Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [43]
Petrus Stuyvesant, painted in New Amsterdam by Hendrick Couturier, c.1660. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Certain that this was the work for which the Lord had spared his life on St. Martin, the new director waded in with the same combination of ruthlessness and piety with which the English Puritans were just then consolidating their power under Oliver Cromwell. “I shall govern you as a father his children,” he informed the townsfolk.
TOWN BUILDING
Uppermost in Stuyvesant’s mind was the need to turn New Amsterdam into the kind of community that would appeal to the Dutch taste for well-regulated urban life. For the Netherlands (unlike, say, England) was a nation of town dwellers, known for their civic consciousness and for the love of public tidiness that had led them to adopt the broom as a symbol of national identity and purpose. No sooner had he arrived, therefore, than Stuyvesant began to sweep New Amsterdam into shape with a succession of edicts, decrees, and orders. They would continue to stream from his pen for the next seventeen years—joined, after 1653, by a torrent of ordinances from the burgomasters he appointed to New Amsterdam’s first municipal government.
One of his earliest targets was the town’s confounding jumble of lanes and footpaths. Stuyvesant named three surveyors to establish reliable property lines and lay out regular streets, some of which even received names. He ordered the removal of building materials and other obstructions from the streets and imposed a speed limit on wagons and carts. In 1658 the residents of Brouwer (Brewer) Street received permission to pave their lane with cobblestones, creating New Amsterdam’s first properly surfaced roadway, now Stone Street.
In 1648 Stuyvesant declared war on New Amsterdam’s pigs, cows, goats, and horses. Residents had been accustomed to letting their animals forage freely through the town; while this helped remove accumulations of garbage it also damaged gardens and orchards, and rooting swine had pretty well ruined the fort’s sodded ramparts. Henceforth, Stuyvesant announced, the schout would seize wayward animals and drag them to a public pound, and soldiers were authorized to shoot on sight any hog grunting its way toward the fort. What was more, residents were forbidden to throw “rubbish, filth, ashes, oyster-shells, dead animal or anything like it” into the streets. Householders were required to clean the road in front of their dwellings. Any privy that released excrement at ground level was banned, for it “not only creates a great stench and therefore great inconvenience to the passers-by, but also makes the streets foul and unfit for use.” Butchers were warned not to discard offal in the streets. In 1657 an ordinance established five official sites for the dumping of garbage.
To guard against the danger of fire—“most of the houses here in New Amsterdam are built of wood and roofed with reeds,” Stuyvesant explained, and “in some houses the chimneys are of wood, which is very dangerous”—he prohibited further construction of wooden chimneys; later, thatched roofs and haystacks were banned as well. Four fire wardens were appointed to see that all chimneys in town were regularly swept. The wardens banned the use of fireplaces on dangerously windy days. After 1647 a fire curfew required that each evening all fires must be put out or covered up. A decade later the burgomasters began to assemble a municipal firefighting apparatus. Two cordwainers (shoemakers) were hired to produce 150 leather fire buckets, copied from a Dutch sample, and after being painted with the city seal by glazier Evert Duyckinck—the town’s first artist—they were placed at various street corners. The following year the town got ladders and fire hooks. As conditions improved and a sense of permanence began to take hold, Dutch brick “alia moderna”—some imported as ship’s ballast, some turned out