Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [74]
New York from Brooklyn Heights, 1679. Drawn by the Labadist missionary Jaspar Danckaerts, its most conspicuous features are the recently completed Great Dock or mole and the new stone pier. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
Andros gave particular attention to improving the waterfront. In 1675 residents along the Heere Gracht were ordered to fill in the old Dutch canal level with the street and “then to pave & pitch the Same before there dores with stones.” The foul inlet, reincarnated as what is now Broad Street, was destined to be the city’s principal commercial street well into the next century. Near where the bridge had crossed the canal, Andros erected a new mercantile exchange and covered market, the city’s first. At the foot of Broad Street he built a new stone pier into the East River. On either side of the pier he constructed a massive stone and timber mole, or breakwater, that arced out in two great semicircles from the foot of Whitehall Street and City Hall. Known as the Great Dock, it provided secure anchorage for cargo ships plying the West Indian trade.
And Andros didn’t stop with the waterfront. Because the supply of water for fighting fires had been reduced by filling in the canal, he ordered the digging of six new wells (the brackish water brought up by buckets proved unfit for drinking, however). He moved malodorous tanneries and slaughterhouses to locations outside the city gates. He fixed up Fort James, ransacked by departing Dutch troops, and designated “the Plaine afore the Forte”—now Bowling Green—as the site of an annual fair for the display and sale of “all graine, Cattle, or other produce of the Country.” He made much-needed repairs to the city wall and ensured that its gates were closed every night by nine o’clock. When the city’s twenty-three coopers banded together to fix a uniform rate for casks and barrels, Andros had them prosecuted and fined for violating the law against illegal combinations. Those employed by the city were fired.
When Long Island farmers and stockmen raised the familiar complaint that they had been enslaved to the mercantile interests of the city, Andros likewise told them to pay up or leave the province. He also advised York that it might be a good idea to set up some kind of representative assembly so they could tax themselves. And when New England governments responded sympathetically to appeals for help from the English towns on the eastern end of Long Island, as they had done so often before, Andros warned them off so convincingly that New York’s jurisdiction over the entire island would never again be called into question.
It was under Andros, too, that municipal authorities forged stronger ties with local cartmen, whose one-horse wagons were the principal means of transporting commodities into and around town. In 1667 the cartmen had formed a “fellowship” or guild and contracted with the city to work at fixed rates. In return for this privilege, the magistrates required them to perform “public work as desired”—picking up rubbish from the streets, fighting fires, maintaining roads, repairing the fort, and transporting felons to the gallows. Slaves and free blacks were later prohibited from operating carts in town—a measure that gave the cartmen relief from a troublesome source of competition but also further reduced their independence and hastened their transformation into semiofficial municipal employees.
THE COVENANT CHAIN
Andros had been in New York less than a year when the Algonkian-speaking peoples of English America rose up in a last, desperate attempt to stem the advance of white settlement. Perhaps the greatest Indian war in American history, it produced political and social revolution in the Chesapeake colonies and such devastation in New England (where it was known