out of all of the cities in the U.S., how did New York City alone
become a first-order central place?

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 19 Nov 2004 06:27 PST

New York was identified as the only first-order central place in the
US in the book:


Stutz, FP and AR de Souza. 1998. The World Economy: Resources,
Location, Trade and Development. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Find that book, and you've found your answer!

pafalafa-ga

Googling "First-order central place" "New York" brings up no results. 
What does this classification mean and who has determined it?  I'm in
NYC and have not heard of it.  I've been looking at census data lately
and have not seen this terminology.

Students of human geography may be familiar with the German geographer
Walter Christalle, who in 1933 published his Central Place theory
(CPT). This theory basically involved the theoretical distribution of
settlements given ideal conditions. He noticed that towns of a certain
size were roughly equidistant, and around these towns were smaller
towns. He proposed a model based on an isotropic1 plane and a
universal transport network2, assuming that the smaller towns would
form hexagons3 around the larger ones. These small towns would in turn
have smaller villages in hexagons around them, and so on.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A228700