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Meet New Yorkers balancing life beside the U.N. [1]

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Date: 2024-09-24 04:03:00+00:00

Each September, New Yorkers who live and work on Manhattan’s East Side brace for the United Nations General Assembly. The meetings that bring an influx of foreign dignitaries also mean delayed buses, traffic jams and security checkpoints, especially during high-level week.

While city residents may have to walk to avoid lengthy traffic delays, some appreciate that the visitors who add traffic to an already busy neighborhood are working to solve global challenges.

“When you bring in world leaders from around the globe and in such a concentration, it can’t help but affect the everyday rhythm of life here,” says Rob Byrnes, president of the East Midtown Partnership. “But we understand it’s important.”

The United Nations has been a fixture of midtown since officials broke ground at the U.N. headquarters site September 14, 1948. Fifty countries founded the U.N. in the aftermath of World War II to maintain global peace and security and improve international cooperation.

U.N. Acting Secretary-General Benjamin A. Cohen saw New York, with its large immigrant population, as an exemplary place for the U.N.’s headquarters because New York attracts “people coming from all over to live in peace and harmony,” the New York Times reported at that time.

Thomas Pickering, who served as the U.S. representative to the U.N. in the early 1990s, said the inconvenience the U.N. meetings bring to New York is well worth it. “Actions by the U.N. still count,” Pickering says. Its general assembly sessions can mold the opinions of world leaders, create legitimacy for the use of force and advance cooperation on protecting human rights, he says.

But what do New Yorkers have to say about it? Read our digital story, The Good Beyond the Gridlock to find out.

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[1] Url: https://share.america.gov/meet-new-yorkers-balancing-life-beside-un/

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