Times Square was originally called Longacre Square until it was renamed in 1904 after The New York Times moved its headquarters to the newly built Times Building.
100 Mind-Blowing York Facts
Mob boss Vincent Gigante used to wander around New York in his bathrobe to convince the police he was insane and avoid capture.
A woman faked her entire tragedy and the loss of her husband during the 9/11 attacks and became President of the Support Network in New York.
It costs almost $290,000 per year in fees to run a hot dog cart near the Central Park Zoo in New York City. This does not include cart incurred costs.
In the early 1900s, when Jewish people were banned from visiting beaches and certain hotels near New York City, they settled in New York’s Catskills Mountains and built a thriving resort region in what was dubbed “The Borscht Belt” or “Yiddish Alps.”
The building One Times Square was built in 1904 as the headquarters for the New York Times. It’s been home to the New Year’s Eve Ball Drop Celebration since 1907, when the first New Year’s Eve ball was made of iron and wood, one hundred 25-watt bulbs and weighed 700 pounds. Today’s ball is 12 feet in diameter and weighs almost six tons with 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles bolted to 672 LED modules attached to the aluminium frame.
According to the New York Times, the Monterey Pop Festival in Monterey, California, was the first rock music festival.
The book 3 SHADES OF BLUE: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan notes that when Miles Davis moved to New York City at 18, he spent his first few weeks attending classes at Julliard and going to Harlem to see performances at Minton’s Playhouse and the Savoy Ballroom, as well as clubs on 52nd Street.
Troy, New York, served as a backdrop for the HBO series The Gilded Age. The Capital District city, known for its Victorian architecture, is said to have more Tiffany windows per square mile than anywhere else in the world.
Cleveland was once the country’s fifth-largest city. Data from the 1920 U.S. census indicates that Cleveland, Ohio, was one of the most heavily populated cities in the country, behind only Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York City.
Glitter may have originated on a ranch. According to local lore, a man by the name of Henry Ruschmann from Bernardsville, New Jersey, invented glitter by accident in 1934 while working on a cattle ranch. The New York Times reports that in the popular origin story, Ruschmann, a machinist, was trying to find a way to dispose of scrap material by crushing it into tiny pieces. Plastic went in, glitter came out, and the rest is commonly accepted as history.
Albert Einstein’s eyeballs are in New York City. They were given to Henry Abrams and preserved in a safety deposit box. Abrams was Einstein’s eye doctor. He received the eyeballs from Thomas Harvey, the man who performed the autopsy on Einstein and illegally took the scientist’s brain for himself.
Roller coasters were invented to distract Americans from sin. In the 1880s, hosiery businessman LaMarcus Thompson hated that Americans were tempted by hedonistic places like saloons and brothels. So he set out to straighten up one of the most immoral places he could think of: Coney Island in New York. There, he built America’s first roller coaster to give New Yorkers some good, clean fun—away from seedier pastimes.
ManhattAnts are an ant species unique to New York City. Biologists found them in a specific 14-block strip of the city.
“OK” most likely stands for fake words. In the 1830s, people jokingly spelt abbreviations incorrectly. One of the most famous: “All correct” turned into “orl korrekt,” and then of course into OK. Historians think it stuck because Martin Van Buren—known as Old Kinderhook, after his hometown in New York—supporters called themselves the OK Club when he was campaigning for reelection.
There’s an ant species unique to New York City. Called ManhattAnts, biologists found them in a specific 14-block strip of the city.
Tap water in Manhattan is not Kosher. Very small crustaceans have been found in the tap water within New York City. Automatically, this cannot be considered kosher water.
One species of ants can only be found in Manhattan, New York. Biologists discovered a new ant species between 63rd and 76th Street in Broadway. This ant species was found to have a higher concentration of carbon in their bodies which was linked to a high corn-syrup diet.
You’re 10 times more likely to get bitten by a person than a shark. In New York City, the annual number of human bites is 10 times higher than the yearly number of shark bites worldwide.
The most layers on a sandwich are 60. The world record for the most layers in a sandwich is 60. It was achieved by the DiLusso Deli Company at Madison Square Park in New York, USA on October 22, 2016.
Peyton List is an alumna of the New York Film Academy. During her pursuit of a career in acting, she honed her skills at the prestigious New York Film Academy.
Hart Island is the final burial place for over a million of New York City’s unclaimed bodies.
New York City mob boss Vincent Gigante used to avoid arrest by wandering around in his bathrobe to convince the police he was insane.
The names of the two stone lions in front of the New York Public Library are Patience and Fortitude. They were named by then-mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
Flying from London to New York by Concord, due to the time zones crossed, you can arrive 2 hours before you leave.
The electric chair was invented by a dentist. Southwick. A steam-boat engineer, inventor and dentist from Buffalo, New York was credited for inventing the electric chair as a method of legal execution.
There’s an ant species that’s unique to New York City. Biologists found them in a specific area of New York City and named them ManhattAnts.
There’s a specific ant species that lives in New York City. Scientists have named them ManhattAnts.
There’s enough concrete in the Hoover Dam to build a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York City.
There’s a restaurant in New York that employs grandmas instead of chefs. The menu at Enoteca Maria is a little unconventional, as half of it is a fixed Italian menu while the other half changes daily. This is because a different grandmother comes in every day with not just a new menu but a completely new cuisine! The owner decided to run his restaurant like this as he had lost all maternal figures in his life and wanted to re-create the feeling of eating in his grandmother’s kitchen.
