The number of fire fighters who will subsequently develop cancer as a result of this operation remains to be tallied. But the fact remains that fire fighters love their work, and if there is a fire they want to battle it. The hallmark of New York City is diversity. Each borough, for example, has its own character. It was the South Bronx that the nation saw burning down in the seventies, when TV cameras at Yankee Stadium would pan the surrounding neighborhood during televised games and catch the tenements blazing away.
Manhattan is the heart of the city.
On the granite island that this borough occupies is a forest of high-rises surrounded by tenements. It is in Manhattan that the commuter rail lines terminate. It is where the poverty of Harlem and the Lower East Side coexists with the wealth of Wall Street and the glitter of Madison Avenue. Brooklyn is known as the Borough of Churches. It was an independent city until 1898, when it became a part of New York.