New York 1900-1950

To a legal purist, New York City as we know it today, was only three years old as the last year of the 19th century ran out. For it was in 1897 that 'greater New York' was constituted and given a federal type of government. It was a system of five boroughs, the two old centres of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the new suburbs of Queens (on Long Island side by side with Brooklyn), Richmond on Staten Island down the Bay and the Bronx, then a vague hinterland stretching northward from the Harlem River.