Burbank, California
Burbank is a city in Los Angeles County in the Los Angeles metropolitan area of Southern California, United States, 12 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The population at the 2010 census was 103,340. Billed as the "Media Capital of the World" and only a few miles northeast of Hollywood, numerous media and entertainment companies are headquartered or have significant production facilities in Burbank, including Warner Bros. Entertainment, The Walt Disney Company, Nickelodeon Animation Studios, The Burbank Studios, Cartoon Network Studios with the West Coast branch of Cartoon Network, Insomniac Games; the Hollywood Burbank Airport was the location of Lockheed's Skunk Works, which produced some of the most secret and technologically advanced airplanes, including the U-2 spy planes that uncovered the Soviet Union missile components in Cuba in October 1962. Burbank consists of two distinct areas: a downtown/foothill section, in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains, the flatland section; the city was referred to as "Beautiful Downtown Burbank" on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
The city was named after David Burbank, a New Hampshire–born dentist and entrepreneur who established a sheep ranch there in 1867. The city of Burbank occupies land, part of two Spanish and Mexican-era colonial land grants, the 36,400-acre Rancho San Rafael, granted to Jose Maria Verdugo by the Spanish Bourbon government in 1784, the 4,063-acre Rancho Providencia created in 1821; this area was the scene of a military skirmish which resulted in the unseating of the Spanish Governor of California, his replacement by the Mexican leader Pio Pico. Remnants of the military battle were found many years in the vicinity of Warner Bros. Studio when residents dug up cannonballs. Dr. David Burbank purchased over 4,600 acres of the former Verdugo holding and another 4,600 acres of the Rancho Providencia in 1867 and built a ranch house and began to raise sheep and grow wheat on the ranch. By 1876, the San Fernando Valley became the largest wheat-raising area in Los Angeles County, but the droughts of the 1860s and 1870s underlined the need for steady water supplies.
A professionally trained dentist, Burbank began his career in Maine. He joined the great migration westward in the early 1850s and, by 1853 was living in San Francisco. At the time the American Civil War broke out he was again well established in his profession as a dentist in Pueblo de Los Angeles. In 1867, he purchased Rancho La Providencia from David W. Alexander and Francis Mellus, he purchased the western portion of the Rancho San Rafael from Jonathan R. Scott. Burbank's property reached nearly 9,200 acres at a cost of $9,000. Burbank would not acquire full titles to both properties until after a court decision known as the "Great Partition" was made in 1871 dissolving the Rancho San Rafael, he became known as one of the largest and most successful sheep raisers in southern California, as a result, he closed his dentistry practice and invested in real estate in Los Angeles. Burbank later owned the Burbank Theatre, which opened on November 27, 1893, at a cost of $150,000. Though the theater was intended to be an opera house, instead it staged plays and became known nationally.
The theatre featured famous actors of the time including Fay Bainter and Marjorie Rambeau, until it had deteriorated into a burlesque house. When the area that became Burbank was settled in the 1870s and 1880s, the streets were aligned along what is now Olive Avenue, the road to the Cahuenga Pass and downtown Los Angeles; these were the roads the Native Americans traveled and the early settlers took their produce down to Los Angeles to sell and to buy supplies along these routes. At the time, the primary long-distance transportation methods available to San Fernando Valley residents were stagecoach and train. Stagecoaching between Los Angeles and San Francisco through the Valley began in 1858; the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived in the Valley in 1876, completing the route connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. A shrewd businessman, foreseeing the value of rail transport, Burbank sold Southern Pacific Railroad a right-of-way through the property for one dollar; the first train passed through Burbank on April 5, 1874.
A boom created by a rate war between the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific brought people streaming into California shortly thereafter, a group of speculators purchased much of Burbank's land holdings in 1886 for $250,000. One account suggests Burbank may have sold his property because of a severe drought that year, which caused a shortage of water and grass for his livestock. 1,000 of his sheep died due to the drought conditions. The group of speculators who bought the acreage formed the Providencia Land and Development Company and began developing the land, calling the new town Burbank after its founder, began offering farm lots on May 1, 1887; the townsite had Burbank Boulevard/Walnut Avenue as the northern boundary, Grandview Avenue as the southern boundary, the edge of the Verdugo Mountains as the eastern boundary and Clybourn Avenue was the western border. The establishment of a water system in 1887 allowed farmers to irrigate their orchards and provided a stronger base for agricultural development.
