1878 -- Sterns, which was begun  began operations in 1867 under four German brothers, Isaac,  Bernard, Louis and Benjamin,  at 167 6th Avenue, and sold dress materials, lace and silk, moves to 110 West  23rd  Street.  It was was among the most prosperous in the section of Downtown New York that became known as Ladies Mile.  Sterns was destined,  moreover, to become by 1910 the largest department store in the world.  (It was subsequently sold to Federated and assumed by Macy's.)

1879 -- The 9th Avenue El is expanded north of 59th Street, providing transportation for and stimulating the growth of a new New York City neighborhood, the Upper West Side.  The unhealthy condition of  Lower East Side tenements spurs the initiation of  a new housing code,  calling for a dumbbell design with airshafts situated at the center of each tenement building.  Also in this year,  Gilbert  and Sullivan  come to Town, and their operas are staged with great success.

1880 -- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on 5th Avenue between 80th and 84th steets, opens its doors to the public.  Formed in 1770 by members of the Union League Club, at the suggestion of John Jay who foresaw for it the roles of educational institution and cultural monument for the City, even today the Museum's continues with programs intended to outreach to the common people and give them a chance to become familiar with the masterpieces of world art.  The             Museum's first home, a smal, Gothicl red-brick building with a steel and glass roof, ,was designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould.  It's collection, which began modestly with a couple of hundred paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters, has grown into one of the richest  in the world.   Also in 1880, the Egyptian Khedive donated to the United States the 70-foot- tall Obelisk, a shaft of red granite,  known as Cleopatra's Needle (c.1475 b.c. ).  When it arrived from abroad, it was unloaded in pieces at Staten Island, then transported  up the Hudson on pontoons, and then rolled on cannonballs to its present site, a small display area behind the Museum in Central Park.

1882 -- The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibits Chinese women (and therefore their children) from entering  the United States unless they can evidence a marriage to a merchant.  As a result a Chinese  bachelor enclave forms at  Pell and Doyer and the lower part of Mott Streets which became known as the "Bachelor Society."   The population of this ghetto remained well below 4,000 until the advent of World War II.    Initially limited to engaging in certain kinds of businesses, the Chinese first opened hand laundries, then in about 1890 began to open restaurants that appealed to tourists; and soon thereafter began to arise the giftshops and temples as we see them today.  It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who signed a measure in 1943 that lifted the Chinese Exclusion Act, after China and  the U.S. became allies in the Second World War.

1883 -- The Brooklyn bridge opens on May 24, 1883, after a decade and one half of construction and the loss of a significant number of lives.   The steel suspension bridge spans the East River, a distance of about 1595 feet,  and finally connects Brooklyn and Manhattan.  Before  the Brooklyn Bridge, it was said, that during severe winter weather it was often quicker to    come from Albany than to venture across or through the ice floes  in the East  in a ferry.   The bridge was first proposed in 1867 by Augustus Roebling, the inventor of wire wire cable and  master builder of bridges, to William C. Kingsley, publisher of the Brooklyn Eagle.   In 1869, however, right after necessary approvals were obtained, August Roebling was  mortally injured by a ferry that toppled him from a shoreline piling, and the work of completing  the bridge was assumed by his son, Washington Roebling who himself was inflicted with  the bends in an underwater descent along the western caisson in the summer of 1872, and then by his Washington Roebling's wife, Emily Warren Roebling.   Besides difficulties with construction, also graft and the collapse of the budget for the bridge, at one  point,  had to be confronted.  When the engineering marvel was finally accomplished, it was regarded as the "new eighth wonder of the world."   Also in this year, the first Metropolitan Opera House, A Romanesque theater building with an auditorium seating only 3,700 patrons, designed by J. C. Cady,  opens on  Broadway between 39th and 40th Streets.

1884 --   The Dakota, an new 85-unit apartment building opens on 1 West 73nd Street on Central Park West.  It was at the time considered  to be so far uptown that its location was faectiously compared to the distant territory of the Dakotas.  The upper crust didn't think very much of its quarters, either comparing the apartments in the Dakota to those of tenement housing.  It opened fully rented without the benefit of paid advertising, nevertheless, justifying the speculations of  Henry J. Hardenbergh, who later became the designer of the Plaza Hotel, and Edward Clark, who was then President of the Singer Manufacturing Co.            

1886 --Frederic Auguste Bartholdi's statue of "Liberty Englightening the World"  is presented to the United States by the people of France on the centenary anniversary of the American Revolution   The 150-foot-tall, bronze Statue of Liberty is then erected in New York Harbor on Bedloe's island (later renamed Liberty Island), over a star-shaped pedestal and a metal framework designed by the architects and builders Richard Morris Hunt and Gustave Eiffel.  Proposed  by  French Statesman  Edouard De Laboulaye long before the centenary as a  commemorative gift liberty and friendship between   the two nations,  the magnificent gift from France is finally dedicated  on October 28, 1886.   It was restored  the 1980s, and the torch was replaced in 1986 for the second centenary celebration.  Bartholdi's magnificent  statue, which faces out to to sea to welcome incoming ships,  continues to preside  over the waves of  Upper  New York Bay.  The tablet in her one hand reads "July 4, 1776"; while the torch in her other hand is held aloft as a beacon of freedom to the world.  In 1903 Emma Lazarus's poem, "The New Colossus," was inscribed on a bronze tablet laid in the statue's pedestal. Another modification to New York   Harbor in 1886, was the construction of Pier A, with a 70-foot tower at the end of the Pier to which was added in 1919 a memorial clock for those who died in World War I.  Pier A became  for many years the headquarters of the New York Fire Department's Marine Division, but presently it is an abandoned state.

 1888 -- The Blizzard of March 12, 1888 throws nearly 22 inches of snow on New York City, toppling phone poles and shearing cables.  A disruption in telephone service persists for 2 months.  The phone company complies with directive to henceforth bury all overhead wire.

1889 -- The Wooden Washington Memorial Arch by Stanford White  is erected Washington Square residents,  as part of the centennial celebration in honor of  Washington's inauguration,   and causes such a sensation  that White is offered a commission to design a permanent marble monument for Washington Square Park.  Also in 1889  the initial copies of  the 4-page  Wall Street Journal sell for 2 cents a copy.  Initially the Journal publishes only railroad and crop conditions, and Dow's index of the leading stocks with their prices.  Circulation increases to only about 7,000 copies in the 1890s.  Charles Henry Dow sells his publication to Clarence Walker Barron  in 1902 , and Walker Barron widens the scope of reportage to include other major cities and increases size of the paper to about 20 pages, thus causing circulation to climb up to about 50, 000 copies before the Great Depression of 1929.   But it is not until 1957 that  Journal, under the leadership  a number of  capable managing editors,  becomes the number one business daily in the nation,  selling about 500,000 copies daily.

1890 -- Jacob Riis, Danish immigrant and journalist,  publishes his excoriating expose of tenement and slum conditions in New York City, particularly on the Lower East Side, under the title How the Other Half Lives. 

1891 -- Croton Aqueduct opens, carrying to the City some 300 million gallons of water per day.  Also in this year, Herman Melville, the author of the american classic Moby Dick, the story of a mad American sea captain's pursuit of a great white whlae, and the story  Nicholas Barneby the Scrivener,  a clerk of the kind one might have found working in the old U.S. Custom's House, and many other celebrated novels and tales, dies in obscurity.  He was born Downtown near State on the Battery,  and later moved to the area around  Madison Square where he remained for nearly three decades.   Also in this year, Carnegie Hall opens on May 5, with Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky conducting the Philharmonic Orchestra of New York.