New York City

• Tourism is an important industry in New York City, which has witnessed a growing combined volume of international and domestic tourists – receiving approximately 49 million tourists in 2010, 51 million in 2011, and a record 54 million tourists in 2013.

• Major tourist destinations include • the Empire State Building;

• Statue of Liberty; • Ellis Island;

• Broadway theater productions; • museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of

Art; • greenspaces such as Central Park and Washington

Square Park; Rockefeller Center; Times Square; the Manhattan Chinatown;

• luxury shopping along Fifth and Madison Avenues;

• and events such as the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village; the Macy's Thanksgiving Day

Parade; the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree; the St. Patrick's Day parade;

• seasonal activities such as ice skating in Central Park in the wintertime; the Tribeca Film Festival;

and free performances in Central Park at Summerstage.

• Special experiences outside the key tourist areas of the

city include • the Bronx Zoo; • Coney Island; • Flushing Meadows-Corona Park;

• and the New York Botanical Garden.

• New York City is one of the major film capitals of the world, and tourists visit the scenes of TV shows and movies such as Seinfeld, Friends, Sex and the City, Saturday Night Live, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Miracle on 34th Street, Godfather, and Taxi Driver.

Times Square

• Times Square is a major commercial intersection and a neighborhood in Midtown Manhattan.

• Times Square – iconified as "The Crossroads of the World",The Center of the Universe", and the "The Great White Way"– is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District, one of the world's busiest pedestrian intersections, and a major center of the world's entertainment industry.

• According to Travel + Leisure magazine's October 2011 survey, Times Square is the world's most visited tourist attraction, hosting over 39 million visitors annually. Approximately 330,000 people pass through Times Square daily, many of whom are either tourists or people working in the area.

The Statue of Liberty

• The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in the middle of New York Harbor, in Manhattan, New York City.

• The statue, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886, was a gift to the United States from the people of France.

• The statue is of a robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, who bears a torch and a tabula ansata (a tablet evoking the law) upon which is inscribed the date of the American Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. A broken chain lies at her feet.

• The statue is an icon of freedom and of the United States: a welcoming signal to immigrants arriving from abroad.

Central Park

• Central Park is an urban park in Manhattan in New York City. The park was initially opened in 1857.

• In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan.

• Construction began the same year, continued during the American Civil War, and was completed in 1873.

• Central Park is the most visited urban park in the United States.