New York Vacation Packages

BEYOND TIMES SQUARE
New York Trivia

Did You Know?

1. New York is called the Big Apple because in the 1920s a sportswriter for the Morning Telegraph named John Fitzgerald overheard stable hands in New Orleans refer to New York’s racetracks as “The Big Apple.” A decade later, jazz musicians adopted the term to refer to New York City, especially Harlem, as the jazz capital of the world. There are many apples on the trees of success, they said, but when you pick New York City, you pick the big apple.
2. Legend has it that Peter Minuit paid $24 in trinkets to purchase the island of Manhattan from Leni Lenape Indians at Bowling Green.
3. In 1664 the British “peacefully” took control of “Nieuwe Amsterdam” from the Dutch and renamed it New York City.
4. In 1898, the five boroughs – Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island – were incorporated into a single entity, known as Greater New York.
5. In 1624 the population of New Amsterdam (Present Day New York) was about 270 people. Today the population is over 8 million. That is about 30,000 times growth.
6. There are 6,374.6 miles of streets in New York City. 20 uptown/downtown blocks or 10 crosstown blocks is approximately equal to one mile.
7. New York has 722 miles of subway track
8. The Bronx is the only New York borough connected to the mainland.
9. There are over 18,000 eating establishment in NYC.
10. In 1836 the price of a house on lower Broadway was $25,000.
11. The last horse drawn trolley in Manhattan was phased out in July 1917.
12. During Prohibition there were 10,000 speakeasies in New York.
13. The New York Post was established by Alexander Hamilton in 1803 and is the oldest running newspaper in the USA.
14. The Statue of Liberty is 101 feet tall from base to torch, 305 feet from pedestal foundation to torch. She has a 35-foot waist and an 8-foot index finger and weighs 450,000 pounds. The actual name of the statue is Liberty Enlightening the World.
15. Central Park is 51 block or 843 acres, bigger than the country of Monaco.
16. The northern façade of City Hall was left unfinished when the building was erected in 1803 because no one foresaw that the city would expand beyond downtown.
17. Lord and Taylor started as a dry good store on Catherine Street. The founders were George W. Taylor and Samuel Lord.
18. Stuyvesant Street in the East Village is the only true street in Manhattan that runs directly east and west. It is a diagonal.

Firsts

1. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, America’s first performing arts center held its first performance on September 23, 1962.
2. The first presentation of a 3D movie to a paying audience took place in Manhattan’s Astor Place Theater in June 1915.
3. The first public brewery in America was established by Peter Minuit at the Market Field in Lower Manhattan.
4. On Sept 1882, 10,000 people marched from City Hall to Union Square in observation of the country’s first Labor Day.
5. New York’s first private telephone was installed at 89 Fifth Ave in 1877.
6. Chewing gum was invented in NYC by Thomas Adams in 1870.
7. The Providence Gray’s and the New York Metropolitans met for the first baseball post season championship games in 1884 (19 years before the start of the World Series) in the Central Park Polo Grounds. They played three games.
8. The first two giraffes to ever be exhibited in the USA were presented to the public in July 1838 at a vacant lot in what is now 509 Broadway.
9. The New York Hotel formally on 721 Broadway was the first hotel in the U.S. to offer room service.
10. Hellmann’s Mayonnaise was introduced in Hellmann’s Delicatessen in 1912.
11. The first Jewish Synagogue was built in 1695.
12. The Brooklyn Children’s Museum was the world’s first museum for kids.
13. The Brooklyn Bridge was the first bridge to be lit using electricity.

Largest

1. The world’s largest gothic cathedral is the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and it’s still under construction! The first stone was laid in 1892.
2. The nation’s largest public Halloween parade is the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.
3. The New York Stock Exchange is the world’s largest exchange.
4. The New York Mercantile Exchange is the world’s largest physical commodity futures exchange.
5. Macy’s, the world’s largest store, covers 2.1 million square feet of space and stocks over 500,000 different items.
6. The Panorama of the City of New York in the Queens Museum of Art is the world’s largest architectural model, containing 895,000 individual structures at a scale of 1” equals 100’.

Beyond Times Square is a tour and travel company that creates tour packages to the five boroughs of New York as well as individualized and group walking tours. Beyond Times Square services include hotel reservations and bookings, sightseeing tours, walking tours, theater and event tickets, airport transfers and chauffeured vehicles, private guides, restaurant suggestions and reservations, private meals, shopping and fashion consultants, lecturers and personal fitness trainers. Beyond Times Square also gives back to the city it showcases. A portion of the proceeds of each tour package go to the Fresh Air Fund and the Henry Street Settlement. For more information about Beyond Times Square or to book a package, call (800) 999-8160.