Which city was the first capital of the United States?

New York, where Washington was inaugurated on the balcony of Federal Hall in 1789 - though the honest answer is that the capital moved repeatedly and depends on when you start counting. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Lancaster, York, Princeton, Annapolis and Trenton all housed the Continental Congress at various points, several of them because the government was fleeing something.

New York held it for about sixteen months, then Philadelphia for ten years while Washington DC was built. The permanent location was decided by the Compromise of 1790, negotiated over dinner between Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton: the federal government would assume the states' war debts, which the north wanted, and the capital would go south on the Potomac.

Federal Hall is not the building it happened in. The original was demolished in 1812 and the current structure is a later customs house on the same site, which is a fair description of a lot of American historical tourism. Washington DC also spent its first century as a swampy, half-built embarrassment - Dickens described it in 1842 as a city of magnificent intentions, with spacious avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere.