<P> On June 15, 1904, over 1,000 people, mostly German immigrant women and children, were killed when the excursion steamship General Slocum caught fire and sank . It is the city's worst maritime disaster . On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village took the lives of 146 garment workers . In response, the city made great advancements in the fire department, building codes, and workplace regulations . </P> <P> Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the city became a world center for industry, commerce, and communication, marking its rising influence with such events as the Hudson - Fulton Celebration of 1909 . Interborough Rapid Transit (the first New York City Subway company) began operating in 1904, and the railroads operating out of Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station thrived . </P> <P> The city was a destination for internal migrants as well as immigrants . Through 1940, New York City was a major destination for African Americans during the Great Migration from the rural American South . The Harlem Renaissance flourished during the 1920s and the era of Prohibition . New York City's ever accelerating changes and rising crime and poverty rates were reduced after World War I disrupted trade routes, the Immigration Restriction Acts limited additional immigration after the war, and the Great Depression reduced the need for new labor . The combination ended the rule of the Gilded Age barons . As the city's demographics temporarily stabilized, labor unionization helped the working class gain new protections and middle - class affluence, the city's government and infrastructure underwent a dramatic overhaul under Fiorello La Guardia, and his controversial parks commissioner, Robert Moses, ended the blight of many tenement areas, expanded new parks, remade streets, and restricted and reorganized zoning controls . </P> <P> For a while, New York City ranked as the most populous city in the world, overtaking London in 1925, which had reigned for a century . During the difficult years of the Great Depression, the reformer Fiorello La Guardia was elected as mayor, and Tammany Hall fell after eighty years of political dominance . </P>

Why was new york city chosen as the first capital of the united states