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We strongly endorse the idea of New Yorkers’ turning to the past for perspective on their present—comparing different eras can bring balance to contemporary judgments—but Gotham is not about ransacking the past for evidence of Spenglerian decline or Panglossian progress. Straight-line scenarios, whether optimistic or pessimistic, usually pose false questions and offer false alternatives. Our hope, rather, is that a history that respects the complexity and contingency of human affairs can offer well-grounded insights into our current situation.

We believe that the world we’ve inherited has an immense momentum; that actions taken in the past have bequeathed us the mix of constraints and possibilities within which we act today; that the stage onto which each generation walks has already been set, key characters introduced, major plots set in motion, and that while the next act has not been written, it’s likely to follow on, in undetermined ways, from the previous action. This is not to say that history repeats itself. Time is not a carousel on which we might, next time round, snatch the brass ring by being better prepared. Rather we see the past as flowing powerfully through the present and think that charting historical currents can enhance our ability to navigate them.

We are historians, not mythmakers, but like Washington Irving we appreciate the power of the past and its centrality to the life of a place, and our choice of title represents a tip of the hat to his endeavor. Our Gotham is not Irving’s, but like Diedrich Knickerbocker we think that the more we know about the city’s past the more we will care about its future. We therefore dedicate this book to the citizens of New York City and to the many historians who have labored to tell its story.

Now, on with the show.

PART ONE

LENAPE COUNTRY AND NEW AMSTERDAM TO 1664

The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam, c. 1660. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

1

First Impressions

O this is Eden!” exulted the Dutch poet Jacob Steendam. A “terrestrial Canaan” echoed the English essayist Daniel Denton, “where the Land floweth with milk and honey.”

That was the usual reaction of the Europeans who began to settle the lower Hudson Valley and the islands of New York’s harbor, three and a half centuries ago. Nowhere else in North America would the beauty and abundance of the physical environment evoke such consistently extravagant praise.

Initially it was what Denton called the “sweetness of the Air” that bewitched explorers and travelers. “Dry, sweet, and healthy,” Adriaen van der Donck wrote. “Sweet and fresh,” the missionary Jaspar Danckaerts noted in his journal as his ship came up past Sandy Hook. “Much like that of the best parts of France,” declared the Rev. John Miller. What could produce such air, or where it came from, was the subject of extensive speculation. Miller traced it to the surrounding “hilly, woody Country, full of Lakes and great Vallies, which receptacles are the Nurseries, Forges and Bellows of the Air, which they first suck in and contract, then discharge and ventilate with a fiercer dilation.” Denton, too, emphasized the region’s sweeping woods and fields, “curiously bedecked with Roses, and an innumerable multitude of delightful Flowers” whose fragrance could be detected far out at sea. The effect was magical, and there was speculation that it might cure colds, consumption, and other respiratory ailments.

But it was the miraculous size and quantity and variety of things—the sheer prodigality of life—that left the most lasting impression. Travelers spoke of vast meadows of grass “as high as a mans middle” and forests with towering stands of walnut, cedar, chestnut, maple, and oak. Orchards bore apples of incomparable sweetness and “pears larger than a fist.” Every spring the hills and fields were dyed red with ripening strawberries,