Manhattan [antikvár]

At the edge of Columbia University's Baker Field, on the northern tip of Manhattan Island, there is a big rock where the path winds off into the woods. It holds a plaque proclaiming that this is the very spot where Peter Minuit bought the island from the Indians for sixty guilders in 1626.No one disputes the tradition that sixty 17th-century Dutch guilders translates into twenty-four 20th-century American dollars, but the rock may be in the wrong place. The people of Holland have erected a flagpole in Battery Park, 13 miles away at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, with an inscription that says it happened down there.Who's right? Who knows?The Dutch kept careful records, but they weren't too strong on keeping track of specific spots where great events took place. It was probably because they were so busy moving the spots around. From the earliest times they were digging canals, leveling hills, filling in low places and extending the shoreline. Hardly a day has gone by since they first came here that Manhattan hasn't changed in some way.It's what makes the place so exciting.In fact, if old Peter Minuit were to come back to Manhattan today, the only place he'd probably recognize is Inwood Hill Park, a 196-acre virgin wilderness a block or two away from that rock whose plaque says he once stood nearby with his bag of beads and trinkets. He might be a little surprised by the Henry Hudson Parkway that cuts through the middle of it, or the 142-foot-high Henry Hudson Bridge, a steel arch that carries cars into The Bronx. But he'd still find the caves Indians used for shelter and the steep hills that once characterized much of Manhattan. He'd also recognize the little bay in the Harlem River which is said to have been the first place Henry Hudson went ashore when he arrived in 1609. But even recent Columbia alumnae who haven't been back to a football game at Baker Field, which overlooks the bay, wouldn't recognize the old stadium. Ifs been modernized, rebuilt, changed.Of all the change in upper Manhattan, the strangest may well be the one that has relocated a piece of the borough to The Bronx.In Colonial times, the northern boundary of Manhattan was a winding creek that connected the Harlem River on the east with the Hudson River on the west. The Dutch called it Spuyten Duyvil because, according to Washington Irving's Father Knickerbocker, an early settler named Anthony Van Corlaer drowned there on his way to warn the northern settlements that the British were coming. The Dutch, says Knickerbocker, thought the Devil lived in the deep, wild waters of the creek. Van Corlaer couldn't find a boat to get him across, but he'd had enough rum to make an easy decision to swim across in spite of the Devil, or as he said in Dutch, "en spijt den Duyvil."The Devil was evicted and the creek rerouted in 1895 when a 400- foot-wide ship channel was cut through to connect the Harlem and Hudson Rivers. In the process a 52-acre knob of territory that had formerly been a part of Manhattan Island became, geographically at least, a piece of The Bronx. But New Yorkers are funny about things like that. They got up a petition and convinced City Hall that their neighborhood, called Marble Hill because of the quarries there, still had its heart in Manhattan. The city fathers took their plea to heart, and though some people who live there may tell you they live in the Kingsbridge section of The Bronx, they're as much Manhattanites as if they lived in Greenwich Village.And they're not alone in their isolation from the main island. Halfway down the East River, where the 59 th Street Bridge crosses over into Queens, some 6,000 people who get to Manhattan in an overhead cable car from