New York City Facts

The World Trade Center towers used to have two zip codes, 10047-10048, one for each building.

New York's Central Park is nearly twice the size of the entire country of Monaco.

The Statue of Liberty's torch arm sits 18 inches from where it was designed to be. Before her 100th birthday, engineers found it swaying in strong winds, with a spike of her crown threatening to pierce it. Crews turned the spike away and swapped almost every iron bar holding her copper skin while she stood. They never moved the arm, or her head, which still sits 2 feet off-center.

William Van Alen hid a 185-foot steel spire inside the Chrysler Building's own crown, assembled in secret. His rival H. Craig Severance had designed 40 Wall Street two feet taller - thinking he'd win. Van Alen raised the hidden spire through the roof in 90 minutes on October 23, 1929. The Chrysler Building jumped to 1,046 feet, the first skyscraper to top 1,000 feet. It held the record for 11 months.

The Statue of Liberty once had no body. For six years, just her arm and torch stood in Madison Square Park. France paid for the statue - Americans had to fund the pedestal. Visitors paid 50 cents to climb inside the arm. Wealthy New Yorkers living right beside it refused to donate. Pulitzer shamed them publicly, and the full statue arrived in 214 crates.

The Empire State Building's spire was designed as a boarding dock for airships. Passengers would cross an open gangplank 1,250 feet above the street, then ride an elevator down. In September 1931, a small airship docked there for three minutes in 40 mph winds. Two weeks later, a blimp lowered newspapers to the tower on a 100 foot rope. Updrafts made the mast unusable. No airship ever truly docked there.

Steve Buscemi was an FDNY firefighter with Engine 55 for four years before he became a movie star. When the World Trade Center fell on 9/11, he went back to his old firehouse. For five days he worked 12-hour shifts digging through the rubble. He declined every interview and photo request the whole time.

The Coney Island Cyclone is a wooden roller coaster that has run since 1927. In 1972, the city planned to bulldoze it to expand the aquarium next door. Fans and a local park owner fought back with a campaign called Save the Cyclone. It worked. New owners reopened the ride in 1975. You can still ride it every summer, dropping 58 degrees at 60 miles an hour.

The Ghostbusters firehouse is real. Ladder 8 has answered calls from it in Tribeca since 1903. In 2011 the city put it on a list of 20 fire companies to close, the neighborhood rallied, and it stayed open. One firefighter says about 20 people a day ask him if it is a real firehouse while he stands there in uniform. It is, and the truck still goes out.

The John J. Harvey was a New York fireboat the FDNY retired in 1994, and volunteers bought her at auction in 1999 and restored her. On September 11, 2001, the water mains at Ground Zero were broken, so the fire department radioed the old boat back to ask if her pumps still worked. Her volunteer crew pumped beside two FDNY fireboats for 80 hours. She is 95 now and still gives free public trips.

This ironworker on the Empire State Building was photographed by Lewis Hine, a man in his mid-50s whose pictures of kids in mills had already helped turn America against child labor. In 1930 Hine climbed the bare steel alongside the crews, and for the highest shots they swung him out in a basket nearly a quarter-mile above Fifth Avenue.

When the 2012 New York City Marathon was cancelled, more than 1,000 runners took the ferry to Staten Island with backpacks of blankets, batteries and food. Superstorm Sandy had wrecked the island, where the race starts, and the mayor called it off two days before. Sports doctor Jordan Metzl rallied them on Facebook, and his group ran 15 miles, then helped clear out a family's home.

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.

P.T. Barnum led 21 elephants - including the famous Jumbo - across the Brooklyn Bridge to prove it was safe. Six days after it opened in 1883, a stampede rumor sparked a panic that left 12 people dead and shattered public confidence. The elephant parade fixed it. It worked.