New York (city)

B

1

Dutch Rule

Hudson discovered that the vast area between French Canada and British Virginia was unfortified and unclaimed and that the Native Americans who lived at the mouth of the Hudson River would happily trade furs for European goods. Excited by the commercial prospects of Manhattan Island, which was in the midst of a vast harbor that was ice-free year-round, Dutch merchants promptly dispatched other expeditions to the vicinity.

The Dutch East India Company established the first permanent European settlement in what is now New York City in 1624. Although most of the Dutch settlers established themselves in the northern Hudson Valley, near the future site of Albany, about eight or ten Protestants from Belgium, who had taken refuge with the Dutch to escape religious persecution, settled on Governors Island in New York harbor. In 1625 the tiny community moved to the southern tip of Manhattan Island. A year later, according to legend, Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan from the Canarsees for 60 guilders (approximately $24) in trinkets and goods.

The city of New Amsterdam, as it was soon called, operated as part of the colony administered by the Dutch West India Company. It was moderately successful and attracted settlers and merchants from a variety of nations. At least 18 different languages were being spoken in the city as early as 1650. Germans, Swiss, Moravians, French, English, and Portuguese joined the Dutch, and New Amsterdam quickly became a cosmopolitan center.

In 1647 Peter Stuyvesant became governor. Stuyvesant governed autocratically. The West India Company originally combined the administration of the city of New Amsterdam with that of the entire Dutch colony, which extended up the Hudson River into upstate New York. However, pressure from the city’s citizens led to the granting of a municipal government in 1653. Despite the change, Stuyvesant maintained tight control over the city and appointed all the important officials. During his rule, however, New Amsterdam saw many basic improvements in city life: cobblestone streets replaced dirt roads, the city introduced fire protection and police patrols, and the first hospital opened. The city built a protective wall where Wall Street now runs, and settlers began moving into outlying areas that eventually became part of New York City.

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B

2

English Rule

The Dutch period ended in 1664 when a European conflict between the Dutch and English spread to the American colonies. A fleet of four English warships and 500 professional soldiers arrived in the harbor on August 18. Stuyvesant wanted to fight and he prepared Fort Amsterdam for battle. But the citizens, resentful of Stuyvesant’s autocratic rule and faced with the powerful naval guns of the English, decided to surrender. The English renamed the community New York, in honor of the Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II of Britain. The city then gave its name to the entire colony.

Trade and commerce provided the chief basis of the city’s prosperity. Ships of New York City’s merchants plied the coastal waters of North America and carried merchandise to the West Indies and Europe. By the mid-18th century, trade between New York City and the neighboring colonies of Connecticut and New Jersey was extensive. The local economy received a boost during the long struggle for empire between Britain and France that began in the late 17th century. The British government bought provisions from local suppliers and licensed private ship owners to attack enemy vessels at sea. City merchants also engaged in a profitable illegal trade with non-British colonies in the Americas, despite British restrictions on such activities.

The city’s merchant elite played a dominant role in local government, even though large landholders, most crafts workers, and many laborers were eligible to vote. The mayors, appointed for annual terms by the governor with the advice of his council, almost invariably were affluent merchants. Merchants also held a disproportionately large number of seats on the elected city council.

During the colonial period, New Yorkers outside the traditional circles of power gained substantial influence over city government on two occasions. In 1689, taking advantage of the confusion surrounding the revolution that deposed English king James II, Jacob Leisler, a German-born merchant, seized control of the provincial government in defiance of the English governor. The new government authorized the election of the mayor by Protestant freemen; Peter Delanoy, their choice, thus became New York’s first elected mayor. British authorities regained control of the city in 1691, and they promptly executed Leisler and his chief assistant.

During the 18th century, aldermen identified with a “popular party” took control of the council during the municipal election of 1734. The new council was sympathetic to publisher John Peter Zenger. In 1735 Zenger had been acquitted of charges of libeling the royal governor in the New York Weekly Journal. The decision set a precedent for freedom of the press in the colonies.

