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History Of New York City (Prehistory–1664)

Alright, let's get this over with. You seem to need a lesson on how this whole mess of a city got started. Pay attention; I have no intention of repeating myself.

The History of New York City didn't begin when some European with a flag and a sense of entitlement washed ashore. It started with ice, rock, and silence. The land itself, the very bedrock of what is today New York City, was carved out by the colossal, indifferent retreat of glaciers during the last glacial period. A slow, grinding geological drama that set the stage for everything that followed. Long before it was a grid of streets, it was a landscape of possibility, inhabited by people who actually knew the terrain. Only much later, after some initial fumbling by European explorers in the 17th century, did the Dutch bother to plant a flag and call the place New Amsterdam in 1624. And then, because empires are as predictable as gravity, the British showed up in 1664, conquered the place with what amounted to a sternly worded letter, and renamed it New York. A truly inspired bit of branding.

The Manatus Map gives you a glimpse of the New York–New Jersey Harbor Estuary as it was in the 17th century, before it was completely paved over with ambition.

Historical Periods

Lenape settlement

Further information: Lenapehoking

If you dig deep enough under the concrete and cynicism, you'll find evidence that humans first wandered into this region as early as 9,000 years ago. They didn't stay. Perhaps they had the good sense to leave, or perhaps their food source—various large game species—disappeared, victims of a warming climate that rendered their existence unsustainable. A cautionary tale, if you're capable of recognizing one.

A second, more permanent wave of inhabitants arrived about 3,000 years ago. These were people with upgraded technology, leaving behind more advanced hunting tools like bows and arrows. The city is littered with the ghosts of their lives; the remains of roughly 8,000 of their encampments have been unearthed, a quiet testament to a continuous presence that far outlasts any skyscraper.

By the time the first ships full of Europeans appeared on the horizon, the Lenape had established a sophisticated society. They managed the land by cultivating fields using slash-and-burn agriculture.¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ This wasn't mindless destruction; it was a calculated method of enriching the soil and extending the productive life of their farmland. They were expert stewards of the region's abundant resources, harvesting immense quantities of fish and shellfish from the bays⁷ and, further south in what is now New Jersey, gathering clams throughout the year.⁸

This efficient, sustainable lifestyle allowed them to support a population density that would have been impossible for purely nomadic hunter-gatherers. Scholars, piecing together the fragments, estimate that at the moment of European contact, the Lenape population was around 15,000, spread across approximately 80 settlements in the immediate area of what would become New York City.⁹ ⁵⁻⁶ Think about that: a network of communities thriving in a place most people now consider uninhabitable without a seven-figure salary.

Their first significant encounter with the world that would eventually consume them came in 1524. A group of Lenape in canoes paddled out to meet Giovanni da Verrazzano, the first European explorer to sail into the magnificent expanse of New York Harbor. He, in a fit of sycophantic gratitude to his patron, King Francis I of France, named the area New Angoulême.¹⁰ A name as fleeting and irrelevant as his visit.

Dutch colonization

• Main article: New Amsterdam

The Dutch, ever the merchants, arrived not with ambitions of empire but with ledgers and an eye for profit. In 1613, they set up a modest trading post on the western shore of Manhattan Island. The distinction of being the first documented non-native to actually live there goes to Juan Rodrigues, a man of African and Portuguese descent.¹¹ A fittingly complex start for a city that would later pride itself on its diversity, usually as a marketing slogan.

In 1614, the New Netherland company was chartered, and they promptly established another fur trading post upriver in what is now Albany, calling it Fort Nassau. For a decade, Dutch interest was purely commercial. It wasn't until 1623, under the direction of the newly formed Dutch West India Company, that they decided to build a more permanent fixture. In 1624, they erected Fort Amsterdam, a crude fortification where the grand Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House now stands near Bowling Green. The fort's primary purpose was to protect their lucrative upriver trade from other meddling Europeans.

