The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Pearl Street, the oldest street in town, was lined with dwellings. Battery Place, bounding Battery Park on the north, was a much wider street than it is today and took the name of Marcktveldt because of cattle fairs held there. Outside town, four blocks north of Wall Street, Maagde Paatje, or Maidens’ Path, began at Broadway and twisted to the southeast along the curve of a stream. Dutch girls who couldn’t afford to send their clothes to a laundry washed their linen in the stream. Today the path is called Maiden Lane.

  The Dutch never built log cabins, which were introduced into America by the Swedes in the Delaware Valley. The first houses erected in New Amsterdam were one-story wood structures containing two rooms. In Stuyvesant’s time some houses were made of brick and stone. In 1628 kilns had been established here. They produced small yellow and black bricks, called Holland bricks to distinguish them from the larger English variety. The northern part of Manhattan provided an abundance of stone. Slowly the colonists began putting up two-story houses, whose second floors overhung the first floors.

  A distinctive feature of Dutch architecture—one that lasted well into the brownstone era—was the high stoop at the front of the house. In Holland the first floors were raised high above the street, for in that nether land a hole in a dike could flood the land around a man’s house. In America the Dutch built a steep flight of steps to the front doors. In warm weather the stoop served as the family gathering place, pipe-smoking men keeping their eyes on their neighbors’ weathercocks, mothers shelling peas, and children shouting across the narrow streets.

  Most front doors were ornamented with huge brass knockers shaped like a dog’s or lion’s head, and these had to be polished every day. Doors were large, and windows were small. Window glass was imported from Holland. Doors had an upper and a lower half. The lower half was usually kept shut so that a housewife could lean on it to gossip with a neighbor, yet keep pigs and hens out of her kitchen.

  The houses had comfortable, if narrow, interiors, the low ceilings pierced by exposed wooden beams, alcoves, and window seats set into the whitewashed walls. Bare floors were scrubbed rigorously and then sprinkled with fine sand, which was broom-stroked into fantastic patterns. Furniture was plain and heavy and was made mostly of oak, maple, or nutwood. The Dutch lacked sofas, couches, or lounges. Their best chairs were made of Russian leather studded with brass nails.

  Dutch matrons prided themselves on their recessed slaap-bancks, huge Holland beds, and massive sideboards and cupboards. Pewter mugs and copper vessels were set around racks holding a generous supply of long-stemmed pipes. China was rare. Most spoons and forks were carved from wood, although the well-to-do had silverware used only for parties. Glassware was almost completely unknown, punch being drunk in turns by guests from a huge bowl, and beer from a tankard of silver. The rich possessed mirrors; one wealthy man owned seventy. Pictures were plentiful but wretched—mostly engravings of Dutch cities and naval engagements. Window curtains were made of flowered chintz.

  Clocks were scarce, time being kept mainly by sundials and hourglasses. Hardworking men arose with the first crow of the cock, breakfasted at dawn, labored through the morning, dined heartily at noon, resumed work, and then quit early in the afternoon to play. Every house contained spinning wheels, and looms became common. Behind most houses flower gardens were laid out in symmetrical designs, together with a vegetable garden and an orchard. Weather permitting, the Dutch liked to eat outdoors in summerhouses.

  Houses cost from $200 to $1,000 and rented for $14 a year. From 1658 through 1661 living costs and wages were as follows: Beer sold at $4 a barrel, a sailor earned $8 a month, a horse was worth $112, the city bell ringer was paid $20 a year, the first Latin teacher earned $100 annually, lots near Hanover Square sold for $50 each, an ox brought $48, herrings sold at $3.60 per keg, and one beaverskin was worth $2.40.

  A seafaring people, the Dutch enjoyed the water. Along Pearl Street small shipyards produced 1-masted sloops and 2-masted ketches. A 28-foot canoe cost $11, while a North River sloop or yacht was worth $560 or more.

  Yacht, by the way, is a Dutch word. So are sloop, skipper, cookie, and cruller. A Dutch dozen or baker’s dozen, meaning thirteen cookies or cakes, originated at a Dutch bakery in Albany, the term spreading to New Amsterdam. To the English a Dutch bargain meant a one-sided deal. Dutch comfort meant that conditions could be worse. Dutch courage signified booze bravery. To talk like a Dutch uncle meant to speak the truth gently but plainly.

