Education in New York City privately run secular and religious schools in the city. The New York Public Library, which has the largest collection of any public library system in the country, serves Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. It has several research libraries including the Main Branch and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Queens is served by the Queens Borough Public Library, the nation's second largest public library system, while Brooklyn Public Library serves Brooklyn. New York City is also home to hundreds of cultural institutions and historic sites, many of which are internationally known. It is widely regarded a center
New York City dominated by Tammany Hall, a political machine supported by Irish and German immigrants. Several prominent American literary figures lived in New York during the 1830s and 1840s, including William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, John Keese, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Edgar Allan Poe. Public-minded members of the contemporaneous business elite lobbied for the establishment of Central Park, which in 1857 became the first landscaped park in an American city. The Great Irish Famine brought a large influx of Irish immigrants, of whom over 200,000 were living in New York by 1860, upwards of a quarter of