Demographic history of New York City

Map depicting NYC's density c.1900 on a sliding scale from 1,000 to 150,000 people per square mile. Areas with less than 1,000 per square mile are excluded. Interactive Map
People waiting to cross Fifth Avenue

The racial and ethnic history of New York City has varied widely; from its sale to the Dutch by Native American residents, to the modern multi-cultural period.

Poster from 1907:
The many ways in which New Yorkers say "Merry Christmas" or its equivalent;
in Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, Flemish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Yiddish (labeled as "Christian Hebrew"), Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.
"Gotham's citizens have been called "The Sons of Elsewhere", and their language that spoken at the Tower of Babel..."

New York City has had a largely white population, and most foreign born immigrants to the city before the end of World War II were from Europe. However, this changed in the decades after World War II, when all of the boroughs became more diverse, and when immigration from places outside Europe was increased largely due to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.