New Amsterdam – Downtown Magazine

This feature originally appeared in Summer 2011 issue of Downtown Magazine.

In the early 1600s, with the opening up of the New World, the international chess game for goods and settlements got underway with a fervor that galvanized both Europe and the Americas.

The Spanish were establishing themselves in South and Central America, the French had a small settlement in Quebec, the English were in Virginia and Massachusetts and the Dutch had carved out a vast empire of mostly trackless forest extending from Delaware to Connecticut and up the Hudson (then called the Noort Rivier, or North River)—with the crown jewel being the settlement at New Amsterdam.

From the modest beginnings in 1625, when less than 300 souls resided at the far southern tip of Manhattan island, the newly formed West India Company launched a search for valuable beaver pelts by trading with the Native Americans. The fairly civil relations with the local inhabitants didn’t take long to sour, however, and lack of understanding on both sides produced a series of military actions and massacres that set the template for the conquest of the continent.

Getting Settled

The first Dutch explorers looked at Manhattan harbor very carefully and determined that the southern tip could be best fortified while still providing an ice-free and deep harbor. The earliest maps and plans show a diminutive but growing little village, dominated by a large star-shaped fort on the site of the current Custom House and about ten streets crisscrossing around the fort.

They were protected to landward by the famous wall, which was a palisade of logs that ran across the island along the line of our current Wall Street. There is evidence that a windmill and sawmill were early arrivals. This made good sense for anyone who has stood in the powerful gusts that come off the Hudson, and the fact that a great deal of wood was needed to be processed to construct not only houses and fortifications, but also to build new ships and repair the vessels arriving in the harbor from Europe.

The initial slaves to shore were eleven black men who came with the first waves of settlers, establishing a precedent that would not be sorted out until two hundred and forty years later. There was also a curious mix of settlers, not just Dutch, but some English, Belgian, French and others, leading to a reputation for pluralism that came to be an essential American motif.

William Kieft was the man chosen to be Director of New Amsterdam, and he was in office from 1638 to 1647. Unfortunately, he lacked organizational skills as well as an understanding of the Native Americans. He launched a series of attacks on Indian villages that served to unite and in flame the formerly peaceful population.

Because war is bad for commerce, and partly as a result of his ham-fisted rule, Kieft was replaced by Peter Stuyvesant, a one-legged military man who proved to have the right touch to get the new colony back on its feet and in the black.

But when a large English fleet sailed into the harbor in 1664, Stuyvesant found himself alone in wanting to fight it out to the last Dutchman. He was overruled, and New Amsterdam fell to the English. Although it was captured back a few years later, the “Golden Age” of the Netherlands had come and gone and the Dutch would never again be a force in North America.

Dutch Imprint

Since they built mostly with wood, and considering the devastating fires of 1776 and 1835 (among others), we have no remains of New Amsterdam today beyond the Dutch Revival architecture along South Sullivan Street. But we have no lack of Dutch influence on New York and America, both in their words and the people bequeathed to us. The nautical terms “bow,” “stern” and “avast” are all of Dutch origin, as is the term boss (from “baas”) and cookie (from “koekje”). The expression “Yankee” is said to have come from the name Jan Kees, but linguists have cast doubt on this explanation. The term Knickerbocker was originally a surname meaning “toy marble maker,” and is now the name for any old New Yorker.

Among the many illustrious Dutch who settled in New Amsterdam we can include the ancestors of prototypical tough guy lm actor, Humphrey Bogart, as well as the illustrious Roosevelt family. A man named Claes Maartenszen Rosenvelt arrived from Holland in the 1640s, and in 1649 bought a farm that encompassed what is today the area between 29th and 35th Streets, and from a bit west of Fifth Avenue east to Lexington. His son, Nicholas Roosevelt, changed his named and his two sons established the two major branches of the family. Between both we have gotten two presidents, a general who won the Medal of Honor on D-Day and a legendary CIA officer who helped to overthrow Iran in the 1950s—not bad, for immigrants.

This feature originally appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Downtown magazine.

Perhaps the great cities of the future are currently just a clearing on the tip of an island in a huge bay; that was what Verrazano glimpsed in 1524, and Henry Hudson confirmed in his voyage of 1609. No, it was not the Northwest Passage to Cathay (China) that exploratory mariners had searched for vainly, but it was one of the finest natural harbors in the world, fed by a massive river and shielded from the worst of the North Atlantic’s icy blasts.

If geography is destiny, then here was a remote and wild locale with enormous potential. All the major European powers had been attempting to infiltrate this vast hemisphere, and while their main agenda was establishing trade across the Pacific, Hudson and others noted the remarkable population of beavers to be found in this New World, whose warm pelt was a fashion staple from London to the Vatican.

