Population in Perspective

Since we're thinking about maps.

I often have a hard time explaining to my friends and family back in the Midwest just how many people live in this fair city. I've spent most of my life in small towns whose "downtown" areas consisted of two blocks of storefronts. So I was ambling along through the webs and found this map. It's a simple population of comparison, matching each borough of New York to the state whose population most closely matches it.


Yes, there as many people on my 14-mile long island as their are in the entire great state of Idaho. (And yes, what happens in Brooklyn, stays in Brooklyn.)

I find it fascinating to see this so plainly laid out. I see more people—and different people—each day than existed in either of the small Michigan towns in which I lived, or even both combined. When people talk about the "New York bad attitude" and how hard it is to get to know people here, I have to admit I'm not that surprised. Look at how many people we have in our lives daily. It's incomprehensible to think of getting to know an entire state—and any one of the five boroughs is no different. Add to this the 45 million tourists who come through each year, and is it really any wonder that most New Yorkers just can't deal with thinking about any more people? (Granted, we could all be a little nicer about it, but that applies across the planet and is just concentrated in cities.)

And if you really want food for thought, think about what this means about the way the electoral college is set up.

As an interesting aside, Manhattan and Idaho both suffer from confusion over the origin of their names. There are several possible origins for the word Manhattan, all deriving from the original "Manna hata" that Henry Hudson noted in his log book in 1609. Mannahata can be translated from the native Lenape tribe as "island of many hills." However, the Munsee dialect of the Lenape translates the word variously as manahachtanienk—meaning "general place of inebriation", manahatouh—"place where timber is procured for bows and arrows" or simply menatay—"island."

Idaho, meanwhile, is disputedly from the Shoshone term "ee-da-how," meaning variously "the sun comes from the mountains," "gem of the mountains," or "Behold! the sun coming down the mountain." But this may have been completely fabricated by a lobbyist named George Willing around the time the northwest part of the country was being carved into territories. However, a tribal chief of the native Coeur d'Alene Nation explains that in their language Idaho would be pronounced "Ah-d'Hoo." He translates the first syllable as a greeting and second as an expression of surprise, coming up with "Welcome, with open arms! We're just surprised that there are so many of you!"

That very phrase has been what New York has greeted newcomers with for four hundred years.