Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [52]
These middling people of New Amsterdam tended to live in houses like the one built for schoolmaster Roelantsen. Made entirely of wood, it was thirty feet long, eighteen feet wide, and eight feet high, with a small garret above the beams. The single chamber served as a combination dining room, living room, and bedroom, with a built-in corner bedstead for the husband and wife (children slept on straw pallets in the garret). It was illuminated by transom windows by day, homemade candles at night. In the rear was the fireplace, where Mevrouw Roelantsen kept her iron pots and pans, and a door to the back garden, where she grew Indian corn. In quarters like these, furniture was crude, books few, and paintings absent. With the arrival of housewives skilled in domestic arts, however, came an increase in the apparatus of domestic production—vessels and implements for making butter, cheese, candles and soap, for spinning and dyeing yarn, and for cutting and stitching imported duffle cloth into articles of clothing. These shirts and shifts, along with household linen, were washed and dried by the housewife or her young daughter, down by the grassy banks of a pebbly brook that ran from Nassau Street to the East River, along what is today Maiden Lane.
The remainder of New Amsterdam’s free white inhabitants comprised a diverse, shifting lower class of laborers, cartmen, transient sailors, apprentices, soldiers, minor West India Company functionaries, farmhands, and indentured servants (too many of the latter, Stuyvesant complained, were runaways)—the same kind of people who until recently had made up the bulk of the colony’s population.
Popular culture in New Amsterdam centered on the town’s always numerous taverns, grogshops, and pothouses, where noisy, pipe-smoking crowds of men and women drank, gambled, and played games like backgammon, handball, and bowling. (Women were particularly fond of a pipe, Nicasius de Sille observed in 1654. “Young and old, they all smoke.”) The Wooden Horse, a particular favorite of sailors and soldiers, was located in a thatched cottage on the corner of Whitehall and Stone streets. In its small single room, boasting only one window and reeking of smoke and stale beer, men sat at long wooden tables, dimly lit by flickering candles, drinking West Indian rum, French brandy, and local brews. The owner was a Frenchman named Philip Gerard, who had once been sentenced to ride the wooden horse in his days as a soldier for the West India Company.
Places like the Wooden Horse tended to treat the nine o’clock closing law casually, and their patrons often disturbed the peace with drunken brawls, sometimes involving knives, cutlasses, and pikes. Jan Peeck, a cantankerous old Indian trader, lost his license for entertaining “disorderly people” in his taproom near Smits Vly on the East River shore. (His equally troublesome wife would be banished from New Amsterdam ten years later for selling liquor to the Indians.)
The upsurge of immigration to New Netherland during the mid-1650s and early 1660s was accompanied by an exuberant revival of holidays long associated with popular culture in Europe. For centuries, peasants and craftsmen, soldiers and sailors had periodically thrown restraint to the winds and indulged themselves with feasts, games, mock courts, races, processions, and wild merrymaking that inverted the everyday order of society. A King of Misrule presided over Twelfth Night festivities, maidens chased young men about the streets on St. Valentine’s Day, servants frolicked in the market on Pinkster (Whitsunday or Pentecost to the English), and whole villages cavorted about maypoles on May Day. In the Netherlands, the Shrove Tuesday festivities, marking the end of Carnival and the beginning of Lent, involved Rabelaisian consumption of meat and