A History of New York City
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The history of New York City (prehistory-1664)
began with the geological formation of the peculiar territory of what is today
New York City. The area was long inhabited by the Lenape; after initial European
exploration, the Dutch established New Amsterdam & New Netherland. In 1664,
the British conquered the area & renamed it New York.
Prehistoric
era
About 75,000 years ago, during the last ice age, the area of present day
New York City was at the edge of the ice sheet that stretched down from Canada.
The ice sheet covered the site of the present city to a depth of approximately
1000 feet (300 m). The glaciers scraped off much of the top layers of material
in the region, exposing underlying much-older bedrock, including gneiss &
marble that dates from 500 million years ago.
Approximately 15,000 years ago, when the ice sheet began retreating, the glacier left behind a terminal moraine that now forms the hills of Long Island & Staten Island. The two islands were not yet separated by the Narrows, which were formed approximately 6,000 years ago when the waters of the Upper Bay broke through in the Lower Bay.
Archaeological excavations indicate that the first humans settled the area as early as 9,000 years ago. These early inhabitants left behind hunting implements & bone heaps. The area was abandoned, however, possibly because the warming climate of the region lead to the local extinction of many larger game species upon which the early inhabitants depended for food.
A second wave of inhabitants entered the region approximately 3,000 years ago & left behind more advanced hunting implements such as bows & arrows. The remains of approximately 80 such early encampments have been found throughout the city. The region has probably remained continually inhabited from that time.
Lenape inhabitants
At the time of the arrival
of the first Europeans, the area around what would later be called New York Bay
was populated primarily by the Munsee branch of the Lenape, a people in the ethnic
& linguistic Algonquian family, loosely connected to them by a common language-root.
The Lenape called the region Scheyischbi, or "the place bordering the ocean",
& perhaps Lenapehoking, meaning "place where the Lenape dwell,"
although there is not universal agreement among scholars regarding this. The Lenape
hunted, fished (sometimes using weirs), & gathered roughly 150 species of
edible wild plants, as well as using slash & burn agriculture, with the women
sowing such crops as the "Three Sisters" of maize, beans, & squash.
The harbor & rivers also provided for rich fishing, especially of oyster &
striped bass.
The Lenape lived in small inter-connected groups moving seasonally from camp to camp & , according to best historical analysis, had no concept of private ownership of land. The Lenape had no written language, but many New York place names are derived phonetically from the original Lenape words, including Raritan Bay between Staten Island & New Jersey, Rockaway in Queens, & Canarsie in Brooklyn. Manhattan is a phonetic interpretation of a word in the Munsee dialect meaning 'hilly island.' In addition to water travel, the Lenape moved through the region on an extensive system of trails, many of which would later become major roads & thoroughfares of the city.
The Lenape engaged a network of trade among themselves & with other tribes in northeastern North America through a system of barter. The principal medium of barter was wampum, which largely consisted of ornamented hand-made belts of crafted purple & white mollusk shells. The particular species required for wampum was found exclusively in the areas around Long Island Sound, in areas controlled by the Pequots. Archaeological evidence of wampum manufactured in the New York area has been found throughout the Northeast & Great Lakes area, indicating an extensive trading network that flourished among the Lenape & other Native ethnic groups such as the Iroquois, who at times inhabited the area of present-day western New York State. In a sense, New York City was a commercial center even before the arrival of the Europeans.
European exploration
The first European
to see the harbor was Giovanni da Verrazzano, during his expedition of 1524 &
named it Nouvelle-Angoulême. Verrazzano entered the harbor on April 17 &
set anchor in the Narrows between Staten Island & Brooklyn, where he was greeted
by a canoe party of Lenape. In 1609, Henry Hudson entered the harbor on a commission
from the Dutch East India Company in search of the Northwest Passage. Hudson may
have interacted with Native Americans on Manhattan, & sailed up the river
that now bears his name as far as Albany. Although Hudson did not find the passage
he was seeking, his reports led to further commercial expeditions financed by
Dutch East India Company with the intent of establishing fur trading factorijs
in the area. At the time in Europe, beaver pelts were of prized value, & the
trade in the Dutch East India Company believed it had found a possible source
of lucrative trade in the new unexplored area. In 1613, Dutch navigator Adriaen
Block spent the winter on lower Manhattan with his crew, then built a new ship
in the following spring, which he sailed through up the East River & through
Hell Gate, becoming the first European to recognize Long Island as an island.
Block christened the coast as New Netherland & his company received exclusive
trading rights in the area.
New Amsterdam
In 1613, the Dutch established
a trading post on the western shore of Manhattan Island in the area of present
Church Street where the WTC was located; this is the beginning of a global financial
center, obtaining thus a commercial spirit from its very humble beginnings.
Among its first settlers were Christian Hendriksen (who could be considered as a founder of New York City) & Jan Rodrigues the first black man to live in this city.
In 1614 the New Netherlands company was established & consequently they settled a second fur trading post in what is today Albany, called Fort Nassau. This is considered one of the oldest capital cities in the US.
In 1616 they also settled a trading post in the Kingston area.
It was not until 1623, however, that the Dutch interests in the area were other than commercial & under the auspices of the newly formed Dutch West India Company they built Fort Amsterdam in 1624, a crude fortification that stood on the location of the present Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House on Bowling Green. The fort was designed mainly to protect the company's trading operations further upriver from attack by other European powers. Within a year, a small settlement, called New Amsterdam had grown around the fort, with a population that included mostly the garrison of company troops, as well as a contingent of Walloon families who were brought in primarily to farm the nearby land of lower Manhattan & supply the company operations with food.
The Dutch took heavy advantage of the Native American reliance on wampum as a trading medium by exchanging cheap European-made metal tools for beaver pelts. By using such tools, the Natives greatly increased the rate of production of wampum, debasing its value for trade. Lenape men abandoned hunting & fishing for food in favor of beaver trapping. Moreover, the Dutch themselves began manufacturing their own wampum with superior tools in order to further dominate the trading network among themselves & the Natives (a practice undertaken by the settlers in New England as well). As a result of this increase, beavers were largely trapped out in the Five Boroughs within two decades, leaving the Lenape largely dependent on the Dutch completely. As a result, the Native population declined drastically throughout the 17th century through a combination of disease, starvation, & outward migration.
As the beaver trade increasingly shifted to Upstate New York, New Amsterdam became an increasingly important trading hub for the coast of North America. Since New Netherland was a trading operation, & not viewed as colonization enterprise for transplanting Dutch culture, the directors of New Netherland were largely unconcerned with the ethnic & racial balance of the community. The economic activity brought in a wide variety of ethnic groups to the fledging city during the 17th century, including Spanish, Jews, & Africans, some of them as slaves.
The Dutch origins can still be seen in many names in New York City, such as Coney Island (from "Konijnen Eiland" - Dutch for "Rabbit Island"), Brooklyn (from Breukelen), Harlem from Haarlem (formalized in 1658 as Nieuw Haarlem), the Bronx (from Pieter Bronck), Flushing (from Vlissingen) & Staten Island (from "Staaten Eylandt").
Willem Kieft became director general in 1638, but five years later was embroiled in Kieft's War against the Native Americans. The Pavonia Massacre, across the Hudson River in present day Jersey City resulted in the death of eighty natives in February 1643. Following the massacre, eleven Algonquin tribes joined forces & nearly defeated the Dutch. Holland sent additional forces to the aid of Kieft, which took part the overwhelming defeat of the Native Americans, leading to a peace treaty on August 29, 1645 to end the war.
The island of Manhattan was in some measure self-selected as a future metropolis by its extraordinary natural harbor formed by New York Bay (actually the drowned lower river valley of the Hudson River, enclosed by glacial moraines), the East River (actually a tidal strait) & the Hudson River, all of which are confluent at the southern tip, from which all later development spread. Also of prime importance was the presence of deep fresh water aquifers near the southern tip, especially the Collect Pond, & an unusually varied geography ranging from marshland to large outcrops of Manhattan schist, an extremely hard metamorphic rock that is ideal as an anchor for the foundations of large buildings.
