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New York is a state in the northeastern United States. It is sometimes called New York State when there is need to distinguish it from New York City, the most populous city in both the state and the nation. Due to the preponderance of the population concentrated in the southern portion around New York City, the state is often regionalized into Upstate and Downstate. New York's postal abbreviation is NY. New York State's borders touch (clockwise from the northwest) two Great Lakes (Erie and Ontario, which are connected by the Niagara River), one former (briefly) Great Lake (Lake Champlain), the provinces of Ontario and Quebec in Canada, three New England states (Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut), the Atlantic Ocean, and two Mid-Atlantic states (New Jersey and Pennsylvania). In addition, Rhode Island shares a water border with New York. New York is also the site of the only extra-territorial enclave within the boundaries of the USA, the United Nations compound on Manhattan's East River. The southern tip of New York State—New York City, its suburbs, and the southern portion of the Hudson Valley—can be considered to form the central core of a "megalopolis," a super-city stretching from the northern suburbs of Boston to the southern suburbs of Washington and therefore occasionally called "BosWash". First described by Jean Gottmann in 1961 as a new phenomenon in the history of world urbanization, the megalopolis is characterized by a coalescence of previous already-large cities of the Eastern Seaboard, a heavy specialization on tertiary activity related to government, trade, law, education, finance, publishing and control of economic activity, plus a growth pattern not so much of more population and more area as more intensive use of already existing urbanized area and ever more sophisticated links from one specialty to another. Several other groups of megalopolis-type super-cities exist in the world, but that centered around New York City was the first described and still is the best example. The five New York City boroughs (and their counties) are: (1) The Bronx (Bronx), on the mainland, north of (2) Manhattan (New York) on Manhattan Island. The Hudson River is their western boundary. (3) Brooklyn (Kings) and (4) Queens (Queens) are across the East River from Manhattan on the western end of Long Island, and (5) Staten Island (Richmond) is south of Manhattan. The eastern end of Long Island includes the suburban counties of Nassau and Suffolk, which, however, are not part of New York City.
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