The original plot of the new townsite of Burbank extended from what is now Burbank Boulevard on the north, to Grandview Avenue in Glendale, California on the south, from the top of the Verdugo Hills on the east to what is now known as Clybourn Avenue on the west. At the same time, the arrival of the railroad provided immediate access for the farmers to bring crops to market. Packing houses and warehouses were built alo
Arabic
Arabic is a Central Semitic language that first emerged in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the lingua franca of the Arab world. It is named after the Arabs, a term used to describe peoples living in the area bounded by Mesopotamia in the east and the Anti-Lebanon mountains in the west, in northwestern Arabia, in the Sinai Peninsula. Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, derived from Classical Arabic; as the modern written language, Modern Standard Arabic is taught in schools and universities, is used to varying degrees in workplaces and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic, the official language of 26 states, the liturgical language of the religion of Islam, since the Quran and Hadith were written in Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic, uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties, has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties.
Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-classical era in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, construed as a multitude of dialects of this language; these dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are acquired in families, while the latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children; the relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Latin and vernaculars in medieval and early modern Europe. This view though does not take into account the widespread use of Modern Standard Arabic as a medium of audiovisual communication in today's mass media—a function Latin has never performed. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in Europe in science and philosophy.
As a result, many European languages have borrowed many words from it. Arabic influence in vocabulary, is seen in European languages Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Catalan, owing to both the proximity of Christian European and Muslim Arab civilizations and 800 years of Arabic culture and language in the Iberian Peninsula, referred to in Arabic as al-Andalus. Sicilian has about 500 Arabic words as result of Sicily being progressively conquered by Arabs from North Africa, from the mid-9th to mid-10th centuries. Many of these words relate to related activities; the Balkan languages, including Greek and Bulgarian, have acquired a significant number of Arabic words through contact with Ottoman Turkish. Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughout its history; some of the most influenced languages are Persian, Spanish, Kashmiri, Bosnian, Bengali, Malay, Indonesian, Punjabi, Assamese, Sindhi and Hausa, some languages in parts of Africa. Conversely, Arabic has borrowed words from other languages, including Greek and Persian in medieval times, contemporary European languages such as English and French in modern times.
Classical Arabic is the liturgical language of 1.8 billion Muslims, Modern Standard Arabic is one of six official languages of the United Nations. All varieties of Arabic combined are spoken by as many as 422 million speakers in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, an abjad script and is written from right to left, although the spoken varieties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left to right with no standardized orthography. Arabic is a Central Semitic language related to the Northwest Semitic languages, the Ancient South Arabian languages, various other Semitic languages of Arabia such as Dadanitic; the Semitic languages changed a great deal between Proto-Semitic and the establishment of the Central Semitic languages in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: The conversion of the suffix-conjugated stative formation into a past tense; the conversion of the prefix-conjugated preterite-tense formation into a present tense.
The elimination of other prefix-conjugated mood/aspect forms in favor of new moods formed by endings attached to the prefix-conjugation forms. The development of an internal passive. There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of the northern Hejaz; these features are evidence of common descent from Proto-Arabic. The following features can be reconstructed with confidence for Proto-Arabic: negative particles m *mā.
Warner Bros. Records
Warner Bros. Records Inc. is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group and headquartered in Burbank, California. It was founded in 1958 as the recorded music division of the American film studio Warner Bros. and was one of a group of labels owned and operated by larger parent corporations for much of its existence. The sequence of companies that controlled Warner Bros. and its allied labels evolved through a convoluted series of corporate mergers and acquisitions from the early 1960s to the early 2000s. Over this period, Warner Bros. Records grew from a struggling minor player in the music industry to one of the top record labels in the world. In 2004, these music assets were divested by their owner Time Warner and purchased by a private equity group; this independent company traded as the Warner Music Group and was the world's last publicly traded major music company before being bought and privatized by Access Industries in 2011. Warner Music Group is the smallest of the three major international music conglomerates that include Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.
