The Biggest! The Most! The Best! Try bragging on your own hometown to a New Yorker, and see how far you get. Well, there must be something to all that swaggering civic pride or what are 40 million tourists per year gawking at?

Manhattan Island, the heart of New York City, is just 13 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, but there are about 1,600,000 people bustling about. That works out to be approximately 72,000 per square mile, and all those people are being rude to each other in 170 different languages. Good thing you don’t always understand your neighbor.

Purchased from the Algonquin Indians in 1624 for around $65, a square foot of mid-town pavement in today’s market is worth exactly $12,647.53. Those Dutch boys made a pretty smooth deal.

Laid end to end, the subway tracks would reach to Chicago, and if you stacked up all the skyscrapers, the penthouse would be 70 miles above the earth. Talk about a room with a view. And yet, with over 120,000 cyclists, an extensive mass transit system, and the lowest rate of car ownership in the U.S., New York is statistically the most energy efficient city in the country.

You could plotz deciding where to eat. There are 16,700 restaurants in New York. Oy vey! Forty-six years of eating out every night to sample them all. And what would you say is the number one food exported from New York? Bagels? Cheesecake? As delicious as those New York noshes are, it is chocolate - 234 million dollars worth per year. Sweet revenge on the Dutch and their $65 bargain.

The Empire State Building is the number one tourist attraction in New York.  With its doors opening in 1931 during the middle of The Great Depression, at first the developers couldn’t give away space. A little too high, but after King Kong had his date at the top with Fay Wray, every square foot was rented. The building is struck by lightning over 200 times a year. And in peak tourist season, the wait in line for the 7-minute elevator ride to the observation deck can take over three hours. But we at FootageBank HD don’t like to dwell on the negative. We prefer to put before you Elvita Adams, who in 1979 jumped off the 86th floor and only broke a hip. How, you may ask? Well, the wind blew her back onto the building one floor below. And that is a New York happy ending.

For images from the Battery to the Bronx in Very High Definition, click here. You’ll look. You’ll try. We’ll tawk.