C

American Revolution

Opposition to British policy became increasingly vocal by the mid-1760s. An economic depression followed the French and Indian War (1754-1763) and coincided with the British Parliament’s decision to tighten control over economic activities in the colonies. Parliament imposed a number of import taxes and fees in the colonies, threatening profits to which New York’s merchant gentry had become accustomed and encouraging the resistant mood of the urban populace. In New York City, as elsewhere in the colonies, a secret organization known as the Sons of Liberty sprang up to oppose these laws. New York’s City Hall was the site of the Stamp Act Congress, at which delegates from nine colonies protested British policy.

Though opinion was divided in New York City on the question of resisting imperial control, the patriotic element had the upper hand by May 1775, a month after the American Revolution (1775-1783) broke out. In April 1776, after colonial forces drove the British out of Boston, Massachusetts, General George Washington moved his headquarters to New York City and began building defenses. Between August and November the Continental Army formed by the rebelling colonists lost a series of engagements with the British, including the Battle of Long Island. Washington then retreated to Manhattan Island, fighting delaying actions at Harlem Heights near the present-day campus of Columbia University.

In November troops under British command stormed Fort Washington and Fort Tryon in upper Manhattan and killed or captured more than 2,000 American soldiers. As General Washington retreated dejectedly across New Jersey, the British took full control of New York City. The city remained the center for British army operations in North America for the remainder of the American Revolution.

Almost immediately after the British occupation a disastrous fire raged through the city and destroyed much of its older section. In 1778 a second fire burned down more of the city. During the remainder of the war, thousands of Americans loyal to Britain took refuge in New York City until the last British troops left the city in 1783 when the war ended.

D

Growth of the City

New York City was the capital of the United States from 1785 to 1790 and capital of the State of New York until 1797. It was host to the First Congress of the United States in 1789. In April of that year, on the steps of Federal Hall, George Washington was sworn in as president of the United States.

During its early years, New York was not the most important city in British America. It was outdistanced in population between 1630 and 1750 by Boston and between 1690 and 1810 by Philadelphia. Following the American Revolution, however, New York swept past its rivals in size and economic importance. By 1789 it was the leading city in the coastal trade. It exceeded Philadelphia in total tonnage in 1794, in the value of imports in 1796, and in exports in 1797. By 1830 New York City surpassed Mexico City to become the largest metropolis in the Americas.

The city grew for several reasons. The open, cosmopolitan attitude of New Yorkers, dating back to the early days of Dutch settlement, placed less importance on family connections and class, while encouraging the kind of risk-taking and innovation that led to rapid commercial growth. The city’s economy received a major boost following the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain. The British chose New York as the site to auction off large quantities of goods that had accumulated on British docks during the war. The city also benefited from an excellent port centrally located between the heavily populated regions of New England and Chesapeake Bay. It possessed an easily navigable inland water route via the Hudson River. After 1825 the Erie Canal connected the Hudson with the Great Lakes, providing easy access to Midwestern markets and increasing the city’s importance as a center of commerce.

The city’s major advantages reinforced each other, and by the early part of the 19th century New York was the pre-eminent port of entry for immigrants to the United States. Europeans arrived in such numbers during the 1840s and 1850s that by 1860 nearly half of the city’s residents were foreign-born. The Irish (see Irish Americans) were the most numerous, followed by the Germans (see German Americans).

These immigrants helped support a growing political organization known as the Tammany Society (better known as Tammany Hall, after the name of the building in which its members met). Originally founded in 1789 as a social and charitable club, Tammany Hall soon acquired a new, political character. It gained control of the city’s Democratic Party as the champion of the working class and later of the immigrant. The society had a number of vote-getting techniques. It illegally granted citizenship to immigrants, gave city jobs to its followers, and provided services to the newcomers and the poor. Tammany was also accused of election fraud, bribery, and extortion.

These methods of getting votes were used most intensively in the 1860s when “Boss” William M. Tweed was the Tammany leader. In 1871 it became known that Tweed and his associates had misappropriated massive amounts of public funds. Tammany’s influence was reduced, but only temporarily. Tammany revived during the 1880s, and it controlled the city into the early 20th century, although, on occasion, reform candidates, working with Republican voters, gained control of the city government.

