, 77.5% of Manhattan households do not own a car.[375]
In 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a congestion pricing system to regulate entering Manhattan south of 60th Street. The state legislature rejected the proposal in June 2008.[376]
The New York City Subway, the largest subway system in the world by number of stations, is the primary means of travel within the city, linking every borough except Staten Island. There are 151 subway stations in Manhattan, out of the 472 stations.[377] A second subway, the PATH system, connects six stations in Manhattan to northern New Jersey. Passengers pay fares with pay-per-ride MetroCards, which are valid on all city buses and subways, as well as on PATH trains.[378][379] There are 7-day and 30-day MetroCards that allow unlimited trips on all subways (except PATH) and MTA bus routes (except for express buses).[380] The PATH QuickCard is being phased out, having been replaced by the SmartLink. The MTA is testing "smart card" payment systems to replace the MetroCard.[381] Commuter rail services operating to and from Manhattan are the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), which connects Manhattan and other New York City boroughs to Long Island; the Metro-North Railroad, which connects Manhattan to Upstate New York and Southwestern Connecticut; and NJ Transit trains, which run to various points in New Jersey.
The US$11.1 billion East Side Access project, which brings LIRR trains to Grand Central Terminal, opened in 2023; this project utilized a pre-existing train tunnel beneath the East River, connecting the East Side of Manhattan with Long Island City, Queens.[382][383] Four multi-billion-dollar projects were completed in the mid-2010s: the $1.4 billion Fulton Center in November 2014,[384] the $2.4 billion 7 Subway Extension in September 2015,[385] the $4 billion World Trade Center Transportation Hub in March 2016,[386][387] and Phase 1 of the $4.5 billion Second Avenue Subway in January 2017.[388][389]
MTA New York City Transit offers a wide variety of local buses within Manhattan under the brand New York City Bus. An extensive network of express bus routes serves commuters and other travelers heading into Manhattan.[390] The bus system served 784 million passengers citywide in 2011, placing the bus system's ridership as the highest in the nation, and more than double the ridership of the second-place Los Angeles system.[391]
The Roosevelt Island Tramway, one of two commuter cable car systems in North America, whisks commuters between Roosevelt Island and Manhattan in less than five minutes, and has been serving the island since 1978. (The other system in North America is the Portland Aerial Tram.)[392][393]
The Staten Island Ferry, which runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, annually carries over 21 million passengers on the 5.2-mile (8.4 km) run between Manhattan and Staten Island. Each weekday, five vessels transport about 65,000 passengers on 109 boat trips.[394][395] The ferry has been fare-free since 1997, when the then-50-cent fare was eliminated.[396] In February 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city government would begin NYC Ferry to extend ferry transportation to traditionally underserved communities in the city.[397][398] The first routes of NYC Ferry opened in 2017.[399][400] All of the system's routes have termini in Manhattan, and the Lower East Side and Soundview routes also have intermediate stops on the East River.[401]
The metro region's commuter rail lines converge at Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal, on the west and east sides of Midtown Manhattan, respectively. They are the two busiest rail stations in the United States. About one-third of users of mass transit and two-thirds of railway passengers in the country live in New York and its suburbs.[402] Amtrak provides inter-city passenger rail service from Penn Station to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.; Upstate New York and New England; cross-Canadian border service to Toronto and Montreal; and destinations in the Southern and Midwestern United States.
Major highwaysI-78I-95I-278I-478I-495US 9NY 9ANY 495TaxisMain article: Taxicabs of New York CityNew York's iconic yellow taxicabs, which number 13,087 city-wide and must have the requisite medallion authorizing the pick up of street hails, are ubiquitous in the borough.[403] Various private vehicle for hire companies provide significant competition for taxicab drivers in Manhattan.[404]
BicyclesMain article: Cycling in New York CityAccording to the government of New York City, Manhattan had 19,676 bicycle commuters in 2017, roughly doubling from its total of 9,613 in 2012.[405]
Streets and roadsSee also: List of numbered streets in Manhattan and List of eponymous streets in New York City
The Brooklyn Bridge (on right) and Manhattan Bridge (on left), two of three bridges that connect Lower Manhattan with Brooklyn over the East River.
Eighth Avenue, looking northward ("Uptown"), in the rain; most streets and avenues in Manhattan's grid plan incorporate a one-way traffic configuration.
Tourists observing Manhattanhenge on July 12, 2016The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 called for twelve numbered avenues running north and south roughly parallel to the shore of the Hudson River, each 100 feet (30 m) wide, with First Avenue on the east side and Twelfth Avenue on the west side. There are several intermittent avenues east of First Avenue, including four additional lettered avenues running from Avenue A eastward to Avenue D in an area now known as Alphabet City in Manhattan's East Village. The numbered streets in Manhattan run east–west, and are generally 60 feet (18 m) wide, with about 200 feet (61 m) between each pair of streets. With each combined street and block adding up to about 260 feet (79 m), there are almost exactly 20 blocks per mile. The typical block in Manhattan is 250 by 600 feet (76 by 183 m).