Max Lousada oversees recorded music operations of the company. Notable artists signed to Warner Bros. Records have included Prince, Kylie Minogue, Goo Goo Dolls, Sheryl Crow, Lil Pump, Green Day, Adam Lambert, Bette Midler, Duran Duran, Fleetwood Mac, Liam Gallagher, Fleet Foxes, Jason Derulo, Lily Allen and Sara, Dua Lipa, Linkin Park, Nile Rodgers, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Black Keys, My Chemical Romance, Mr. Bungle, Regina Spektor, Van Halen. At the end of the silent movie period, Warner Bros. Pictures decided to expand into publishing and recording so that it could access low-cost music content for its films. In 1928, the studio acquired several smaller music publishing firms which included M. Witmark & Sons, Harms Inc. and a partial interest in New World Music Corp. and merged them to form the Music Publishers Holding Company. This new group controlled valuable copyrights on standards by George and Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern and the new division was soon earning solid profits of up to US$2 million every year.
In 1930, MPHC paid US$28 million to acquire Brunswick Records, whose roster included Duke Ellington, Red Nichols, Nick Lucas, Al Jolson, Earl Burtnett, Ethel Waters, Abe Lyman, Leroy Carr, Tampa Red and Memphis Minnie, soon after the sale to Warner Bros. the label signed rising radio and recording stars Bing Crosby, Mills Brothers, Boswell Sisters. For Warner Bros. the dual impact of the Great Depression and the introduction of broadcast radio harmed the recording industry—sales crashed, dropping by around 90% from more than 100 million records in 1927 to fewer than 10 million by 1932 and major companies were forced to halve the price of records from 75c to 35c. In December 1931, Warner Bros. offloaded Brunswick to the American Record Corporation for a fraction of its former value, in a lease arrangement which did not include Brunswick's pressing plants. Technically, Warner maintained actual ownership of Brunswick, which with the sale of ARC to CBS in 1939 and their decision to discontinue Brunswick in favor of reviving the Columbia label, reverted to Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. sold Brunswick a second time, this time along with the old Brunswick pressing plants Warner owned, to Decca Records in exchange for a financial interest in Decca. The studio stayed out of the record business for more than 25 years, during this period it licensed its film music to other companies for release as soundtrack albums. Warner Bros. returned to the record business in 1958 with the establishment of its own recording division, Warner Bros. Records. By this time, the established Hollywood studios were reeling from multiple challenges to their former dominance—the most notable being the introduction of television in the late 1940s. Legal changes had a major impact on their business—lawsuits brought by major stars had overthrown the old studio contract system by the late 1940s. Pictures sold off much of its film library in 1948 and, beginning in 1949, anti-trust suits brought by the US government forced the five major studios to divest their cinema chains. In 1956, Harry Warner and Albert Warner sold their interest in the studio and the board was joined by new members who favoured a renewed expansion into the music business—Charles Allen of the investment bank Charles Allen & Company, Serge Semenenko of the First National Bank of Boston and investor David Baird.
Semenenko in particular had a strong professional interest in the entertainment business and he began to push Jack Warner on the issue of setting up an'in-house' record label. With the record business booming - sales had topped US$500 million by 1958 - Semnenko argued that it was foolish for Warner Bros. to make deals with other companies to release its soundtracks when, for less than the cost of one motion picture, they could establish their own label, creating a new income stream that could continue indefinitely and provide an additional means of exploiting and promoting its contract actors. Another impetus for the label's creation was the brief music career of Warner Bros. actor Tab Hunter. Although Hunter was signed to an exclusive acting contract with the studio, it did not prevent him from signing a recording contract, which he did with Dot Records, owned at the time by Paramount Pictures. Hunter scored several hits for Dot, including the US #1 single, "Young Love", to Warner Bros.' chagrin, reporters were asking about the hit record, rather than
Found object (music)
Found objects are sometimes used in music to add unusual percussive elements to a work. Their use in such contexts is as old as music itself, as the original invention of musical instruments certainly developed from the sounds of natural objects rather than from any designed instruments; the use of found objects in modern classical music is connected to experiments in indeterminacy and aleatory music by such composers as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, although it has reached its ascendancy in those areas of popular music as well, such as the ambient works of Brian Eno. In Eno's influential work, found objects are credited on many tracks; the ambient music movement which followed Eno's lead has made use of such sounds, with notable exponents being performers such as Future Sound of London and Autechre, natural sounds have been incorporated into many pieces of new-age music. Found objects have been featured in well known pop songs: "You Still Believe In Me" from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds features bicycle bells and horns as part of the orchestral arrangements.
