New York City, the largest city in the United States, comprises five boroughs — Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island — covering roughly 1,214 km² with a population of about 8.1 million. Founded by the Dutch in the seventeenth century as New Amsterdam, the city became the main gateway for European immigration to the United States from the nineteenth century onward, through Ellis Island. The Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French people in 1886, is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Manhattan is home to major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, while Wall Street makes the city the world's leading financial center.