According to the original Commissioner's Plan, there were 155 numbered crosstown streets,[406] but later the grid was extended up to the northernmost corner of Manhattan, where the last numbered street is 220th Street. Moreover, the numbering system continues even in the Bronx, north of Manhattan, despite the fact that the grid plan is not as regular in that borough, whose last numbered street is 263rd Street.[407] Fifteen crosstown streets were designated as 100 feet (30 m) wide, including 34th, 42nd, 57th and 125th Streets,[408] which became some of the borough's most significant transportation and shopping venues. Broadway is the most notable of many exceptions to the grid, starting at Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan and continuing north into the Bronx at Manhattan's northern tip. In much of Midtown Manhattan, Broadway runs at a diagonal to the grid, creating major named intersections at Union Square (Park Avenue South/Fourth Avenue and 14th Street), Madison Square (Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street), Herald Square (Sixth Avenue and 34th Street), Times Square (Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street), and Columbus Circle (Eighth Avenue/Central Park West and 59th Street).
"Crosstown traffic" refers primarily to vehicular traffic between Manhattan's East Side and West Side. The trip is notoriously frustrating for drivers because of heavy congestion on narrow local streets laid out by the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, absence of express roads other than the Trans-Manhattan Expressway at the far north end of Manhattan Island; and restricted to very limited crosstown automobile travel within Central Park. Proposals in the mid-1900s to build express roads through the city's densest neighborhoods, namely the Mid-Manhattan Expressway and Lower Manhattan Expressway, did not go forward. Unlike the rest of the United States, New York State prohibits right or left turns on red in cities with a population greater than one million, to reduce traffic collisions and increase pedestrian safety. In New York City, therefore, all turns at red lights are illegal unless a sign permitting such maneuvers is present, significantly shaping traffic patterns in Manhattan.[409]
Another consequence of the strict grid plan of most of Manhattan, and the grid's skew of approximately 28.9 degrees, is a phenomenon sometimes referred to as Manhattanhenge (by analogy with Stonehenge).[410] On separate occasions in late May and early July, the sunset is aligned with the street grid lines, with the result that the sun is visible at or near the western horizon from street level.[410][411] A similar phenomenon occurs with the sunrise in January and December.
The FDR Drive and Harlem River Drive, both designed by controversial New York master planner Robert Moses,[412] comprise a single, long limited-access parkway skirting the east side of Manhattan along the East River and Harlem River south of Dyckman Street. The Henry Hudson Parkway is the corresponding parkway on the West Side north of 57th Street.
River crossings
Ferry service departing Battery Park City Ferry Terminal for Paulus Hook in New JerseyBeing primarily an island, Manhattan is linked to New York City's outer boroughs by numerous bridges, of various sizes. Manhattan has fixed highway connections with New Jersey to its west by way of the George Washington Bridge, the Holland Tunnel, and the Lincoln Tunnel, and to three of the four other New York City boroughs—the Bronx to the northeast, and Brooklyn and Queens (both on Long Island) to the east and south. Its only direct connection with the fifth New York City borough, Staten Island, is the Staten Island Ferry across New York Harbor, which is free of charge. The ferry terminal is located near Battery Park at Manhattan's southern tip. It is also possible to travel on land to Staten Island by way of Brooklyn, via the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.
The George Washington Bridge, the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge,[413][414] connects Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan, to Bergen County, in New Jersey. There are numerous bridges to the Bronx across the Harlem River, and five (listed north to south)—the Triborough (known officially as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge), Ed Koch Queensboro (also known as the 59th Street Bridge), Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges—that cross the East River to connect Manhattan to Long Island.
Several tunnels also link Manhattan Island to New York City's outer boroughs and New Jersey. The Lincoln Tunnel, which carries 120,000 vehicles a day under the Hudson River between New Jersey and Midtown Manhattan, is the busiest vehicular tunnel in the world.[415] The tunnel was built instead of a bridge to allow unfettered passage of large passenger and cargo ships that sail through New York Harbor and up the Hudson River to Manhattan's piers. The Holland Tunnel, connecting Lower Manhattan to Jersey City, New Jersey, was the world's first mechanically ventilated vehicular tunnel.[416] The Queens–Midtown Tunnel, built to relieve congestion on the bridges connecting Manhattan with Queens and Brooklyn, was the largest non-federal project in its time when it was completed in 1940;[417] President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first person to drive through it.[418] The Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel runs underneath Battery Park and connects the Financial District at the southern tip of Manhattan to Red Hook in Brooklyn.
Several ferry services operate between New Jersey and Manhattan.[419] These ferries mainly serve midtown (at W. 39th St.), Battery Park City (WFC at Brookfield Place), and Wall Street (Pier 11).
HeliportsManhattan has three public heliports: the East 34th Street Heliport (also known as the Atlantic Metroport) at East 34th Street, owned by New York City and run by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC); the Port Authority Downtown Manhattan/Wall Street Heliport, owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and run by the NYCEDC; and the West 30th Street Heliport, a privately owned heliport owned by the Hudson River Park Trust.[420] US Helicopter offered regularly scheduled helicopter service connecting the Downtown Manhattan Heliport with John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens and Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, before going out of business in 2009.[421]
UtilitiesGas and electric service is provided by Consolidated Edison to all of Manhattan. Con Edison's electric business traces its roots back to Thomas Edison's Edison Electric Illuminating Company, the first investor-owned electric utility. The company started service on September 4, 1882, using one generator to provide 110 volts direct current (DC) to 59 customers with 800 light bulbs, in a one-square-mile area of Lower Manhattan from his Pearl Street Station.[422] Con Edison operates the world's largest district steam system, which consists of 105 miles (169 km) of steam pipes, providing steam for heating, hot water, and air conditioning[423] by some 1,800 Manhattan customers.[424] Cable service is provided by Time Warner Cable and telephone service is provided by Verizon Communications, although AT&T is available as well.
