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The Mid-Atlantic
The dense middle of the eastern seaboard, New York to Washington
The Mid-Atlantic is the densely populated middle stretch of the eastern seaboard, broadly New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and often Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. as well. It was the most diverse and commercial of the original colonies - Dutch, English, German, and Quaker - and its great harbors and rivers made it the country's early gateway for trade and immigration, a role New York Harbor and Ellis Island still symbolize.
Today it forms the core of the Boston-to-Washington megalopolis, with New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington strung along a near-continuous urban corridor. Behind the coast lie the rolling Piedmont, the Appalachian ridges, and the great estuaries of the Hudson, Delaware, and Chesapeake. It concentrates finance, media, pharmaceuticals, and the federal government in a relatively small area.