Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [49]
“PERSONS OF QUALITY”
Travelers disembarking at the new East River pier in these years would have found themselves near the heart of a bustling, cosmopolitan little seaport. Directly in front of them, facing the river, lay the Strand, a two-block stretch of Paerle Straet (Pearl Street) crowded with taverns, workshops, warehouses, cottages, and brick residences built in the Dutch manner, one or two stories tall, gable-ends out. Just upriver, one block to the right, was the entrance to the Heere Gracht, now lined with houses almost up to what is now Exchange Place. A block to the left stood Stuyvesant’s new Great House, a “costly and handsome” two-story residence of whitewashed stone—later known as the White Hall (whence the present Whitehall Street)—which boasted extensive gardens and a private dock for the director-general’s barge of state. From there it was a short walk across the Marktvelt, past Brugh (Bridge), Brouwers (Brewers, now Stone), and Marktvelt (Marketfield) streets—all densely built up—to the parade-ground (now the site of Bowling Green) at the front gate of Fort Amsterdam. The Heere Wegh (Broadway), which led north from the parade-ground, past the company’s garden, was only beginning to attract construction, though. Indeed most of the area beyond the upper end of the Heere Gracht was still occupied by orchards, gardens, and grazing cows.
Although the physical transformation of New Amsterdam was remarkable enough, the really striking change, less apparent to the casual observer, was the appearance of an embryonic class system where once there had been only employees of the West India Company. At the top of this new social order stood a few dozen wealthy, socially established, and politically well-connected private merchants from Holland. They were a new phenomenon in town, so much so that in 1656 an embarrassed schout had to ask where he should jail “persons of quality, or of good name and character,” who broke the law. (He was told they could be held in a tavern, if they had the money to pay for their lodgings.)
Some of these “persons of quality” were representatives of the handful of Dutch commercial syndicates that dominated the colony’s trade after the West India Company abandoned its monopoly in 1639. Their business consisted for the most part of exchanging a few basic items of local origin (furs, skins, tobacco, timber) for imported essential trade goods (duffel cloth, liquor, gunpowder). Johannes Pietersen Verbrugge and his cousin Johannes Gillissen Verbrugge came over for the firm of Gillis Verbrugge and Company; Allard Anthony, a prosperous Amsterdam merchant, served as New Amsterdam agent for the firm of Pieter Gabry and Sons. Other important newcomers—Abel de Wolff, Cornelis Steenwyck, Jan Baptiste van Rensselaer, and William Beekman—enjoyed close family and professional ties with leading West India Company stockholders, private merchants, government officials, and military men. Cornelis van Werckhoven had served as governor of the Amsterdam poorhouse and was an officer in that city’s burgher guard. Arent van Hattem was a nobleman and former alderman of the city of Culemborg.
Women like Annetje Jans played a major part in the accumulation of wealth by this nascent upper class. Jans was one of two daughters of Tryn Jonas, the West India Company’s midwife. Around 1630 Annetje married Roeloff Jansen, an Indian trader and agricultural foreman up at Fort Orange. Thanks largely to her business acumen, the couple prospered, and later they moved down to Manhattan, where they occupied a sixty-acre farm along the North River shore near the foot of what is now Jay Street. Roeloff’s sudden death in 1636 left Annetje with several children to raise on her own but with an attractive estate. Two years later, after getting him to sign a prenuptial agreement that protected the interests of her children by Jansen, she married Dominie Bogardus, moved into his new house near the fort, and