Manhattan witnessed the doubling of the natural gas supply delivered to the borough when a new gas pipeline opened on November 1, 2013.[425]
The New York City Department of Sanitation is responsible for garbage removal.[426] The bulk of the city's trash ultimately is disposed at mega-dumps in Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina and Ohio (via transfer stations in New Jersey, Brooklyn and Queens) since the 2001 closure of the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.[427] A small amount of trash processed at transfer sites in New Jersey is sometimes incinerated at waste-to-energy facilities. Like New York City, New Jersey and much of Greater New York relies on exporting its trash to far-flung areas.
New York City has the largest clean-air diesel-hybrid and compressed natural gas bus fleet, which also operates in Manhattan, in the country. It also has some of the first hybrid taxis, most of which operate in Manhattan.[428]
Health careMain article: List of hospitals in New York City § ManhattanThere are many hospitals in Manhattan, including two of the 25 largest in the United States (as of 2017):[429]
Bellevue HospitalLenox Hill HospitalLower Manhattan HospitalMetropolitan Hospital CenterMount Sinai Beth Israel HospitalMount Sinai HospitalNewYork–Presbyterian HospitalNYC Health + Hospitals/HarlemNYU Langone Medical CenterWater purity and availabilityMain articles: Food and water in New York City and New York City water supply systemNew York City is supplied with drinking water by the protected Catskill Mountains watershed.[430] As a result of the watershed's integrity and undisturbed natural water filtration system, New York is one of only four major cities in the United States the majority of whose drinking water is pure enough not to require purification by water treatment plants.[431] The Croton Watershed north of the city is undergoing construction of a US$3.2 billion water purification plant to augment New York City's water supply by an estimated 290 million gallons daily, representing a greater than 20% addition to the city's current availability of water.[432] Manhattan, surrounded by two brackish rivers, had a limited supply of fresh water. To satisfy its growing population, the City of New York acquired land in adjacent Westchester County and constructed the old Croton Aqueduct system there, which went into service in 1842 and was superseded by the new Croton Aqueduct, which opened in 1890. This, however, was interrupted in 2008 for the ongoing construction of a US$3.2 billion water purification plant that can supply an estimated 290 million gallons daily when completed, representing an almost 20% addition to the city's availability of water, with this addition going to Manhattan and the Bronx.[433] Water comes to Manhattan through the tunnels 1 and 2, completed in 1917 and 1935, and in future through Tunnel No. 3, begun in 1970.[434]
Address algorithmMain article: Manhattan address algorithmThe address algorithm of Manhattan refers to the formulas used to estimate the closest east–west cross street for building numbers on north–south avenues. It is commonly noted in telephone directories, New York City travel guides, and MTA Manhattan bus maps.
See alsoLGBT portalWorld portalFlagUnited States portalFlagNew York (state) portalFlagNew York City portalHistory of New York CityList of Manhattan neighborhoodsList of people from Register of Historic Places listings in ManhattanSawing-off of Manhattan IslandTimeline of New York City
“This summer,” Robert Downey Jr. says, “is the battle for the soul of cinema.” Like a lot of things said by the actor, who co-stars in the thriller “Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan and opening in theaters on July 21, that statement was delivered with a soupçon of knowing sarcasm, but there’s truth to it. In a cinematic season dominated by series, superheroes and pre-existing I.P. all aimed at the widest-possible market, whether there is still a theatergoing audience sizable enough to sustain the work of a highly individualistic, highly ambitious director like Nolan — whose latest is a three-hour epic focusing on, among other weighty themes, the moral dilemmas faced by the title character, called “the father of the atomic bomb” — remains an open question. (In the film, Downey plays Lewis Strauss, the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and the chief antagonist of J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy.) As if that weren’t enough, the film also represents a career reset — famously not the first — for Downey, who in June premiered “Downey’s Dream Cars,” a docuseries in which some of his classic cars were refitted to be more eco-friendly. It has been an awfully long time since the 58-year-old has shown up in a big movie playing a major part that wasn’t Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man) or other would-be franchise material. “You start to wonder,” says Downey, a rollicking and digressive talker, “if a muscle you have hasn’t atrophied.”
Even though Christopher Nolan is a marquee name, a movie like “Oppenheimer” isn’t exactly a guaranteed box-office slam dunk. Then consider that in the light of a show like “Perry Mason,” which your company co-produced and which everyone seemed to like, but that wasn’t enough to keep it from being canceled. So from where you’re sitting, do you feel as if you’re able to make sense of the business right now? Since my ship came in in 2008, when “Iron Man” had that big weekend, I have been a self-described expert on the ways of the world of creativity and commerce. It’s not that the playing field changes — it’s that it morphs into something that you can’t even really call a playing field anymore. It’s a kind of mosaic of what it was moments before. If I am running a major streamer — which sounds like a big No. 1; how serious is it if the mind immediately goes to peepee? — anyway, you look at the budget, you look at the numbers and it comes down to a spreadsheet.
But how does knowing that affect your choices about what to make? You just go, “Welcome to Thunderdome.” I think it has been great in that we can all say that not one of us can entirely hit our ass with both hands right now, so let’s just keep doing what we believe is the best course of action.
