Page 65 - 416_

Stars and Stripes - державний прапор США
Greenwich Village - Грінвіч-Вілідж, район письменників і
художників

Downtown Manhattan is the business centre of the nation. The
average New Yorker works in an office in Manhattan. Even though
the factory, the mine, or other industry may be in some distant part
of the United States, the main office is usually in New York. As the
financial headquarters of the capitalist world, New York is the home
of some of the world's largest corporations and the New York and
American Stock Exchanges.
Wall Street – America's financial centre occupying a quarter of a
mile – has become world famous. It symbolizes the money-market
and financiers of the US.
Wall Street was called so because of a wall which extended
along the street in Dutch times. It was built about 1650 from river to
river (the Hudson and the East River) to protect the small colony
living south of this street from attacks by Indians. Later the wall was
removed, but the name remained.
At the foot of Wall Street we come to the East River, where
there is a sea-plane base for businessmen who fly in from the
suburbs to work each day. And within a walking distance from the
base, below 14th Street, lies East Side, a slum area inhabited by the
poor, "East Siders" as they are called, who speak a dialect of their
own ("East Sidese").
Not far from Wall Street is the Bowery.
The Bowery is part of the lower East Side. Extending from the
East River about half-way across Manhattan, between the Brooklyn
Bridge and 14th Street, it has traditionally been home to the waves
of poor immigrants who have settled in New York City over the last
century, and it still retains distinctive ethnic neighbourhoods.
In this lower end of Manhattan, along Wall Street and the
narrow byways laid out by the original New Amsterdam colony, the
visitor is confronted by a thick cluster of legal and brokerage firms,
insurance companies, banks and import-export houses. Both the
New York Stock Exchange, at 20 Broad Street, and the smaller
American Stock Exchange, nearby at 86 Trinity Place, have guides
who explain how the markets work.
In this area, too, are a number of historic structures: Fraunces
Tavern, a restored 18th Century building in which George