Einstürzende Neubauten became known for incorporating a wide range of found objects in their percussion gear. A more recent example of found objects being used as percussion instruments is Shawn "Clown" Crahan from the nu metal band Slipknot, who beats a beer keg with a baseball bat to the beat of the song; the Dodos played a garbage bin as a part of their percussion gear. Wall of Voodoo drummer Joe Nanini would use pots and pans instead of conventional drums. Many street drummers perform with empty plastic baskets; the band Neptune uses VCR-casings, scrap metal and all kinds of other found objects to create experimental musical instruments. Other builders like Yuri Landman, Harry Partch, Pierre Bastien, Iner Souster incorporate found material in their works; the use of found objects in music takes one of two general forms: either objects are deliberately recorded, with their sound used directly or in processed form, or previous recordings are sampled for use as part of a work. With the improvement and easy accessibility of sampling technology since the 1980s, this second method has flourished and is a major component of much modern popular music in such genres as hip hop.
Experimental musical instrument Sampling Martin J. Junker: Buchhaltung – Percussion octet with books. Norsk-Musikforlag, Oslo 2011
Disc jockey
A disc jockey abbreviated as DJ, is a person who plays existing recorded music for a live audience. Most common types of DJs include radio DJ, club DJ who performs at a nightclub or music festival and turntablist who uses record players turntables, to manipulate sounds on phonograph records; the disc in disc jockey referred to gramophone records, but now DJ is used as an all-encompassing term to describe someone who mixes recorded music from any source, including cassettes, CDs or digital audio files on a CDJ or laptop. The title DJ is used by DJs in front of their real names or adopted pseudonyms or stage names. In recent years it has become common for DJs to be featured as the credited artist on tracks they produced despite having a guest vocalist that performs the entire song: like for example Uptown Funk. DJs use audio equipment that can play at least two sources of recorded music and mix them together to create seamless transitions between recordings and develop unique mixes of songs; this involves aligning the beats of the music sources so their rhythms do not clash when played together or to enable a smooth transition from one song to another.
DJs use specialized DJ mixers, small audio mixers with crossfader and cue functions to blend or transition from one song to another. Mixers are used to pre-listen to sources of recorded music in headphones and adjust upcoming tracks to mix with playing music. DJ software can be used with a DJ controller device to mix audio files on a computer instead of a console mixer. DJs may use a microphone to speak to the audience; the "disc" in "disc jockey" referred to gramophone records, but now "DJ" is used as an all-encompassing term to describe someone who mixes recorded music from any source, including vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, or digital audio files stored on USB stick or laptop. DJs perform for a live audience in a nightclub or dance club or a TV, radio broadcast audience, or in the 2010s, an online radio audience. DJs create mixes and tracks that are recorded for sale and distribution. In hip hop music, DJs may create beats, using percussion breaks and other musical content sampled from pre-existing records.
In hip hop, rappers and MCs use. DJs use equipment that can play at least two sources of recorded music and mix them together; this allows the DJ to create seamless transitions between recordings and develop unique mixes of songs. This involves aligning the beats of the music sources so their rhythms do not clash when they are played together, either so two records can be played at the same time, or to enable the DJ to make a smooth transition from one song to another. An important tool for DJs is the specialized DJ mixer, a small audio mixer with a crossfader and cue functions; the crossfader enables the DJ to transition from one song to another. The cue knobs or switches allow the DJ to listen to a source of recorded music in headphones before playing it for the live club or broadcast audience. Previewing the music in headphones helps the DJ pick the next track they want to play, cue up the track to the desired starting location, align the two tracks' beats in traditional situations where auto sync technology is not being used.