Arrival of the British
In 1664, British
ships entered Gravesend Bay, in modern Brooklyn, & troops marched to capture
the ferry across the East River to the city, with minimal resistance: the governor
at the time, Peter Stuyvesant, was unpopular with the residents of the city. Articles
of Capitulation were drawn up, the Dutch West India Company's colors were struck
on September 8, 1664, & the soldiers of the garrison marched to the East River
for the trip home to the Netherlands. The date of 1664 appeared on New York City's
corporate seal until 1975, when the date was changed to 1625 to reflect the year
of Dutch incorporation as a city, & to incidentally allow New York to celebrate
its 350th anniversary just 11 years after its 300th.
The British renamed
the colony New York, after the king's brother James, Duke of York & on June
12, 1665 appointed Thomas Willett the first of the mayors of New York. The city
grew northward, & remained the largest & most important city in the colony
of New York.
Lenape & New Netherland: prehistory - 1664
Prehistory
in the area began with the geological formation of the peculiar territory of what
is today New York City. The area was long inhabited by the Lenape; Lenape in canoes
met Giovanni da Verrazzano, the first European explorer to enter New York Harbour,
in 1524. Giovanni da Verrazzano named this place New Angoulême in the honour
of the French king Francis I. Although Verrazano sailed into New York Harbour,
he is not thought to have travelled further than the present site of the bridge
that bears his name, & instead sailed back into the Atlantic. It was not until
the voyage of Henry Hudson, an Englishman who worked for the Dutch East India
Company, that the area was mapped. He discovered Manhattan Island on September
11, 1609, & continued up the river that bears his name, the Hudson River,
until he arrived at the site where New York State's capital city, Albany, now
stands.
European settlement began with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement in Lower Manhattan in 1613 later called New Amsterdam (Nieuw Amsterdam) in the southern tip of Manhattan in 1624. Later in 1626, Peter Minuit established a long tradition of shrewd real estate investing when he purchased Manhattan Island & Staten Island from native people in exchange for trade goods. (Legend, now long disproved, has it that the island was purchased for $24 worth of glass beads.) Minuit's settlement was also a haven for Huguenots seeking religious liberty.
Willem Kieft became director general in 1638, but five years later was embroiled in Kieft's War against the Native Americans. The Pavonia Massacre, across the Hudson River in present day Jersey City resulted in the death of eighty natives in February 1643. Following the massacre, eleven Algonquin tribes joined forces & nearly defeated the Dutch. Holland sent additional forces to the aid of Kieft, which took part the overwhelming defeat of the Native Americans, leading to a peace treaty on August 29, 1645 to end the war
On May 27, 1647, Peter Stuyvesant was inaugurated as director general upon his arrival, & ruled as a member of the Dutch Reformed Church. He curtailed the city's religious freedoms & closed all of the city's taverns. The colony was granted self-government in 1652 & New Amsterdam was formally incorporated as a city February 2, 1653. In 1664, the British conquered the area & renamed it "New York" after the English Duke of York & Albany. The Dutch briefly regained it in 1673, renaming the city "New Orange", before permanently ceding the colony of New Netherland to the British for what is now Surinam in November 1674.
History of New
York City (1665-1783)
This period began with the establishment of English rule
over formerly Dutch New Amsterdam & New Netherland. As the newly renamed City
of New York & surrounding areas developed there was growing sentiment for
greater independence. Leisler's Rebellion, an uprising in which militia captain
Jacob Leisler seized control of lower New York from 1689 to 1691, occurred in
the midst of Britain's "Glorious Revolution" & reflected colonial
resentment against the policies of King James II, who in the 1680s decreed the
formation of New York, New Jersey & the Dominion of New England as royal colonies,
with New York City designated as the capital. This unilateral union was highly
unpopular among the colonists. Royal authority was restored in 1691 by British
troops sent by James' successor, William III. The event introduced the principle
that the people could replace a ruler they deemed unsuitable; uprisings against
royal governors sprouted throughout the colonies.
In 1754, Columbia University was founded under charter by King George II as King's College in Lower Manhattan.
