Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [70]
Besides continuing the horse races on Hempstead Plain, Lovelace strengthened the proprietary’s ties with influential Dutch New Yorkers by organizing one of the town’s earliest social clubs. Once or twice a week its sixteen members—ten Dutch, six English—-gathered at one another’s houses to discuss matters of common concern and drink punch from silver tankards. “I find some of these people have the breeding of courts,” Lovelace later told the king. He didn’t mention that he’d become involved in extensive private dealings with a number of the very same people, including Cornelis Steenwyck. Nor did he reveal that, at his own expense, he’d built a tavern right next to the old Stadhuis, now called City Hall, and equipped it with a connecting door that opened directly into the chambers of the municipal court, a convenience for which it may be supposed the magistrates were often grateful.
By the early 1670s, thanks in no small measure to the attentions of Nicolls and Lovelace, New York’s economy was showing signs of life again, and people with names like Van Rensselaer, Schuyler, Van Cortlandt, and Beekman were both richer and more securely in control of the town than ever. Former mayor Steenwyck, reportedly Manhattan’s wealthiest resident, had just built an opulent house on the corner of Bridge and Whitehall streets that would become famous for its Russia-leather chairs, French cabinets, oils by old Antwerp masters, statuary, and other luxuries.
The rewards of collaboration with the English shone even more brilliantly, perhaps, in the career of Margaret Hardenbroeck. She had first come to New York in 1659 as the agent for an Amsterdam merchant and soon after her arrival married a local trader named Rudolphus de Vries. De Vries dealt in such diverse commodities as lumber, bricks, sugar, furniture, tobacco, and wine. He also owned quite a bit of land and was one of a group of investors who in 1660 established the village of Bergen, just across the Hudson from New Amsterdam. After his death in 1661, Hardenbroeck inherited his various interests and went into business for herself, becoming one of New Amsterdam’s richest citizens, known throughout the province for her “miserable covetousness” and “terrible parsimony.”
In 1662 Hardenbroeck married a former West India Company carpenter, now turned trader, named Frederick Vlypse (also spelled Flipsen or Flypsen), with whom she formed a highly profitable partnership. They were among the merchants who pressured Stuyvesant not to oppose the English invasion, and in its aftermath they became intimates of Nicolls and Lovelace, a connection that earned them valuable privileges and exemptions from English trade regulations. In time they owned all or part of fifteen vessels that ranged from Albany to Europe to Virginia to the West Indies with cargoes of furs, lumber, tobacco, hides, and wine. One of Hardenbroeck’s ships was the King Charles, and another, partly owned by Governor Lovelace and Cornelis Steenwyck, was the Duke of York—a choice of names that suggests the lengths she would go to flatter authority.
Ten years after the conquest, Hardenbroeck and Vlypse had amassed an empire that included, besides ships and goods, extensive real estate holdings throughout the lower Hudson Valley and a plantation in Barbados; Vlypse himself was a moneylender, wampum manufacturer, land speculator, and mill owner as well. It was around this time, too, that he changed his name to the more English-sounding Philipse.
DISSIDENTS
Steenwyck, Philipse, Hardenbroeck, and others of their ilk thought the transition from Dutch to English government was going well. Others didn’t, the duke of York among them. He worried that trade with England failed to develop as rapidly as his bookkeepers would have liked. No more than a few English merchantmen were ever