This process ensures that the selected song will mix well with the playing music. DJs may use a microphone to speak to the audience; the title "DJ" is commonly used by DJs in front of their real names or adopted pseudonyms or stage names as a title to denote their profession. Some DJs focus on creating a good mix of songs for the club dancers or radio audience. Other DJs use turntablism techniques such as scratching, in which the DJ or turntablist manipulates the record player turntable to create new rhythms and sounds. DJs need to have a mixture of artistic and technical skills for their profession, because they have to understand both the creative aspects of making new musical beats and tracks, the technical aspects of using mixing consoles, professional audio equipment, and, in the 2010s, digital audio workstations and other computerized music gear. In many types of DJing, including club DJing and radio/TV DJing, a DJ has to have charisma and develop a good rapport with the audience. Professional DJs specialize in a specific genre of music, such as house music or hip hop music.
DJs have an extensive knowledge about the music they specialize in. Many DJs are avid music collectors of rare or obscure tracks and records. Radio DJs or radio personalities introduce and play music broadcast on AM, FM, digital or Internet radio stations. Club DJs referred as DJs in general, play music at musical events, such as parties at music venues or bars, music festivals and private events. Club DJs mix music recordings from two or more sources using different mixing techniques in order to produce non-stopping flow of music. One key technique used for seamlessly transitioning from one song to another is beatmatching. A DJ who plays and mixes one specific music genre is given the title of that genre; the quality of a DJ performance consists of two main features: technical skills, or how well can DJ operate the equipment and produce sm
Arabic music
Arabic music is the music of the Arab World with all its different music styles and genres. Arabic countries have many styles of music and many dialects. Arabic music has a long history of interaction with genres, it represents the music of all the peoples that make up the Arab world all the 22 states. Pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula music was similar to that of Ancient Middle Eastern music. Most historians agree that there existed distinct forms of music in the Arabian peninsula in the pre-Islamic period between the 5th and 7th century AD. Arab poets of that time—called shu`ara' al-Jahiliyah or "Jahili poets", meaning "the poets of the period of ignorance"—used to recite poems with a high notes, it was believed. The choir at the time served as a pedagogic facility where the educated poets would recite their poems. Singing was not thought to be the work of these intellectuals and was instead entrusted to women with beautiful voices who would learn how to play some instruments used at that time such as the drum, the guitar or the rebab, perform the songs while respecting the poetic metre.
The compositions were simple and every singer would sing in a single maqam. Among the notable songs of the period were the huda, the nasb and rukbani. Both compositions and improvisations in traditional Arabic music are based on the maqam system. Maqams can be realized with either vocal or instrumental music, do not include a rhythmic component. Al-Kindi was a notable early theorist of Arabic music, he joined several others like al-Farabi in proposing the addition of a makeshift fifth string to the oud. He published several tracts including the cosmological connotations of music, he identified twelve tones on the Arabic musical scale, based on the location of fingers on and the strings of the oud. Abulfaraj wrote the Kitab al-Aghani, an encyclopedic collection of poems and songs that runs to over 20 volumes in modern editions. Al-Farabi wrote a notable book on music titled Kitab al-Musiqi al-Kabir, his pure Arabian tone system is still used in Arabic music. Al-Ghazali wrote a treatise on music in Persia which declared, "Ecstasy means the state that comes from listening to music".
In 1252, Safi al-Din developed a unique form of musical notation, where rhythms were represented by geometric representation. A similar geometric representation would not appear in the Western world until 1987, when Kjell Gustafson published a method to represent a rhythm as a two-dimensional graph. By the 11th century, Islamic Iberia had become a center for the manufacture of instruments; these goods spread throughout France, influencing French troubadours, reaching the rest of Europe. The English words lute and naker are derived from Arabic oud and naqareh. Bartol Gyurgieuvits spent 13 years as a slave in the Ottoman empire. After escaping, he published De Turvarum ritu et caermoniis in Amsterdam in 1544, it is one of the first European books to describe music in Islamic society. The origins of the "belly dance" are obscure, as depictions and descriptions are rare, it may have originated in pre-Islamic Arabia. Examples have been found from 200 BCE, suggesting a possible pre-Islamic origin. In the early 20th century, Egypt was the first in a series of Arab countries to experience a sudden emergence of nationalism, as it became independent after 2000 years of foreign rule.