Have you talked with Tom Cruise about this competition between “Mission: Impossible” and “Oppenheimer” to be on more IMAX screens?11Puck, a business newsletter focusing in part on Hollywood, reported on the behind-the-scenes jostling for space on IMAX screens this month, when “Oppenheimer,” Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” and “Barbie,” are all vying for theatergoers’ dollars.Nah. Like I said, it’s Thunderdome out there. Everybody’s trying to do what they can. There’s a scramble going on, and what a glory to behold.
Robert Downey Jr. in “Oppenheimer.” Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal PicturesIf there is, as you said, a battle going on for the soul of cinema, do you feel any ambivalence about having been such a key part of the Marvel movies, which pretty much ate Hollywood moviemaking? If you’re talking about, adjusted for inflation, the biggest movies of all time, “Gone With the Wind” and “The Ten Commandments” are there. I’m sure that in the years those movies came out, there were probably films that you and I would agree were a better representation of what cinema can be. I did not have the luxury of wondering what the longer-term repercussions of coming in as a second-tier superhero for something that was going to build out into a cinematic universe would be — and it didn’t matter, because I had a Super Bowl ring on each finger while this debate was being contested with much heat. The other side of it is that I was raised in a family22Downey’s father was the underground film director Robert Downey Sr., perhaps best known for his satirical comedy “Putney Swope” (1969). His mother, Elsie, was an actress who also appeared in Downey Sr.’s work.that rebelled against the idea of a summer blockbuster having any merit and thought that the films that were preferred viewing that year weren’t any good, either. So coming from that other place, entering the box-office-weekend-dominating place, then going into this spot now where I’m happy that I’m in this quality product — I’m happy that I regained my connection with a more purist approach to making movies.
Is it right that you’re remaking “Vertigo”? We are certainly looking into it. You know why?
No, but that seems crazy. Exactly! Not even risky. Advisably ridiculous to even consider. Great, let’s look into it! First of all, who would our partners be in it?33The creator of “Peaky Blinders,” Steven Knight, has been tapped to write the script, pending the resolution of the W.G.A. strike. Davis Entertainment and Paramount are set to co-produce along with Team Downey.Love them, respect them. Second of all, let me reread the original synopsis. I think we can do better. [Laughs.]
God bless. I’ll tell you why. I have been rock climbing before and gotten stuck in that panic freeze, and if not for the sheer embarrassment, I would have asked to have been hoisted off that rock. I lost my confidence in my positioning, the drop was too far, my body reacted. It wasn’t fight-or-flight; it was freeze-and-about-to-faint. I’ll never forget it, and it made me think there are cinematic devices that have yet to be fully utilized that I think would provide an experience in trying to say, “What does it feel like to be psychologically silly with fear over something that should be manageable?” That might be entertaining.
Downey on “Downey’s Dream Cars.” MaxBut you’re obviously in a phase of your career, post-Marvel,44Downey first played Iron Man in 2008. He portrayed the character for the final time in 2019.in which, I assume, you only have to work when you want to. You’ve also got plenty going on outside acting.55Including the Footprint Coalition, a venture-capital company focusing on Environmental tech that Downey co-founded, and Aura, a digital-security firm in which he’s an investor.So how do you decide what movies to do? At this point, you’re not doing it for the money. Were you ever doing it for the money once your baseline needs were met? Probably not. Did you think it was about money and prestige? Probably from the time I was a teenager until that illusion dissolved in front of me, leaving me in a depressive state. But then there’s the why: I don’t know why I can relate to Lewis Strauss so much, but I felt like I was meant to play this role, and I knew I’d be in capable hands. “Oppenheimer” has been a bit of a demarcation line for me.
Why? I finished the Marvel contract and then hastily went into what had all the promise of being another big, fun, well-executed potential franchise in “Dolittle.” I had some reservations. Me and my team seemed a little too excited about the deal and not quite excited enough about the merits of the execution. But at that point I was bulletproof. I was the guru of all genre movies. Honestly, the two most important films I’ve done in the last 25 years are “The Shaggy Dog,” because that was the film that got Disney saying they would insure me. Then the second most important film was “Dolittle,” because “Dolittle” was a two-and-a-half-year wound of squandered opportunity. The stress it put on my missus66Downey’s wife, Susan Downey, was a co-producer on “Dolittle.” The couple are founders of the Team Downey production company. “Perry Mason” was another of their productions.as she rolled her sleeves up to her armpits to make it even serviceable enough to bring to market was shocking. After that point — what’s that phrase? Never let a good crisis go to waste? — we had this reset of priorities and made some changes in who our closest business advisers were. And that whole time, my dad was passing away, and as an avoidance mechanism, I decided to send crews over and get his thoughts on his winter years, and that turned into “Sr.,”77A 2022 documentary, produced by Downey, about his father and their relationship during the latter’s final years.probably the most important thing I will ever do, which was being able to become part object and subject within a piece of “content.” Which is what it was but to me was meaningful. Then old Chris Nolan calls, and getting to see the spartan, almost monastic way he approaches this art form, it was like going to the other side of the moon. So I guess my answer to your question is, I’m a dedicated martial-arts student, and it is great to spar with someone who is more dangerous than you.
Downey with his son Exton Elias and father, Robert Downey Sr., in “Sr.” (2022). NetflixDo you remember when that money-prestige illusion dissolved for you? About two weeks after me and Jon88Jon Favreau, director of “Iron Man.”and Kevin99Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios.were pumping fists at Giorgio Baldi, in the private room, and the numbers kept getting bigger for the first weekend of the first “Iron Man.” It was gung-ho, masters of the universe until I went to bed on night 13. I must have processed out all of the projection that had been on those external markers of what I should feel great about. I went into a k-hole.