  Slaves were brought here from the West Indies and South America, but no New Netherland ship ever sailed on a slave-trading expedition to Africa. In 1654 the price of one slave was about $280. A law of 1658 forbade the whipping of Negro slaves without permission of the city magistrates; they enjoyed fairly humane treatment and were granted certain personal rights. Some were freed after long and faithful service and allowed to buy land in their own names. Peter Stuyvesant himself kept thirty to fifty slaves, his favorite being Old Mingo, who entertained him by playing the fiddle.

  Despite the relative leniency with which slaves were treated, white lawbreakers suffered severely. They were branded, lashed, tortured on the rack, and dipped into water while strapped in a ducking stool. However, the Dutch never put witches to death, as was done in New England, and householders who erected wood chimneys, instead of the brick ones ordered by the governor, were merely fined.

  Money obtained from the fines was sent to Holland to buy fire ladders and leather buckets for the town’s eight-man fire department. Local craftsmen later produced leather buckets, whose sides were decorated by Evert Duyckinck, an artist who founded a dynasty of New Netherland painters. At last the city owned 250 leather buckets, which had to be kept filled. In winter, though, the water in them froze solidly. So did well water. The first fireman arriving on the scene had to jump down into the nearest well to chop away the surface ice with an ax. At night the community was more or less protected by a rattle watch, or rotating roster of policemen who called out the hour and shook rattles to warn thieves that they were approaching.

  Manhattan abounded in rock springs that gushed pure water. The water supply did not become a problem until after the end of Dutch rule, when the population greatly increased. Burghers obtained water from springs and private wells until 1658; then the first public well was dug.

  At first Peter Stuyvesant lived at 1 State Street. Later he bought land from the Dutch West India Company for a country estate, where he could spend the summer months. This consisted of an area roughly bounded by Sixth to Sixteenth Streets, the East River, and Third Avenue. Stuyvesant had brought fruit trees from Holland, and he planted an orchard with his own hands. On what is now the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street he set out a peach tree that flourished for a century, after which the branches decayed and fell off. Everyone thought the old pere-bloome had died. Then, all by itself, it revived, greened again, and put out new shoots. Poems and articles were written about Peter Stuyvesant’s doughty pear tree. When it was 220 years old, it was destroyed in 1867, after two vehicles had collided at the corner.

  Stuyvesant’s farm stood in the center of Bowery Village. The east-west streets were named for male members of his family, together with his title—Peter, Nicholas, William, Stuyvesant, and Governor. The north-south streets were styled after the family’s female members—Judith, Eliza, and Margaret. The only surviving street is the short reach of Stuyvesant Street, preserved to keep open the approach to St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie, a church begun in 1660 as a Dutch chapel on Stuyvesant’s farm.

  He obtained downtown property on the East River at the foot of Whitehall Street, where he put up a handsome stone mansion. Gardens flanked the mansion on three sides, and a velvety lawn extended to the water’s edge. There the governor’s private barge was docked at a landing reached by cut stone steps. This imposing residence was called White Hall, and Whitehall Street was later named for it.

  The first dwelling on Manhattan north of Wall Street was erected before Stuyves
ant’s time in Greenwich Village. Governor Peter Minuit had set aside in perpetuity four farms for the company. Minuit’s greedy successor, Wouter Van Twiller, grabbed the property for himself and founded a tobacco plantation. Then he put up a farmhouse that became the nucleus of a hamlet, known as Bossen Bouwerie, or the Farm in the Woods.

  Still farther north on the island, along the Hudson River from about 14th to 135th streets, there stretched an area called Bloemen-dael, or Vale of the Flowers. At 125th Street a ravine, called the Widow David’s Meadow sloped westward to the Hudson. Blooming-dale Village developed in the vicinity of 100th Street and the Hudson River.

  About 1637 a Dutchman, named Hendrick De Forest, became the first white man to settle in what is now known as Harlem. Other colonists soon built there, but Indians ravaged the area so repeatedly that by the time Stuyvesant arrived here, all had deserted their farms. In 1658 Stuyvesant decided to improve this northeastern end of Manhattan “for the promotion of agriculture and as a place of amusement for the citizens of New Amsterdam.” He promised that when twenty-five families settled there, he would provide them with a ferry to Long Island and a minister of their own.