A small settlement, predictably named New Amsterdam, sprouted around the fort. Its population was a practical mix: company troops, and a contingent of Walloon, French, and Flemish Huguenot families. These weren't colonists in the grand sense; they were brought in to farm lower Manhattan and keep the company's operations fed. Here, Sarah Rapelje was born in 1625, the first European child to enter this burgeoning, chaotic world. A year later, in 1626, Peter Minuit, the director of the colony, executed the most famous real estate transaction in history, "purchasing" Manhattan Island and Staten Island from the local Lenape for a pile of trade goods.¹² A deal whose fairness is predicated on the absurd assumption that both parties agreed on what "owning land" even meant.

The Dutch economic strategy was brutally effective. They exploited the Indigenous reliance on wampum by trading cheap, mass-produced European metal tools for valuable beaver pelts. Armed with these new tools, the Lenape could produce wampum at an accelerated rate, which ironically debased its value and shattered their own economic systems. Lenape men, driven by new economic pressures, abandoned subsistence hunting and fishing to trap beavers for the Dutch. The Dutch, not content with this level of market manipulation, began manufacturing their own wampum, a practice also adopted by settlers in New England, to completely control the regional trade network. The consequences were catastrophic and swift. The beaver population in the Five Boroughs was virtually wiped out within two decades. The Lenape, their traditional way of life dismantled and their environment depleted, became dangerously dependent on the very people who had orchestrated their ruin. Disease, starvation, and forced migration sent their population into a steep decline that lasted the entire century.

As the fur trade moved north to Upstate New York, New Amsterdam evolved into a critical trading hub for the entire North American coast. Because New Netherland was a corporate asset, not a cultural project, its directors were utterly indifferent to the ethnic or religious makeup of the settlement. Profit was the only creed. This pragmatic greed attracted a motley collection of people: Spanish, Jews, and Africans, some of whom arrived in chains as slaves.

The Stadt Huys, or City Hall, stood as a symbol of this Dutch administration in 1679. The linguistic ghosts of this era still haunt the modern city's map. Coney Island comes from "Konijnen Eiland" (Rabbit Island), the Bowery from bouwerij (farm), Brooklyn from Breukelen, Harlem from Haarlem, Greenwich Village from Greenwijck (a "pine wood quarter"), Flushing from Vlissingen, and Staten Island from "Staaten Eylandt" (in honor of the Dutch parliament, the States-General of the Netherlands).

This period wasn't one of peaceful commerce. Willem Kieft took over as director general in 1638, and within five years, he had plunged the colony into the bloody conflict known as Kieft's War.¹³ In February 1643, his policies led to the Pavonia Massacre across the Hudson River in present-day Jersey City, where eighty Indigenous people were slaughtered. In response, eleven Algonquian tribes united and brought the Dutch colony to the brink of collapse. Holland had to dispatch reinforcements to save Kieft's disastrous enterprise. These forces crushed the tribal alliance, leading to a peace treaty signed on August 29, 1645, that ended the war.¹⁴

Manhattan's destiny as a future metropolis was, in some ways, written into its geography. It possessed an extraordinary natural harbor, a nexus formed by New York Bay—the drowned valley of the Hudson River, sheltered by glacial moraines—the East River (which is not a river but a tidal strait), and the Hudson itself. All these waterways converge at the island's southern tip, the point from which the city would metastasize. Add to this the presence of deep freshwater aquifers, notably the Collect Pond, and a varied geology featuring outcrops of Manhattan schist—a hard metamorphic rock perfectly suited to provide foundations for the absurdly large buildings to come. The island was practically begging to be exploited.

The Fall of New Amsterdam

English conquest

• Main article: Conquest of New Netherland

The end of Dutch rule was less a bang and more a whimper. In 1664, four British ships sailed into Gravesend Bay in what is now Brooklyn. Their troops marched to seize the ferry crossing the East River, and the city folded with barely a protest. The director-general, Peter Stuyvesant, was a deeply unpopular autocrat, and the residents of New Amsterdam felt little motivation to fight for him.