How come? That drive that had been built up by being the kid on the other side of the fence — there was no longer a purpose for that. The water broke on what had seemingly been this unrequited thing. But what was requited? You realize you still have grief about a, b or c, or a not particularly irrational fear that d, e or f could happen. These external goals — there’s only so much space on the hard drive to function, and it was all geared toward getting this thing, and then when you meet it, it just goes, OK, big shot, can we get back to the process of unpacking a lifetime of experiences, fears, hopes, desires?
In that decade-plus when you were mostly doing Marvel movies, did you have any concerns about what effect that might have on your acting? I say that as someone who thought you did amazing work with Tony Stark. But you did play the same role for a long time. Yes. A hundred percent, and I knew there was a point where Chris Nolan was endorsing, let’s work those other muscles, but let’s do it while rendering you devoid of your usual go-to things.
Downey in “Iron Man” (2008). Paramount, via Everett CollectionWhat are your go-to things? It’s the fast-talking, charming, unpredictable, blah, blah, blah, or as my very close friend Josh Richman, a character actor, used to say, I made my bones playing “Milo, the offbeat buddy.” And Milo, the offbeat buddy, better be offbeat! Just to connect this back to “Oppenheimer”: In doing a bunch of research on Strauss, I connected it to my own grandfather, who would have been a contemporary of his. Robert Elias, whom I never met, was in the U.S. Army, self-made guy. There’s a cool simile between something he was involved in and how Strauss probably felt about Oppenheimer. This grandfather helped do the glass for the Chrysler Building, and the Chrysler and the Empire State were vying to be the biggest. So I was thinking, how can I make Strauss’s competitiveness with Oppenheimer personal, and it was: Look at that building over there that’s no better than mine getting all the shine! I don’t think there’s another human being alive that can’t admit to having fallen into the vagaries of comparison. I also relate to, for reasons in a part of my life that I don’t discuss with press — the recovery stuff1010As you probably already know, Downey dealt with severe addiction issues, multiple related arrests and a period of incarceration, until getting clean in the early 2000s.— the amount of service that was involved in Strauss’s life and the dedication to an ideal. There’s always going to be variances in opinion, but I had an easy time making a case for why this individual was right.
I respect that there are things you don’t talk about in interviews, but can you make the connection for me between Strauss’s sense of service and your own? I’m not following. I’m saying that doing the right thing for the right reasons gives you an advantage in spirit. For instance, my son is in Little League. He also thinks I am his personal P.T. masseuse. I’m like, “Dude, I love you, but do I really have to give you another foot rub?” Once I get past that and realize, yes, I’ve had a long day but he’s probably had a longer day — there’s this sacred moment when he’s already fallen asleep and I’m still doing my shiatsu moves on him and you just feel right-size. You are getting so much gratification from this process of putting yourself in this position of service, and no one’s keeping score. That is something that I learned as I was tunneling my way back to being a functioning member of society, one teaspoon of dirt at a time. And looking at Strauss, I saw that he was a guy who had his nose to the grindstone and was a civil servant for decades. I have something I can relate to.
That tunneling-your-way-back line is reminding me of something I wanted to ask about: I watched this 2004 clip of you on “Oprah,” about a year after you got clean, and the subtext of the interview is that you were bad and now you have to convince everyone that you’re good — which is a dynamic that showed up in so many old TV appearances and magazine articles about you. I’m curious to know how you understood the public’s expectations for how a celebrity is supposed to behave in order to earn redemption. I remember with great pride that I was able to even address something like that in a public forum. Yet it would irk me deeply. It felt strangely punitive and unnecessarily humiliating. The challenge, though, is, yeah, so what? [Expletive] what you’re going through. Can you show up for this? There’s a great story about this guy — this would never play nowadays — he was in one of his last Zen trainings, and he was told to go to the lingerie section at Lord & Taylor and just stand there until women felt uncomfortable. It’s this idea of purposefully putting yourself in a situation where you will feel judged. The only difference between that misguided aspiring Zen master and me is I didn’t sign up to have that kind of experience. But once you’re there, you gotta roll with the punches. I am close with people right now who have gotten caught up in this iteration of the pendulum-like nature of culture deciding who is and isn’t OK. It is baffling. But yeah, shock, self-damnation, feeling exposed, feeling disabused of any progress you might have made — we’re also talking about me in my 40s and 30s, and there’s something great about pushing 60, which is I still have many of the old defects; I just know them so well. They’re like telemarketers. It’s like, “Come on, guys.”
Downey with Holly Hunter in “Home for the Holidays” (1995). Paramount, via Everett CollectionWhat advice are you giving to people you’re close with who the culture has decided are not OK? I feel a bit fugazi when I’m trying to apply the metrics of the ’80s, ’90s and the early aughts to what’s occurred in the last five or seven years, but I think there’s usually a two-year turnaround on sinking to the depths of the Mariana Trench until you get back up to the surface. You come up too quick, we know what happens. There are many points in a comeback or being seen in a favorable light by your peers that, I’ll speak for myself, I wanted to happen sooner than it did, and I felt victimized by the timeline. But mankind’s greatest challenge is to be still. Stay on the bus. The scenery’s changing. You don’t get to decide where you get off the bus. The driver will let you know when you’ve arrived at your stop. But that’s that intolerable thing of how will I know when this nightmare is over?
How do you know? Because you wake up.