  Taking his word for it, the first settlers broke ground on August 14, 1658, near the foot of 125th Street and the Harlem River. Apparently Stuyvesant named the community New Haarlem for the town of Haarlem in Holland. The new hamlet lay eleven miles from New Amsterdam, the exact distance between Amsterdam and Haarlem in the old country. Along an old Indian path the governor carved a road connecting the two Manhattan communities. By horseback the trip each way took three hours. Dutchmen, French Protestants (Huguenots), Danes, Swedes, and Germans later developed rich farms in Haarlem, which ultimately dropped one a from its name.

  The present five boroughs of New York City resulted from the coalescence of many individual hamlets, villages, towns, and cities. On Long Island the Dutch settled the western part, while the English gathered in communities farther east. The present boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens are located on the western end of Long Island.

  Brooklyn got its start in 1634, when the Dutch founded Midwout, or Middle Woods, in the ’t Vlacke Bos, or Wooded Plain. Later ’t Vlacke Bos was anglicized to Flatbush. Today it lies in central Brooklyn. By 1652 this hamlet had received a patent of township from Stuyvesant, and two years afterward the original Flatbush Reformed Protestant Church was erected at Flatbush and Church avenues under the governor’s direction. He raised a stockade around it as protection from Indians.

  In 1636 William Adriaense Bennett and Jacques Bentyn bought 930 acres of land from a Mohawk chief, named Gouwane, in the southeastern part of Brooklyn now called Gowanus. The purchase included the area known today as Red Hook. There are two theories on why the Dutch called it Roode Hoeck: Either it described the color of the soil, or the area was covered with ripe cranberries.

  In 1637 a Walloon, named Joris De Rapelje, purchased 335 acres near an East River inlet, later the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Because of him the Dutch called it Waelenbogt, or Walloon Bay. This term later was corrupted to Wallabout Bay. In 1638 the Dutch West India Company bought land east of the bay and founded a hamlet called Boswijck, or Bushwick. The Greenpoint section of Brooklyn was part of the original purchase of Bushwick.

  Gowanus and Wallabout Bay were absorbed in 1646 by the village of Breuckelen, or Broken Land, named for a village in Holland of similar topography. This village had been started about four years earlier at the present intersection of Fulton and Smith streets. Breuckelen was granted a municipal form of government on November 26, 1646, or four years earlier than New Amsterdam itself. The name evolved from Breuckelen to Brockland to Brocklin to Brookline and finally to Brooklyn.

  South of Flatbush another place, called Gravesend, was established in 1643 by Lady Deborah Moody, a cultured and tough-fibered Englishwoman. With the consent of the Dutch she bought the property from the Canarsie Indians for one blanket, one kettle, some wampum, three guns, and three pounds of gunpowder. Her colony included Coney Island, which the Indians called Narrioch. Born in England, Lady Moody had left her homeland because she had been denied freedom of conscience, had removed to New England, where she had encountered further intolerance, and had then made her way to the more liberal New Netherland. Until her death in 1659 she was an active leader in her community. Even the testy Stuyvesant sought her opinion from time to time.

  In 1652 Cornelis Van Werckhoven of the Dutch West India Company heard that the English were claiming some Dutch possessions on Long Island. He went there, inspected land in what is now west Brooklyn, decided to establish a colony, and went back to Holland to recruit settlers. Upon returning to Long Island, he bought property from the Indians between Bay Ridge and Gravesend, paying them in shirts, shoes, stockings, knives, combs and scissors. Then he erected a house and mill. In 1657 his town took the name of New Utrecht, for his native city in Holland.

  The borough of Queens was first settled by the Dutch in about 1635. Colonization began at Flushing Bay, a shallow inlet of the East River in the northern section of Queens. Mespat, now Maspeth, was founded in 1642 at the head of Newtown Creek. The next year brought the establishment of Vlissingen, or Flushing, located in northern Queens and named for a town in Holland. It received its formal charter in 1645.

  Between Maspeth and Flushing the town of Middleburg was created in 1652 by English Puritans under Dutch auspices, but after conflict between the Dutch and English the name was changed to New Town or, as we know it, Newtown. It embraced the southwestern half of present-day Queens County.