The Stamp Act & other British measures formented dissent among local residents, particularly among Sons of Liberty who maintained a long-running skirmish with locally stationed British troops over Liberty Poles from 1766 to 1776. The site of modern Greater New York City was the theatre of the New York Campaign, a series of major battles in the early American Revolutionary War. After early success in that campaign the city became the British political & military center of operations in North America for the remainder of the war. New York was greatly damaged twice by fires of dubious origin during the British military rule that followed. Continential Army officer Nathan Hale was hanged in Manhattan for espionage after the Battle of Long Island (also known as the Battle of Brooklyn), the largest battle of the entire war. In addition, the British began to hold the majority of captured American prisoners of war aboard prison ships in Wallabout Bay, across the East River in Brooklyn. More Americans lost their lives from neglect aboard the prison ships than died in every battle of the war, combined. British occupation lasted until November 25, 1783. George Washington triumphally returned to the city that same November 25th, as the last British forces left the city. The Continental Congress met in New York City under the Articles of Confederation, making it the first national capital of the United States. The Supreme Court first deliberated & the new United States first expanded (via the passage of the Northwest Ordinance) in the city.
City of New York
Population by year
1790 33,131
1800 60,515
1810 96,373
1820 123,706
1830 202,589
1840 312,710
1850 515,547
1860 813,669
1870 942,292
1880 1,206,299
1890 1,515,301
1900 3,437,202
1910 4,766,883
1920 5,620,048
1930
6,930,446
1940 7,454,995
1950 7,891,957
1960 7,781,984
1970 7,894,862
1980 7,071,639
1990 7,322,564
2000 8,008,278
Including the "outer
boroughs"
before the
1898 consolidation
1790 49,000
1800 79,200
1830 242,300
1850 696,100
1880 1,912,000
History of New York City (1784-1854)
New
York City became the first capital of the newly formed United States on September
13, 1788 under the U.S. Constitutional Convention. On April 30, 1789 the first
President of the United States, George Washington, was inaugurated at Federal
Hall on Wall Street. New York City remained the capital of the U.S. until 1790,
when the honor was transferred to Philadelphia.
New York grew as an economic center, first as a result of Alexander Hamilton's policies & practices as the first Secretary of the Treasury & , later, with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. After the Revolutionary War thousands of mostly New England Yankees moved into the city. Their numbers were such that by 1820, the city had far outstripped its pre-War population, was largely middle class with a growing upper-class, & was fully 95% of American born heritage. Its economy was a vigorous artisan & craftsman society second to none in the United States while its banking & commercial sectors were fast becoming dominant in the country as a whole. From 1800-1840 the city grew in wealth & power & never again would the city have such a substantially stable society of American born citizens.
It was into this stable Protestant middle class American society of stockbrokers, guildsmen, bankers, artisans, craftsmen, merchants, shippers, porters, & shopkeepers, & well paid laborers, all operating in an early republican environment of volunteer firefighters, watchmen, & other civic organization that thousands of mostly illiterate unskilled Catholic Irish fleeing the rural depression of their homeland disembarked onto New York City in the 1840s. The Irish Potato Famine brought a large influx of Irish immigrants, & by 1850, the Irish comprised one quarter of the city's population. Government institutions, including the New York City Police Department & the public schools, were established in the 1840s & 1850s to respond to growing demands of residents.
The social change was an earthquake. Lacking the bureaucratic civic structure of today, the city's infrastructure built as it was a volunteer network of similar minded individuals collapsed. Partisan networks developed to protect neighborhoods of native Americans from the Irish[citation needed], & the Irish formed gangs to protect themselves. Crime rose as competing ethnic volunteer groups vied for control of the municipal patronage & its utility networks of fire, sanitation, garbage, & police.
Tammany Hall began to grow in influence with the support of many of the immigrant Irish, culminated in the election of the first Tammany mayor, Fernando Wood, in 1854.