During that period when your offscreen life was so chaotic, you took a bunch of roles that had an element of daring to them. Whether it was “Chaplin” or “Heart and Souls” or “Natural Born Killers” or “Black and White.”1111In “Chaplin,” Downey offered a touching, detailed rendition of the great early film star (which earned him a best actor Oscar nomination); in “Heart and Souls,” he played a man inhabited by the souls of four different dead people; in “Natural Born Killers,” he gave perhaps the most gonzo performance, as an amoral Australian tabloid TV journalist, in an exceptionally gonzo movie; and in “Black and White,” he has a scene in which he makes a pass at a perturbed Mike Tyson.Maybe “The Sympathizer”1212Downey is playing multiple parts in the producer and director Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The series, which is co-produced by Team Downey, is slated to arrive on Max in 2024.is a return to that; maybe in a way, “Oppenheimer” is, too. But post-comeback, you seemed to step away from those riskier parts. Was there a connection between living a wilder life and pursuing riskier parts? Or maybe it’s having a more stable life and wanting more stable parts? That element of risk: Is this something that is relatively low or mid-degree of difficulty? Or is this something that to fail at it is to be walking between two large buildings — what was that guy’s name?
Philippe Petit.1313That’s the Frenchman who, in 1974, famously walked between the World Trade Center towers on a tightrope.Thank you. Or is a sweet Petit moment? I never intentionally started saying, “Let me do something that feels like a little more low-hanging fruit.” I would just be in varying stages of self-deception, where I could say, “Oh, I can make this huge stretch” but really it’s more of the same. It was not a rude awakening with Chris Nolan, because all those memory banks of, I should probably be off book for these 80 pages of dialogue. What? We don’t need to do that anymore! Shut up! You can do this. What if your brain has gone jelly-numb from all of your conspicuous consumption? As it turns out, it all has gone nowhere. It was confirmation that very little atrophies when you get shaken out of whatever version of complacency you might have been in.
Downey and Marisa Tomei in “Chaplin” (1992). Carolco Pictures, via Getty ImagesHow much does it matter for you to be able to personally relate to a character in the way that you related to Lewis Strauss? Actually, let me ask this question using examples from your career: In “Two Girls and a Guy,” there’s a scene where your character is looking in the mirror excoriating himself, and it’s easy to watch that and assume that the self-loathing on display was being drawn from your own life. But then there’s something like “Home for the Holidays,” where you give this totally relaxed, charming performance. In both cases, your life at the time was a mess. But did one or the other performance feel truer to you? Hold on, let’s get this straight: “Home for the Holidays,” for me, is the most relaxed performance in the history of cinema, brought to you courtesy of black-tar heroin. “Two Girls and a Guy,” those were Toback’s1414James Toback, who has directed Downey in three films. In 2017, Toback was accused of rampant sexual harassment of women. He has denied the allegations. In 2022, 38 of those women filed a joint lawsuit against Toback in New York.loose words put together in his assessment of this character’s self-damnation, but it ends with a clown. I learned a lot from that one take. That was an end-of-the-day, we’ve got a mag of film left, here’s a dumb idea, and yet I learned as much from that as anything I had ever done up to that, with the exception of “Chaplin.” It’s that Spencer Tracy approach1515This is an allusion to, and somewhat odd paraphrase of, a quote often, though not definitively, credited to Tracy: “Learn your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.” I’ve heard Tom Hanks use a similar line and also credit it to Tracy, though Hanks rendered it as “Learn the lines. Hit the marks. Tell the truth.”— stand there, be honest — with a little undercutting at the end. It was a gauche way of trying to express that — but I was relatively young.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is how much your performances tend to be rooted in your personal experience. Because, unlike with a lot of other actors, I have no idea how important being able to personally identify with a character is or isn’t for your approach to acting. I’ll say this: I don’t know! I did “Less than Zero,”1616Downey delivered an acclaimed performances as Julian, an affluent young drug addict, in this 1987 adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel.with a director, Marek Kanievska, who understood what I didn’t, which is, we’re doing something incredibly artistic: This guy is a mess and probably going to get worse, but he’s not as bad as the character he’s playing. Can he have an experience whereby it may spare him years of untold agony? The answer was no, but it was a question worth asking! Then I had other characters in other things where I put on a mask, and in putting on the mask, I am free to subject the screen to my unconscious dialogue, which I find hilarious, engaging and wrought with bad-clown energy. Then there’s things that feel kind of in the sweet spot. I had an experience in Pasadena on “Oppenheimer” where we were doing a driving shot and it’s me and Nolan and Hoyte1717The cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema has worked on multiple Christopher Nolan films.the D.P. and this driver, and it’s all been set up and we had to address something on the car. The rig or something wasn’t right. At one point, Nolan was like, “I’m going to step out — here, take this,” and he put a mag of film in my lap. I was brought back to that first time I was really on set with my dad1818As a child, Downey acted in his father’s films.— the smell of film — and it was almost like in the five minutes that I was sitting there he gave me back my cellular dignity as someone who belongs in the position I found myself.
Downey with Jami Gertz and Andrew McCarthy in “Less Than Zero” (1987). 20th Century Fox, via Everett CollectionAt the beginning of the conversation, you referred to “Sr.” as “content.” I’m guessing you wouldn’t use that word to describe “Oppenheimer.” So what’s “content” and what’s not? Pull out the list, and I’ll tell you yes or no.
“Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.” Not content.
