New York metropolitan area passed through ports in New York or in one of the surrounding towns. The five boroughs of New York City — The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island — were consolidated into a single city in 1898. The newly unified New York City encouraged both more physical connections between the boroughs and the growth of bedroom communities. The New York City Subway began operating in 1904 as the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, one of three systems (the other two being the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation and the Independent Subway System) that were later taken over by the city. Railroad stations
Demographics of New York City settled along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn creating a unified community consisting of about 75,000 people in this area, while the other Sephardic Jews live in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and in Staten Island. 19th-century Jewish immigrants settled mainly in the tenement houses of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. New York City's current Jewish population is dispersed among all the boroughs; Brooklyn's Jewish population in 2011 was estimated as 561,000, and Manhattan's was 240,000. The Orthodox community is rapidly growing due to higher birthrates among Orthodox (especially Hasidic) Jews, while the numbers of Conservative and Reform Jews are