History of New York City (1855-1897)
This
period started with the inauguration in 1855 of Fernando Wood as the first mayor
from Tammany Hall, an institution that would dominate the city throughout this
period. During the 19th century, the city was transformed by immigration, a visionary
development proposal called the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which expanded the
city street grid to encompass all of Manhattan, & the opening of the Erie
Canal, which connected the Atlantic port to the vast agricultural markets of the
Midwestern United States & Canada in 1819. By 1835, New York City had surpassed
Philadelphia as the largest city in the United States. Local politics became dominated
by Tammany Hall, a Democratic Party political machine. Public-minded members of
the old merchant aristocracy pressed for a Central Park, which was opened to a
design competition in 1857: it was the first landscape park in an American city.
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the city's strong commercial ties to the South, its growing immigrant population, & anger about conscription led to divided sympathy for both the Union & Confederacy, culminating in the Draft Riots of 1863, one of the worst incidents of civil unrest in American history. After the Civil War, the rate of immigration from Europe grew steeply, & New York became the first stop for millions seeking a new & better life in the United States, a role acknowledged by the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886.
The new European immigration brought further social upheaval, & old world criminal societies rapidly exploited the already corrupt municipal machine politics of Tammany Hall, while local American barons of industry further exploited the immigrant masses with ever lower wages & crowded living conditions. In a city of tenements packed with cheap foreign labor from dozens of nations, the city was a hotbed of revolution, syndicalism, racketeering, & unionization. In response, the upper classes used partisan hand-outs, organized crime groups, heavy handed policing & political oppression to undermine groups which refused to be coopted. Groups such as the anticapitalist labor union Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), native American patriot organizations such as the American Protestant Association, & reformers of all stripes were fiercely repressed, while crime lords that became too independent disappeared.
Early 20th century: 1898-1945
This
period began with the formation of the consolidated city of the five boroughs
in 1898. Manhattan & the Bronx, though still one county, were established
as two separate boroughs & joined together with three other boroughs created
from parts of adjacent counties to form the new municipal government originally
called "Greater New York". The Borough of Brooklyn incorporated the
independent City of Brooklyn, recently joined to Manhattan by the Brooklyn Bridge,
& several municipalities in eastern Kings County, New York; the Borough of
Queens was created from western Queens County (with the remnant established as
Nassau County in 1899); & The Borough of Staten Island contained all of Richmond
County. All municipal (county, town & city) governments contained within the
boroughs were abolished. In 1914, the New York State Legislature created Bronx
county, making five counties coterminous with the five boroughs.
On June 15, 1904 over 1,000 people, mostly German Immigrants, were killed when the steamship General Slocum caught fire & burned on North Brother Island, in the East River; & on March 25, 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village took the lives of 146 garment workers, which would eventually lead to great advancements in the city's fire department, building codes, & workplace regulations.
A series of new transportation links, most notably the New York City Subway, first opened in 1904, helped bind the new city together. The height of European immigration brought social upheaval. Later, in the 1920s, the city saw the influx of African Americans as part of the Great Migration from the American South, & the Harlem Renaissance, part of a larger boom time in the Prohibition era that saw dueling skyscrapers in the skyline.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the city became a world center for industry, commerce, & communication. Interborough Rapid Transit (the first New York subway company) began operating in 1904, & the railroads operating out of Grand Central Terminal & Pennsylvania Station thrived. New York City became the most populous city in the world in 1925, overtaking London, which had reigned for a century.
Crime rates also increased as the city grew in size. Newspapers made household names of sensational criminals, such as Harry Thaw & Josephine Terranova. Terrranova's murder trial, pitting the seventeen year old killer against the nation's medical establishment, rivetted the city for months in 1906.
New York City's ever accelerating changes & rising crime & poverty rates ended when World War I disrupted trade routes, the Immigration Restriction Acts limited additional immigration after the war, & the Great Depression ended the need for new labor. The combination ended the rule of the Guilded Age barons. The period between the World Wars saw the election of reformist mayor Fiorello LaGuardia & the fall of Tammany Hall after eighty years of political dominance. As the city's demographics stabilized, labor unionization brought new protections & affluence to the working class, the city's government & infrastructure underwent a dramatic overhaul under LaGuardia, & his controversial parks commissioner, Robert Moses, ended the blight of many tenement areas, expanded new parks, remade streets, & restricted & reorganized zoning controls.
