Arbeitsblatt: New York

English Reading New York New York 1 The Big Apple People often call New York The Big Apple. Why? In the 1920s and 1930s, jazz musicians all wanted to work in New York. There are lot of apples on the tree, they said, but when you take New York City, you take The Big Apple! Yes, everybody wanted some of The Big Apple and they want some today, too! More than twenty million people visit New York every year. Lots of them say it is the most exciting city in the world. When visitors think about New York, they usually think about Manhattan an island 21.5 kilometres long and 3.7 kilometres wide. But New York City has five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island. The city has 10,000 kilometres of streets, and seven million or more people live here. But New York was not always big city . 1 English Reading New York 2 In the beginning By 1647, about 500 people lived in New Amsterdam, and the Governor was Dutchman called Peter Stuyvesant. But in 1664, the British took the town from the Dutch and changed its name to NewYork. Then came the War of Independence (1776-1783) a war between the British and some of the people of North America. When it finished in 1783, the British left and George Washington was made the first President of the United States of America. Four hundred years ago, Manhattan Island was the horne of the Algonquin Indians. In 1609, man called Henry Hudson ca me up the river to Manhattan. He was British but he was on Dutch ship, The Half Moon. Today, the river is called the Hudson River. In 1626, Dutchman called Peter Minuit came to Manhattan, and he paid the Indians about twenty-four dollars for the island. Minuit put up some houses, and called the little town New Amsterdam. In 1790, about 33,000 people lived in New York, but then millions more men and women began to come to America from all over the world. They all wanted to be part of the new country, and many of them came to live in New ork. At first they came from Germany and Ireland, then later on from Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Africa, and China. The new people ofNew York worked hard, and many of them helped to build the first skyscra pers and bridges. These New Americans often lived in the same streets with other people from their own country Irish with Irish, 2 English Reading New York Italians with Italians, Chinese with Chinese. Today, New York has parts called Chinatown and Little Italy. Ellis Island was the first stop for the New Americans when they came to New York. All the ships bringing people from Europe to America stopped here. The Brooklyn Bridge opened on 24 May, 1883, and thousands of New Yorkers came to see it. There were too many of them. The big crowd pushed some people off the bridge into the water; more men and women died under the feet of the crowd. 3 English Reading New York 3 Visiting the city There are lot of things to see in New York, and it is easy for the visitor to get to the different parts of the city. In Manhattan, the avenues go north and south, and most streets go east and west. They have numbers or names. After 14th Street, it is difficult to get lost because the streets and avenues go in straight lines! The East Side is to the east of Fifth Avenue. The West Side is to the west of it. When you take the subway- New York underground railway first ask, Where am going?Are you going uptown (north), or downtown (south)? You can buy subway token for your journey before you get on the train. The subway is noisy and dirty, but it cheap and quick. Millions of people use the subway trains to get to and from work every day. 4