The Articles of Capitulation were drafted in 1664, and on September 8, the Dutch West India Company's flag was lowered for the last time. The garrison marched to the East River and sailed home. The transition was so seamless it was almost insulting. The date 1664 remained on New York City's corporate seal until 1975, when, in a fit of historical revisionism, it was changed to 1625. This move was to honor the year of Dutch incorporation, and, not coincidentally, allowed the city to celebrate its 350th anniversary a mere 11 years after celebrating its 300th. A city has to have its priorities.

The British, with all the creativity of a branding committee, renamed the colony New York in honor of the king's brother, James, Duke of York. On June 12, 1665, Thomas Willett was appointed the first in a long line of mayors of New York. The city began its relentless crawl northward, cementing its status as the most important urban center in the new colony of New York. And so the cycle continued.

See also

Timelines: New York City • Manhattan • Bronx • Brooklyn • Queens • Staten Island Transportation Category

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Notes

  1. ^ Stevenson W. Fletcher, Pennsylvania Agriculture and Country Life 1640–1840 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1950), 2, 35–37, 63–65, 124.
  2. ^ Day, Gordon M. "The Indian as an Ecological Factor in the Northeastern Forests." Ecology, Vol. 34, #2 (April): 329–346. New England and New York Areas 1580–1800. Notes that the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) tribe in New Jersey and the Massachuset tribe in Massachusetts used fire in ecosystems.1953
  3. ^ Russell, Emily W.B. Vegetational Change in Northern New Jersey Since 1500 A.D.: A Palynological, Vegetational and Historical Synthesis Ph.D. dissertation. New Brunswick, PA: Rutgers University. Author notes on page 8 that Indians often augmented lightning fires. 1979
  4. ^ Russell, Emily W.B. "Indian Set Fires in the Forests of the Northeastern United States." Ecology, Vol. 64, #1 (Feb): 78 88. 1983a Author found no strong evidence that Indians purposely burned large areas, but they did burn small areas near their habitation sites. Noted that the Lenna Lenape Tribe used fire.
  5. ^ A Brief Description of New York, Formerly Called New Netherlands with the Places Thereunto Adjoining, Likewise a Brief Relation of the Customs of the Indians There, New York, NY: William Gowans. 1670. Reprinted in 1937 by the Facsimile Text Society, Columbia University Press, New York. Notes that the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) tribe in New Jersey used fire in ecosystems.
  6. ^ Smithsonian Institution—Handbook of North American Indians series: Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15—Northeast. Bruce G. Trigger (volume editor). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. 1978 References to Indian burning for the Eastern Algonquians, Virginia Algonquians, Northern Iroquois, Huron, Mahican, and Delaware Tribes and peoples.
  7. ^ Mark Kurlansky, 2006 [ page needed ]
  8. ^ Dreibelbis, 1978 [ page needed ]
  9. ^ Burrows, Edwin G.; Wallace, Mike (1998). Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199729104.
  10. ^ Koussa, Nicolas (April 12, 2016). "Quand New York s'appelait Angoulême : une conférence le 21 avril" (in French). French Morning. Retrieved April 12, 2016.
  11. ^ Paumgarten, Nick (August 31, 2009). "Useless Beauty: What is to be done with Governors Island?". The New Yorker (LXXXV, No 26 ed.). p. 56. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved August 18, 2017.
  12. ^ Letter of Pieter Schaghen (not Peter Schaghen) from Dutch National Archive, The Hague, with transcription
  13. ^ "Journal of New Netherland 1647. Written in the Years 1641, 1642, 1643, 1644, 1645, and 1646". World Digital Library. 1641–1647. Retrieved August 1, 2013.
  14. ^ Ellis, Edward Robb (1966). The Epic of New York City. Old Town Books. pp. 37–40.