Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [51]
They were highly sociable, too. The director, the council, the burgomasters, and the orphanmasters frequently held meetings in taverns. Many commercial bargains were struck in the taprooms where merchants gathered to exchange and discuss news. Jollier still were the drinking clubs whose members gathered at favorite taverns to eat and drink. Arguably the best-known establishment was the Stadts Herbergh or City Tavern on the East River. Its ground-floor taproom was always thronged with merchants, sea captains, and Indian traders, and it was one of three places in town designated for the posting of official notices. Metje Wessels’s tavern over on Pearl Street was noted for its terrapin feasts. On the Sabbath, after the sermon, many families dined at an inn, and some publicans provided bowling greens, where customers could play ninepins at all times except during divine service. The more vigorous enjoyed ice-skating, boat racing, and angling parties, especially up at an island in the middle of the Kalch-hook pond where the Lenapes once fished.
COMMON FOLK
Below the mercantile elite of New Amsterdam’s new social hierarchy were the white working people of modest means, not exclusively Dutch, who provided the growing community with its basic goods and services. The backbone of this middling class consisted of a hundred or so skilled craftsmen and their families, plus a few dozen innkeepers, boardinghouse owners, surgeons, and notaries.
Only a few artisans still worked for the West India Company. Back in 1644, surveying the havoc wrought by Kieft’s War, the company’s Board of Accounts had recommended slashing the number of its salaried “officers and servants” throughout New Netherland. “Carpenters, masons, smiths and such like ought to be discharged,” the board added, “and left to work for whomsoever will pay them.” The directors evidently concurred, for over the next ten or twenty years company employees became a distinct and shrinking minority of the colony’s population. In New Amsterdam, counting everyone from Stuyvesant down to the poorest laborer, only seventy-five of the town’s adult white males, roughly one in four, remained in the company’s service after 1660.
Many former employees stayed on and put down roots in New Amsterdam. Abraham Willemsen, for example, had been a seaman in the company’s service who married a local girl in 1647, petitioned the court to release him from his obligations to the company, and settled in town as a carpenter. (It’s more than likely that he’d been moonlighting as a carpenter for some time already. As Stuyvesant explained to his superiors in 1659, a common soldier employed by the company, “except on extraordinary expeditions, has only to go on guard duty in his garrison every third day” and the rest of the time endeavored “to earn elsewhere something to supplement his small pay and board-money”—no better, in most cases, than thirty guilders per month.)
By the early 1660s old-timers like Willemsen had been joined by a new generation of immigrant artisans representing a wide variety of trades. Coopers made the barrels, hogsheads, pipes, and kegs in which merchants exported flour, salted meats, fish, and beer. The town’s bakers (ten of them now) made bread, special cakes for festivals and weddings, and the hard biscuits that formed a large part of the diet of sailors at sea. Evert Duyckinck, the glazier and fire-bucket artist, installed leaded glass, painted with family coats of arms, in the windows of the church at two and a half beaver skins a pane. There were brewers like Isaac and Joannes