Despite the effects of the Great Depression, the 1930s saw the building of some of the world's tallest skyscrapers, including numerous Art-Deco masterpieces that are still part of the city's skyline today. Both before & after World War II, vast areas of the city were also reshaped by the rise of the bridges, parks & parkways coordinated by Moses, the greatest proponent of automobile-centered modernist urbanism in America.
In 1938 the political designation "ward" was abolished. New York City had used this designation for the smallest political units since 1686, when Governor Thomas Dongan divided the city, then entirely in Manhattan, into six wards. In 1791, wards were given numerical designations. The First Ward was the tip of Manhattan, & the wards going north were given consecutive numbers with new added as the city expanded. The older wards were also subdivided as their populations swelled. Brooklyn had also composed of wards since it became a city in 1837. It originally had nine, & by the time of the 1898 consolidation it had 32.
Post-World
War II: 1946-1977
Main article: History of New York City (1946-1977)
Returning
World War II veterans & immigrants from Europe created a postwar economic
boom & led to the development of huge housing tracts in eastern Queens. In
1951, the United Nations relocated from its first headquarters in Flushing Meadows
Park, Queens, to the East Side of Manhattan. During the 1960s, the views of real
estate developer & city leader Robert Moses began to fall out of favor as
the anti-Urban Renewal views of Jane Jacobs gained popularity. Citizen rebellion
killed a plan to construct an expressway through lower Manhattan.
Like many major U.S. cities, New York suffered race riots & population & industrial decline in the 1960s. By the 1970s the city had gained a reputation as a crime-ridden relic of history. In 1975, the city government avoided bankruptcy only through a federal loan & debt restructuring by the Municipal Assistance Corporation, headed by Felix Rohatyn. The city was also forced to accept increased financial scrutiny by an agency of New York State. In 1977, the city was struck by the twin catastrophes of the New York City blackout of 1977 & the Son of Sam serial murderer's continued slayings. These events were perhaps the impetus to the election of Mayor Ed Koch, who promised to revive the city.
History of New York
City (1978-present)
The 1980s saw a rebirth of Wall Street, & the city
reclaimed its role at the center of the world-wide financial industry. In the
1990s, crime rates dropped drastically & the outflow of population turned
around, as the city once again became the destination not only of immigrants from
around the world, but of many U.S. citizens seeking to live a cosmopolitan lifestyle
that New York City can offer. In the late 1990s, the city benefited disproportionately
from the success of the financial services industry during the dot com boom, one
of the factors in a decade of booming residential & commercial real estate
value increases
Post 9/11: 2001-present
New York City was a site of the
September 11, 2001 attacks , when nearly 3,000 people were killed by a terrorist
strike on the World Trade Center, including those employed in the buildings, passengers
& crew on two commercial jetliners, & hundreds of firemen, policemen,
& rescue workers who came to the aid of the disaster. Thick, acrid smoke continued
to pour out of its ruins for months following the Twin Towers' fiery collapse.
The city has since rebounded & the physical cleanup of the World Trade Center
site was completed ahead of schedule. The Freedom Tower, intended to be exactly
1,776 feet tall (a number symbolic of the year the Declaration of Independence
was written), is to be built on the site & is slated for construction between
2006 & 2010.
On July 18, 2007, a steam pipe exploded in Midtown Manhattan, causing chaos, evacuations, several injures, & one death.
See also
Histories
of New York City neighborhoods, such as Harlem, San Juan Hill, Upper West Side,
Lower East Side, Chinatown, the Financial District (which includes the South Street
Seaport) & others. New York has many famous thoroughfares, including Fifth
Avenue, Madison Avenue, Broadway & others. The city also has numerous smaller
streets with rich histories, including Wall Street.
Some of the islands of the city have surprisingly rich local histories: Liberty Island, Governors Island, City Island, Roosevelt Island & others.
The history of New York City's Water Supply System.
There is also a Timeline of New York City crimes & disasters.
Compare history of Brooklyn, New York.
Kenneth T. Jackson, a preeminent authority on the history of New York City.
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