New York Facts

If Manhattan had the same population density as Alaska, only about 30 people would live there.

There are more than 10 million bricks in the Empire State Building!

If NYC were its own country, and the NYPD was its army, it would be the twentieth-best-funded army in the world, just behind Greece and just ahead of North Korea.

When he was 7, Vin Diesel and some friends broke into a New York theater with intentions to vandalize it. Instead of calling the police, the theater’s artistic director handed them scripts and offered them parts in the upcoming show. This became Diesel’s first acting role.

There's a man named Raffi Stepanian who mines diamonds and gold from New York City sidewalks, making over $600 in one week.

New York City has approximately 27,000 restaurants. If you visited a different one every single day, it would take you nearly 74 years to try them all—and that's assuming none of them closed or opened while you were eating your way through.

Carlos Vasquez, a dry cleaner in New York, has a sign outside his shop that reads: If you are unemployed and need an outfit clean for an interview, we will clean it for free.

Instead of McDonald's tearing down a ~230-year-old Georgian mansion, citizens of a small NY town forced them to renovate it instead, resulting in a uniquely historic franchise location.

A B-25 bomber slammed into the Empire State Building in heavy fog. Elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver was burned on the 80th floor. Rescuers placed her in an elevator to get her down - but the crash had severed the cables. She plummeted 75 stories to the basement. She survived. She still holds the Guinness World Record 80 years later.

Patrick Moriarty was 22 when he told his 9th-grade earth science students to circle one date on their worksheets: a solar eclipse. He gave the same assignment to every class he taught for the next 16 years. More than 100 former students showed up 46 years later. Rochester was cloudy. Nobody cared.

Five train cars passed over Wesley Autrey while he shielded a stranger on the subway tracks. His two daughters, ages 4 and 6, watched from the platform. From under the train he shouted: "Let my daughters know their father's okay."

During the 2022 Buffalo blizzard, Jay Withey knocked on 10 doors begging for shelter. All 10 said no. He smashed a window at Pine Hill School and guided 24 stranded strangers inside. He found cereal in the cafeteria and gym mats for beds. Before leaving, he left a note: "I'm terribly sorry about the window. I had to save everyone. Merry Christmas, Jay." Police put out a call to find him. Not to arrest him. To thank him.

A flock of Canada geese knocked out both engines of US Airways Flight 1549 roughly two minutes after takeoff. Captain Chesley Sullenberger had about three and a half minutes to save 155 lives. He landed on the Hudson River - and when NTSB later ran simulations with a realistic 35-second decision delay added, the return to LaGuardia crashed short of the runway. The river was the only choice. Every single person survived.

On the eve of Thanksgiving 1997, a New York woman brought five puppies into a maximum-security women's prison and taught a group of inmates to raise them. Today her prison-raised service dogs go home free of charge with wounded war veterans, each one spending two years with someone serving time and learning more than 70 commands. The puppies still grow up behind bars.

Muhammad has been the most popular baby boy's name in England for two years running.

When the towers fell on September 11, the Coast Guard put out one call on marine radio: all available boats. Ferry captains turned mid-route. Tugboat operators dropped everything. Fishing boats, private yachts, dinner cruises - hundreds showed up. In nine hours, they evacuated nearly 500,000 people by water. The largest maritime evacuation in history. Larger than Dunkirk, which took nine days.

Sylvia Bloom worked as a legal secretary on Wall Street for 67 years. Every time her boss bought a stock, she quietly bought the same one. Nobody - not her husband, not the lawyers she worked for - knew. When she died at 96, her estate was worth $9 million. She left $8.2 million for college scholarships.

A 25-year-old woman was pinned face-down under a Mercedes-Benz at a Manhattan intersection. The rear tire was on her back. Within seconds, nearly a dozen strangers sprinted over and tilted the 2-ton SUV onto two wheels to free her. She crawled out with no broken bones. New Yorkers, apparently.

Brian Boles was 17 when police handcuffed him to a chair for two days and fed him a false confession to a crime he didn't commit. He spent 30 years locked up - and used that time to enroll in the Bard Prison Initiative. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology two months before a judge officially cleared his name.

The Statue of Liberty's torch has been closed since July 30, 1916 - and will never reopen. German saboteurs detonated roughly 2 million pounds of explosives at a New Jersey depot. The blast hit like an earthquake up to magnitude 5.5, lodging shrapnel in the copper skin and cracking the torch arm's iron frame. Only a handful of NPS staff have been up there since.

Martin Couney ran a Coney Island sideshow. Visitors paid 25 cents to watch premature babies living in incubators. Hospitals were turning preemies away as weaklings. Couney's exhibit gave them state-of-the-art care for free. Parents paid nothing. Over 40 years, roughly 6,500 of the 8,000 babies in his care went home. He wasn't even a licensed doctor.

In 1928 America had no guide dog schools. A blind twenty-year-old trained six weeks in Switzerland with a German shepherd he renamed Buddy, then came home to skeptical reporters. He crossed West Street, a waterfront run of ten-ton trucks, and the dog took him over. He helped found The Seeing Eye a year later. It still breeds and trains its own dogs.