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Yosemite Apartments, 1080

Young Americans, 685-87, 692, 701, 703, 708, 710

Young Ireland, 686, 752, 762, 870

Young Italy, 686

Young Men’s Central Republican Union of New York city, 864

Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 777-78, 783, 881, 1014, 1015, 1016, 1023, 1165

Young Men’s Hebrew Association, 1115

Young Men’s Missionary Society of New-York, 496

Young Men’s Tract Society, 497

Young Woman’s Home, 992

Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 1165

Youth culture, 753-54

Zion Chapel, 398, 400

Zion Home for Colored Aged, 973

“Zip Coon,” 489, 490, 557, 758

*The term has gone in and out of popular favor, having great currency in one decade, falling into desuetude the next. It owes its most recent revival to the 1989 movie Batman and its sequels, themselves a reincarnation of the late 1930s comic books. When New Yorkers Bob Kane and Bill Finger first created the caped crusader, they were going to call Batman’s hometown “Civic City.” That seemed a bit dull, however, and Finger “tried Capital City, then Coast City. Then, I flipped through the phone book and spotted the name Gotham Jewelers and said, ‘That’s it,’ Gotham City. We didn’t call it New York because we wanted anybody in any city to identify with it. Of course, Gotham is another name for New York.” Actually, as a later Batman editor perspicaciously noted, Gotham is New York’s noirish side—“Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at 3 A.M., November 28 in a cold year”—whereas Superman’s Metropolis presents New York’s cheerier face, “Manhattan between Fourteenth and One Hundred and Tenth Streets on the brightest, sunniest July day of the year.”

1. More than 150 years later, the Lenapes gave a Pennsylvania missionary their version of what happened when the first white men landed on Manhattan: they sighted a “large canoe or house” moving across the water and decided that it belonged to the Supreme Being, “the great Manitto,” who then appeared before them dressed entirely in red. After a preliminary exchange of courtesies, he offered them a toast and they all got happily drunk—whence the site came to be known as Mannahattanink, “the island or place of general intoxication.” If authentic, this almost certainly alludes to events that occurred before Hudson arrived. Hudson and his mate, who kept a fairly full record of their activities, made no mention of landing on Manhattan. It doesn’t appear, either, that the Lenapes he encountered were especially surprised to see him.

2. The Tyger burned and sank on the Hudson shore of Manhattan near what would now be (thanks to subsequent landfill) the intersection of Greenwich and Dey streets, due east of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. In 1916 workmen excavating the site for the IRT subway uncovered the ship’s prow and keel. Portions were sawed off and are now preserved by the Museum of the City of New York; the rest is still there, twenty feet below street level.

3. The charter divided the company into five provincial chambers, one of which was in Amsterdam proper (and cost a hefty six thousand guilders to join). A nineteen-member central committee, consisting of delegates from the provincial chambers and the States-General, supervised the company’s business, but day-to-day matters were delegated to particular provincial chambers. The administration of New Netherland and Curacao, for example, always belonged to the Amsterdam Chamber. Similarly, the colony’s spiritual affairs were entrusted to the Classis of Amsterdam, an association of churches that had the exclusive right to examine and license dominies, or ministers.

4. Jasper Danckaerts later remarked that native American peoples knew nothing of theft or greed prior to the European invasion “because zeewant, which they all treasure and now serves as their money, didn’t exist previously but was only their decoration as beads are for children.” According to the Hiawatha legend, wampum was invented by the Iroquois.

1. In 1649 white residents criticized the company for enslaving