  Shortly after the founding of New Amsterdam a Dutchman, named Jorissen, bought property at Hunter’s Point in middle Queens near the mouth of Newtown Creek in present-day Long Island City. Many fine farms soon sprang up in the area.

  About 1645 other Hollanders paid the Matinecock Indians an ax for every 50 acres of land in the northern section of Queens now called Whitestone. It took its name from a big white rock at an East River landing. Another part of northern Queens, Astoria, was settled in 1654 by William Hallett, who obtained a patent of 1,500 acres from the Dutch West India Company and the Indians. For the next 150 years this property belonged to his family.

  English settlers, in 1650, founded a settlement, called Rustdorp, in middle Queens and were given a charter the same year by Stuyvesant. Soon the name was changed to Jamaica, for the Jameco Indians who first lived there. About two years later another section of middle Queens was bought from the Indians. At first the region was known as Whitepot, from the legend that the land had been bought with three white pots. Today it is called Forest Hills.

  The Bronx was known to the Indians as Keskeskeck. In 1639 it was bought by the Dutch West India Company, but at first no one settled there. Then, as we have seen, a Danish immigrant, named Jonas Bronck, became the first white colonist when he purchased fifty acres between the Harlem and Aquahung Rivers. The latter stream became known as Bronck’s River and now, of course, is the Bronx River.

  Religious dissenters trickled into the Bronx from New England. In 1643 John Throgmorton settled on the skinny peninsula we call Throgs Neck. The next year Anne Hutchinson, exiled from Massachusetts, took up residence on the banks of the stream now known as the Hutchinson River. Her family was wiped out by an Indian massacre. In 1654 Thomas Pell bought a large tract of land near Pelham Bay Park.

  The upper reach of the Bronx constituting Van Cortlandt Park was originally a hunting ground for Mohican Indians. In 1646 it was included in a patroonship granted by the company to Adriaen Cornelissen Van der Donck. He was New Netherland’s first lawyer and historian and served as one of Stuyvesant’s Nine Men. Because of his wealth and social position, he was popularly known as jonkheer, meaning his young lordship. In time the name of the area was corrupted to Yonkers.

  The story of Staten Island, lying south of Manhattan, started in 1630, when Michael Paauw was granted a patroonship that included the isle. At least three attempts were made to colonize the island, but each time the settlements were wipe
d out by Indians. The Dutch bought Staten Island a total of five times. In 1661 nineteen Dutch and French settlers established the first permanent colony on the island near the present site of Fort Wadsworth. They called it Oude Dorp, or Old Town.

  The city of New Amsterdam and the colony of New Netherland had one and the same government until 1653, when the city got its own separate government. This happened because of a chain of circumstances forged in the year 1649.

  The Nine Men had been emboldened by Kuyter’s and Melyn’s victory over Peter Stuyvesant. Disgruntled by his treatment of them and disheartened because his reforms had failed, they decided to go over his head, bypass the company, and appeal directly to the Dutch government at The Hague. Despite the governor’s angry protests, the Nine Men drew up and sent to the homeland the famous Petition and Remonstrance of New Netherland.

  Both papers were written by Van der Donck and were signed in July, 1649. The petition was a short report on the condition of the colony, with suggested remedies. The remonstrance was a lengthy explanation of the detailed history of the facts on which the petitioners based their appeal for changes. It spelled out the autocratic behavior and cross-grained personality of both Stuyvesant and his predecessor, Kieft. It posed questions about the expenditure of public funds. It criticized the administration of justice. It asked for trading concessions. It said that more farmers were needed in the colony.

  Most important, the Petition and Remonstrance asked for: (1) administration of the colony by the Dutch government instead of by the company; (2) municipal rule for New Amsterdam instead of arbitrary rule by the director general; and (3) establishment of a firm boundary between New Netherland and New England by treaty between the Dutch and English governments. What did the Nine Men get? Point 1 was rejected: The Dutch government declined to take over the administration of the colony because it could not withstand the pressures brought to bear on it by the company. Point 2 was granted: The government agreed to give New Amsterdam the kind of municipal government enjoyed by cities in Holland. Point 3 was approved in theory: Although the government itself made no effort to settle boundary disputes, it did not object to the establishment of a commission to consider the issues.