“Avengers: Age of Ultron.” Content.
“U.S. Marshals.” Debatable.
“Back to School.” Not content.
Do you have a Rodney Dangerfield1919The stand-up comedy legend was the star of “Back to School” (1986), in which he played a middle-aged businessman who returns to college to help his son.story? Oh, yeah. The first time I went to meet him, he opened the door of his apartment wearing a terry-cloth robe. The belt for the robe undid itself as he was opening the door — so the first part of Rodney Dangerfield I ever experienced were his kiwis. It was unadulterated joy from that moment. “Come on in. You mind if I smoke some [expletive]?” “Nope, that’s not going to be a problem, Rodney.” Another time, we were shooting a scene, and he said: “Watch this. ‘Oh, my ankle! Ah, [expletive]!’ ” That was on a Thursday. Three-day weekend. Honestly, let me tell you why I used that word “content.”
Yeah. “Sr.” is so personal, but to everyone else it was a piece of content that they could have chosen to click on and watch or not.
How’s that different from anything else you do? Whether it’s a movie or “Downey’s Dream Cars” or your business ventures, you put things out there and people engage with it or not, right? Because it’s a way for me to let myself know that just because this may be the most important thing that I ever commit to a data card on a camera, doesn’t mean it isn’t [expletive] content to everyone else. You know, there’s part of me that thinks I should be a writer or an entrepreneur or I could blah, blah, blah. But then I think about it and go, I’ve made my peace with what I am at my core: There’s really only one thing I’ve ever been any goddamn good at. So to keep imagining that I’m going to suddenly transform into this formidable multihyphenate? I’m just starting to not buy my own hype. It’s about: Can I feel good about what I’m doing? OK, yes, then I’ll feel good about it.
Robert Downey, Jr., in full Robert John Downey, Jr., (born April 4, 1965, New York City, New York, U.S.), American actor considered one of Hollywood’s most gifted and versatile performers.
Downey was raised in an artistic household in New York City’s Greenwich Village; his father was a noted underground filmmaker who gave the five-year-old Downey his first part. After dropping out of high school in California, Downey returned to New York City to pursue an acting career. Supporting roles in several movies, including the cult hit Weird Science (1985), led to a stint (1985–86) on the television comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live. With his boyish looks and raffish charm, Downey then scored the lead in the romantic comedy The Pick-up Artist (1987) and broke out further with his visceral performance as a cocaine addict in Less Than Zero (1987).
USA 2006 - 78th Annual Academy Awards. Closeup of giant Oscar statue at the entrance of the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, film movie hollywoodBritannica QuizPop Culture QuizSteady work followed, but much of it went unnoticed until Downey’s appearance in 1992 as the title character in Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin biopic, which earned him numerous plaudits and an Academy Award nomination for best actor. By this time, however, Downey had developed a substance-abuse problem, and, despite impressive turns in films ranging from the violent media satire Natural Born Killers (1994) to the costume drama Restoration (1995), his frequent skirmishes with the law and his public struggle with drug addiction often overshadowed his on-screen successes. He reached a low point in 1999, when he was sentenced to three years in prison for having violated parole from an earlier arrest.
In 2000, after being granted an early release, Downey was cast in a recurring role on the television series Ally McBeal, and he won a Golden Globe Award for his work on the show. His drug problems continued, however, and he was arrested several times. In 2003 Downey seemed to turn his life and career around, and he thrust himself into his work, appearing in 13 feature films over the next five years, including The Singing Detective (2003), Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and Zodiac (2007).
Tropic ThunderTropic ThunderIn 2008 Downey won acclaim for his roles in two summer blockbusters. In Iron Man he portrayed Tony Stark, a billionaire inventor with a superhero alter ego, and in the satiric comedy Tropic Thunder he starred as a self-important movie star who dons blackface to land the role of an African American soldier in the Vietnam War. For the latter role Downey received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. He next appeared in The Soloist (2009), portraying a journalist who befriends a homeless man (played by Jamie Foxx) who was a classically trained cellist. Downey then assumed the title role in Sherlock Holmes (2009), a film featuring a visceral reimagining of the central character from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective series, and won a Golden Globe Award for his performance; a sequel followed in 2011.