One of Hudson’s men named the island “Manahatta,” from an uneasy and garbled talk with the Native Americans who found themselves facing a danger they could scarcely conceive. They may not have wished to reveal their true name, although it seems now they were of the Lenape Tribe.

While the English colonies stretched across harsh New England, and the Spanish were all over South America, Mexico, California, Texas and Florida, and the French were pressing into present-day Canada, oddly enough it was the Dutch who sent a small group of French-speaking Walloons to settle the very tip of Manhattan Island. They were cleverly attempting to drive a wedge into the New World and to play out European politics on a new shore—hardly the last time such an attempt would be made.

Our first view of the modest settlement shows a star-shaped fort, a windmill and a cluster of low houses. By 1626 the Dutch had a foothold and were expanding up the Hudson, establishing trading posts and forts as far as Albany and dealing with the natives for beaver pelts, which would establish the first fortunes to be derived from the New World.

Did Peter Minuit actually buy the island of Manhattan for $24 on behalf of the Dutch West India Company? It seems the real price was 60 guilders (about $37) as well as farming implements and colored beads, and that Minuit only was mentioned tangentially as part of the deal. Such legends die hard, and the notion of purchasing the entire shebang for pocket change is an attractive one.

Doing some tricky math and allowing for inflation, experts suspect this was worth about one thousand dollars— with the proviso that then, just as now, a given entity is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it—like your Aunt Lucy’s beat-up chair, which turns out to be a Hepplewhite. There is a very good chance that no one had ever offered the Lenape Tribe any monies or goods whatsoever for the land and an even better chance that they did not understand the transference of property anyway.

“If geography is destiny, then here was a remote and wild locale with enormous potential.”

There is almost nothing left of New Amsterdam, as the Dutch called their settlement, due to the depredations of fire and the cyclical swirl of change that has always been a landmark of Lower Manhattan, from 1626 to today. But the names remain, such as the fact that Wall Street actually marks the line of a wooden palisade built to defend the Walloons from the provoked and sometimes violent local peoples.

And Broadway itself, winding thirteen and a half miles south from Spuyten Duyvil to the Battery, is the track of an old Indian trail. A “bowerie” is an orchard, and the word was attached to many of the small farms that popped up north of the protective wall.

You can find 19th century buildings that mimic the high-stepped gables of houses in Amsterdam, but none of the original wooden structures have survived 400 years of relentless disaster, building and rebuilding.

As Thoreau told us, it’s not what you see, but what you make of what you see, and with the right sort of eyes you can see Henry Hudson’s ship, Half Moon, sailing up the harbor in 1609. And with the right map you can visit some of the original streets, such as Nassau Street and Maiden Lane. And with the right imagination you can scour the modern buildings from the landscape momentarily and picture the candles glowing through the small multi-paned windows of 30 small houses by 1628, and imagine the warm hearth-sides of some 200 Walloons who were the first New Yorkers. From a seemingly trackless wilderness they built the start of what was to become the greatest city in the world.

Facts:

Peter Minuit (1580- 1638) is one of those old New York names that we never quite fully comprehend––but we should. He was a Walloon from present day Germany who moved to Holland to escape religious persecution. Minuit came across the Atlantic and was the Director General of New Netherland—a grand title for a somewhat modest settlement based at the southern tip of Manhattan. Additionally, he helped to consolidate outlying settlements, such as the Dutch who went up the Hudson as far as Albany in search of beaver, and after being relieved from his post (1633) went on to found New Sweden on the banks of the Delaware River. Eventually, he died at sea—a common obituary in a time of poor navigation and wonky ships.

His enduring legacy is the purchase of Manhattan Island on May 24, 1626, though it is suspected that he was not the main dealmaker. There is also a wonderful line of speculation that he actually bought the island from a tribe that did not own it––the Canarsee Tribe from Long Island. This latter myth, redolent of subsequent purchases of the Brooklyn Bridge by unwary investors many times over, is perhaps too good and too funny to be true.

It may be that both sides thought they were getting the better of the other, making this the primordial “New York Deal.” “Let the buyer beware!” has always been a Manhattan proverb in Latin, Dutch, English and about seventy other languages.

Today Peter Minuit’s name can be found at Peter Minuit Plaza by the Whitehall Ferry Terminal, on a granite flagstaff base in Battery Park and in the name of the Peter Minuit Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Director General Minuit has also appeared countless times in cartoons and films, perhaps most notably being played by native New Yorker Groucho Marx in the 1957 comedy The Story of Mankind.

If his story is a myth, it is a darn fine one, especially if one imagines the Canarsee canoes on the East River paddling back to Long Island––with their laughter ringing out over the waters.