By 1860 New York City and the adjacent community of Brooklyn had 1 million residents. The area was the unchallenged center of American enterprise. New York City ranked first in the nation in population, industrial production, bank deposits, and wholesale trade. But unlike London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Vienna, and other world cities that had grown to substantial size, New York was not the capital of a nation, a region, or even a single state.

Throughout the first three centuries of the city’s history, the cornerstone of its growth was commerce and the backbone of its economy remained at the bustling wharves along the water’s edge. For more than a century the port of New York ranked as the world’s busiest. Between 1830 and 1906 the harbor annually handled between 37 percent and 71 percent, by value, of the nation’s foreign trade.

E

The Transformation of the Metropolis

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of major changes in technology and infrastructure transformed the city. Gas illumination was available by 1825 and electric lighting by the 1880s. The Croton Aqueduct, completed in 1842, provided the city with the best and largest municipal water supply on earth. The Brooklyn Bridge, a major feat of engineering that connected Manhattan with Brooklyn across the East River, was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed in 1883.

Urban mass transit also improved with the introduction of horse-drawn streetcars by the 1850s, elevated trains by the 1870s, electric trolleys by the 1890s, and the first subway in 1904. These changes helped relieve the residential congestion of the lower and central city. The demand for space was eased when the modern apartment building was introduced in about 1870. Within a few decades, New Yorkers were building skyscrapers, high rise buildings constructed with new engineering techniques. In 1902 New York’s first skyscraper, the 21-story Flatiron Building, was erected around a steel framework that supported the structural load of the building. This new engineering technique allowed architects to design taller buildings that made more efficient use of limited urban space. Within a few decades this new type of building would dramatically change the skyline of the city.

An increase in cultural and recreational facilities also added greatly to New York’s appeal. Central Park was opened in 1859. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was organized in 1870. The collections of several libraries combined to form the New York Public Library in 1895. By the late 1860s, 20 theaters offered a broad choice of entertainment nightly. Opera, available as early as 1825, was performed more frequently after the opening of the Academy of Music in 1854 and the old Metropolitan Opera House in 1883.

As the city grew, many of the adjacent communities became more closely integrated into an expanding urban area. Public sentiment grew for a merger of the surrounding cities and towns into a single city. In 1898, following the passage of a referendum, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx were incorporated into the city. By 1900 the population of the recently expanded city was 3,437,202.

The years between the consolidation of the five boroughs in 1898 and the end of World War II represented a kind of golden age for New York. The city contained the largest concentrations of architects, bankers lawyers, engineers, designers, and corporate officials on the continent. By the beginning of the 20th century, Wall Street had become a national institution and investment bankers like J. P. Morgan and August Belmont had become legendary figures. As national corporations took shape, wealthy entrepreneurs such as oil company executive John D. Rockefeller, steel manufacturer Andrew Carnegie, and retailer F. W. Woolworth, who had started their empires elsewhere, moved their business offices to New York City.

The poor, of course, came in much greater numbers, and overcrowding, a problem ever since the original Dutch settlers huddled together below Wall Street for protection against Native Americans, reached frightening proportions between 1870 and 1920. For the middle class, the preferred dwelling type was the single-family brownstone, a large row house with a front facade faced in the plentiful local stone that gave the structure its name. But the poor immigrants of the Lower East Side and elsewhere in the city were packed into tenements that offered little light and minimal sanitation.

Because the center of the city was so congested, the New York metropolitan region began to decentralize as early as the 1870s. By 1920 tens of thousands of families were moving out of the city every year. This outward movement proceeded more quickly in New York than in most other world cities because the city rapidly adopted every new development in transportation technology. A system of bridges and underground tunnels facilitated travel between the city and outlying areas. A wonder of modern engineering, the Brooklyn Bridge was later eclipsed, at least in terms of size, by the Triborough Bridge (later renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge), which linked Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx in 1936; by the George Washington Bridge, which became the world’s largest suspension structure when it opened in 1931; and by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which assumed that title in 1964. All pointed out an important difference between New York and other world cities-the waterways around Manhattan were broad and the structures that spanned them were huge, unlike the human-scale bridges of Paris, London, Rome, and Berlin.

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