The Barbie doll’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts, from Willows, Wisconsin. Her birthday is March 9, 1959, when she was first displayed at the New York Toy Fair.
The tallest building in the US is One World Trade Centre in New York, which comes in at number six on the worldwide list. It stands at exactly 1,776 feet as a nod to the date of the Declaration of Independence.
The Empire State Building in New York was the tallest in the world from 1931 until 1971 and was the first building with over 100 floors.
Study Reveals Surgeons Need To Play More Video Games, But Why? Beth Israel Medical Centre in New York recently carried out a study with 33 of its surgeons. The surgeons took a surgical skills test in Laparoscopy that lasted almost two days. In the study, researchers tracked performance in the skills test on an individual level. They then recorded each surgeon’s habits about playing video games. Nine of 33 surgeons played an average of three hours of games per week. They outscored surgeons that never played video games in various categories. For instance, they committed 37 per cent fewer errors and completed the test 27 per cent faster. The study concluded a strong correlation exists between surgical skill and Laparoscopy performance.
The first cell phone call was in New York City. In 1973, the first-ever mobile phone call was made by Martin Cooper, an employee of Motorola, made from the streets of New York City. It wasn’t until 19 years later that Neil Papworth sent the first SMS message.
Although the TV show “Friends” is based around life in New York City, the entire show was filmed in California. Whether you love it or hate it, Friends was one of the most iconic TV shows to come out of the nineties and early 2000s. One of the most surprising facts about Friends is that it wasn’t filmed in Manhattan, where it’s set, but at the Warner Brothers Ranch just outside of Los Angeles. That being said, there are a small handful of locations where filming took place outside of LA. One of these is, of course, Monica and Rachel’s apartment building at 90 Bedford St in New York. Several other locations filmed in New York for the serious include the places where the friends all work.
World’s first skyscraper. The story of skyscrapers often begins in New York and Chicago from around 1884 with increasingly tall buildings. However, what is technically the world’s first skyscraper was built in Shropshire in 1796–7. Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings may not look like a skyscraper, but its Main Mill was the first building in the world to have an iron frame supporting the weight of the structure, the formula for every skyscraper ever built so that it has been dubbed the ‘Grandparent of Skyscrapers’.
Oll Korrect. The origin of the phrase ‘OK’ dates back to a fad for intentionally misspelt abbreviations in 1830s Boston. When witty Bostonians began spelling ‘all correct’ as ‘Oll Korrect’, newspapers picked up on the joke. In 1840, US President Martin Van Buren, originally from Kinderhook in New York, adopted the phrase for his re-election campaign and his supporters set up ‘Old Kinderhook’, or ‘OK’, clubs across the country. The term quickly made the transition from slang to legitimate use.
Two significant car crashes. On 13 December 1931, Winston Churchill was struck by a car while crossing Fifth Ave in New York City. He had looked the wrong way before crossing the street and was dragged for several yards, sustaining bruises, sprains and cuts. In the same year, a 19-year-old British aristocrat named John Scott-Ellis was driving a red Fiat in Munich and almost hit the future Führer, Adolf Hitler. Scott-Ellis jumped out of his car and apologised, and Hitler only suffered minor bruises. They shook hands, and Scott-Ellis later remarked, ‘For a few seconds, perhaps, I held the history of Europe in my rather clumsy hands. . . [Hitler] was only shaken up, but had I killed him, it would have changed the history of the world.’
The Cousins’ War. The ‘Wars of the Roses’ was a series of rivalries and disputes that took place between 1455 and 1487 among the English nobility, largely between Lancaster and York, with many switching sides. However, it was not called the ‘Wars of the Roses’ at the time. Although roses feature in imagery from Tudor times onwards, the moniker first appeared in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein in 1829. The name the Cousins’ War was first applied to the conflict in the 20th century.
In one of the biggest breaches of all time, three billion Yahoo accounts were hacked in 2013. (New York Times)
The largest county in England is… Yorkshire: We’re continuing this guide on facts about England with a dive into the country’s geography. Taking up 11% of England’s land mass at 14,859 km², Yorkshire hails the title of being England’s largest county! Due to its large size, it’s no surprise that Yorkshire boasts a large variety of landscapes. From the stunning North Yorkshire Coast and Moors to the flat greenery of the Vale of York; there’s so much to explore here. The county is also home to a wealth of history, including two UNESCO World Heritage sites, Saltair & Salts Mill and Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal.
The Great Statue of Liberty is situated in New Jersey rather than New York.
New Amsterdam was the original name of New York that later on got changed in the 17th century.
It is observed that more people live in New York City than 40 out of 50 states of the US.
The first ATM launched in 1967 in London: John Shepherd-Barron is credited with the invention of the Automated Teller Machine (ATM). The first ATM was set up at a branch of Barclay’s Bank on a street in Enfield, London in June 1967. The first ATM in the US was launched in September 1969 at the Chemical Bank branch in Rockville Centre in New York. In 1970, a British engineer called James Goodfellow created the concept of a personal identification number (PIN).
Open AI is facing several lawsuits for copyright infringement in ChatGPT’s training process. Some of the plaintiffs are The New York Times and book authors like George R.R. Martin and John Grisham.