The AvengersThe AvengersAvengers: Age of UltronAvengers: Age of UltronHaving emerged, somewhat surprisingly, as one of Hollywood’s most-bankable stars, Downey was cast as an anxious father-to-be in the road-trip comedy Due Date (2010). He took a supporting role in Iron Man director Jon Favreau’s pet project, Chef (2014), before playing a lawyer defending his father (Robert Duvall), who is accused of vehicular homicide, in The Judge (2014). He reprised the role of Tony Stark in the Iron Man sequels (2010 and 2013), The Avengers (2012) and its sequels (2015, 2018, and 2019), Captain America: Civil War (2016), and Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017). In 2020 Downey starred in the family comedy Dolittle, which was based on the character created by Hugh Lofting. Downey then took a three-year hiatus from acting in films before appearing in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), a historical epic about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb.Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content.John M. CunninghamThe Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaBrad PittTable of ContentsIntroductionEarly life and workFilms from the late 1990s and beyondPersonal life and humanitarian causesFast FactsBrad Pitt summaryFacts & Related ContentQuizzesOscar-Worthy Movie TriviaPop Culture QuizMediaImagesMoreMore Articles On This TopicContributorsArticle HistoryRelated BiographiesDon CheadleDon CheadleAmerican actorSam RockwellSam RockwellAmerican actorPhilip Seymour Hoffman in CapotePhilip Seymour HoffmanAmerican actorMorgan FreemanMorgan FreemanAmerican actorSee AllHomeEntertainment & Pop CultureActorsArts & CultureBrad PittAmerican actor Also known as: William Bradley PittWritten and fact-checked byLast Updated: Jul 7, 2023 • Article HistoryBrad PittBrad PittSee all mediaCategory: Arts & CultureBorn: December 18, 1963 (age 59) Shawnee OklahomaFounder: Make It Right Not on Our WatchAwards And Honors: Golden Globe Award Academy Award (2020) Academy Award (2020): Actor in a Supporting Role Academy Award (2014): Best Picture Emmy Award (2014): Outstanding Television Movie Golden Globe Award (2020): Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Golden Globe Award (1996): Best Supporting Actor in a Motion PictureNotable Family Members: spouse Jennifer Aniston spouse Angelina JolieRecent NewsJul. 7, 2023, 4:41 PM ET (AP)F1 welcomes Brad Pitt but is wary of protesters at British Grand PrixBrad Pitt, byname of William Bradley Pitt, (born December 18, 1963, Shawnee, Oklahoma, U.S.), American actor known for his portrayal of unconventional characters and for his good looks. After gaining attention for his role in Thelma & Louise (1991), Pitt channeled his magnetism as a leading man in such movies as A River Runs Through It (1992) and Legends of the Fall (1994) but avoided being typecast by assuming unorthodox roles in 12 Monkeys (1995) and Fight Club (1999). Pitt won an Academy Award for his performance in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019).
Early life and workInterview with the VampireInterview with the VampirePitt grew up in Springfield, Missouri, and attended (1983–87) the University of Missouri before dropping out just short of graduation to move to California and pursue an acting career. After playing minor television and movie roles, Pitt captured the public’s attention as a charming scoundrel in the film Thelma & Louise. He followed up with such movies as A River Runs Through It, Interview with the Vampire, and Legends of the Fall (1994). Pitt then starred as a police detective in the gritty thriller Se7en (1995) and as a demented malcontent in the fantasy 12 Monkeys (1995), for which he won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Oscar.
USA 2006 - 78th Annual Academy Awards. Closeup of giant Oscar statue at the entrance of the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, film movie hollywoodBritannica QuizPop Culture QuizFilms from the late 1990s and beyondPitt deliberately played against type as Austrian mountain climber Heinrich Harrer in Seven Years in Tibet (1997), an Irish Republican Army terrorist in The Devil’s Own (1997), a modern-day personification of death in Meet Joe Black (1998), and an underground boxer in Fight Club (1999). In 2000 Pitt married actress Jennifer Aniston. The following year he starred in Ocean’s Eleven, a comedy caper about con artists. The film was a major success and led to the sequels Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007). In 2004 Pitt portrayed the Greek warrior Achilles in Troy.
The action comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) paired Pitt with actress Angelina Jolie, with whom he became romantically involved. Pitt continued to lend his talents to films covering a wide range of subject matter, including Babel (2006), a film that traces the intersecting lives of characters from divergent backgrounds, and the period western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). Pitt further demonstrated his versatility in 2008, portraying a dim-witted would-be blackmailer in the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading and a man who ages backward in the poignant fantasy The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. His chameleonic turn in the latter film earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.
Brad Pitt in Inglourious BasterdsBrad Pitt in Inglourious BasterdsBrad Pitt on the set of Inglourious BasterdsBrad Pitt on the set of Inglourious BasterdsIn 2009 Pitt starred in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a World War II drama about a group of Jewish American soldiers trained to kill Nazis in German-occupied France. The following year Pitt provided the voice of the superhero rival of the titular villain in the animated film Megamind. In Terrence Malick’s impressionistic drama The Tree of Life (2011), he played a domineering father in 1950s Texas. Pitt later scored another best actor Oscar nomination, for his performance as real-life general manager Billy Beane in the baseball drama Moneyball (2011). The film chronicles how Beane assembled successful teams with the Oakland Athletics by using statistics to acquire cheaper, less-well-known players. Pitt subsequently starred as a mob enforcer in the crime drama Killing Them Softly (2012) and as a former United Nations investigator fighting to contain a zombie pandemic in the thriller World War Z (2013).
Pitt had supporting roles in 12 Years a Slave (2013)—which was based on the true story of Solomon Northup, a free person of colour who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the mid-19th century—and in the crime drama The Counselor (2013). In Fury (2014) he played an American army sergeant commanding the remnants of a decimated battalion during the last days of World War II. The following year Pitt reteamed with Jolie, this time in By the Sea, a marital drama she also wrote and directed. He then portrayed a morally grounded former investment banker in the black comedy The Big Short (2015), about the 2008 financial crisis. In the World War II thriller Allied (2016), Pitt starred as a Canadian intelligence officer whose wife (Marion Cotillard) might be a German spy. In 2017 he portrayed a four-star general in War Machine, a military satire that was released on Netflix.Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content.Once Upon a Time…in HollywoodOnce Upon a Time…in HollywoodPitt later reteamed with Tarantino in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019), playing the stunt double of a washed-up actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) in 1969 Los Angeles. For his performance, Pitt earned both an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award for best supporting actor. Also in 2019 he starred as an astronaut searching the solar system for his missing father (played by Tommy Lee Jones) in the futuristic drama Ad Astra. Pitt’s credit
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