Any English, French or Turkish songs got replaced by national Egyptian music. Cairo became a center for musical innovation. Female singers were some of the first to take a secular approach. Egyptian performer Umm Kulthum and Lebanese singer Fairuz were notable examples of this. Both have been popular through the decades that followed and both are considered legends of Arabic music. Across the Mediterranean, Moroccan singer Zohra Al Fassiya was the first female performer to achieve wide popularity in the Maghreb region, performing traditional Arab Andalusian folk songs and recording numerous albums of her own. During the 1950s and 1960s, Arabic music began to take on a more Western tone – Egyptian artists Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez along with composers Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Baligh Hamdi pioneered the use of western instruments in Egyptian music. By the 1970s several other singers had followed suit and a strand of Arabic pop was born. Arabic pop consists of Western styled songs with Arabic instruments and lyrics.
Melodies are a mix between Eastern and Western. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Lydia Canaan, musical pioneer regarded as the first rock star of the Middle East fused English lyrics and Western sound with Middle-Eastern quarter tones and microtones and became the first internationally successful Lebanese recording artist. Western pop music was being influenced by Arabic music in the early 1960s, leading to the development of surf music, a rock music genre that gave rise to garage rock and punk rock. Surf rock pioneer Dick Dale, a Lebanese American guitarist, was influenced by the Arabic music he learnt from his uncle the oud and derbakki drum, skills which he applied to his electric guitar playing when recording surf rock in the early 1960s. In the 1990s, several artists have taken up such a style including Amr Diab, Najwa Karam, Nawal Al Zoghbi, Nancy Ajram, Haifa Wehbe, Fadl Shaker, Majida Al Roumi, Wael Kfoury, Asalah Nasri, Myriam Fares, Carole Samaha, Samira Said, Hisham Abbas, Kadhem Al Saher, Mostafa Amar, Ehab Tawfik, Moham
New York City
The City of New York called either New York City or New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles, New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural and media capital of the world, exerts a significant impact upon commerce, research, education, tourism, art and sports; the city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of, a separate county of the State of New York. The five boroughs – Brooklyn, Manhattan, The Bronx, Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898; the city and its metropolitan area constitute the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. New York City is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the United States, the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world. In 2017, the New York metropolitan area produced a gross metropolitan product of US$1.73 trillion. If greater New York City were a sovereign state, it would have the 12th highest GDP in the world. New York is home to the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world. New York City traces its origins to a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan.
The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790, it has been the country's largest city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the U. S. by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is an international symbol of the U. S. and its ideals of liberty and peace. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a global node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance, environmental sustainability, as a symbol of freedom and cultural diversity. Many districts and landmarks in New York City are well known, with the city having three of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions in 2013 and receiving a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world. Times Square, iconic as the world's "heart" and its "Crossroads", is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District, one of the world's busiest pedestrian intersections, a major center of the world's entertainment industry.
The names of many of the city's landmarks and parks are known around the world. Manhattan's real estate market is among the most expensive in the world. New York is home to the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is the largest single-operator rapid transit system worldwide, with 472 rail stations. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top universities in the world. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, the city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. In 1664, the city was named in honor of the Duke of York.
James's older brother, King Charles II, had appointed the Duke proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, which England had seized from the Dutch. During the Wisconsinan glaciation, 75,000 to 11,000 years ago, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth; the erosive forward movement of the ice contributed to the separation of what is now Long Island and Staten Island. That action left bedrock at a shallow depth, providing a solid foundation for most of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In the precolonial era, the area of present-day New York City was inhabited by Algonquian Native Americans, including the Lenape, whose homeland, known as Lenapehoking, included Staten Island; the first documented visit into New York Harbor by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown. He named it Nouvelle Angoulême. A Spanish expedition led by captain Estêvão Gomes, a Portuguese sailing for Emperor Charles V, arrived in New York Harbor in January 1525 and charted the mouth of the Hudson River, which he named Río de San Antonio.
The Padrón Rea
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