The Five Boroughs

New York City, in the U.S. state of New York, is composed of five county-level administrative entities called boroughs. They are Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Each borough is coextensive with a county of New York State. The county governments were dissolved when New York City consolidated in 1898, along with all city, town, and village governments within each county. If the boroughs were each independent cities, four of the boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx) would be among the ten most populous cities in the United States; these same boroughs are coextensive with the four most densely populated counties in the United States (New York [Manhattan], Kings [Brooklyn], Bronx, and Queens).

The term borough was adopted to describe a form of governmental administration for each of the five fundamental constituent parts of the newly consolidated city in 1898. Under the 1898 City Charter adopted by the New York State Legislature, a "borough" is a municipal corporation that is created when a county is merged with populated areas within it. This system, in which New York City's borough governments are inferior to the powers of the city-wide government, differs significantly from borough forms of government used in Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, in which a borough is an independent level of government, as well as other borough forms used in other states and Greater London.

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