New York City [antikvár]

ill',; lii-iijaiB.u-:'!.' -liif To MANY PEOPLE, NEW YORK, THAT COLOSSUS OF ROADS, bridges, skyscrapers, and iiumanity, is America. From its pastoral beginnings, this city grew to encompass dozy villages and working farms, urban grandeur, and suburban sprawl. New York anticipated the America of today, becoming big, braggadocio, multicultural, materialistic. Long before it was positioned as a deliciously optimistic Apple, New York was known as the Big Onion, a grittier, more piquant, tear-inducing realm of many surprising layers. You can unpeel these overlays on the historical and architectural walking tours of the city that took the Big Onion name; they take you past Harlem churches that were once synagogues, the nation's largest Chinese Catholic church that was a Lutheran house of worship, whole neighborhoods that were German, Italian, East European Jewish, and then Chinese in turn. Like the nation. New York has opened its arms to immigrants, then fretted that the new arrivals would ruin the culture. Peter Stuyvesant, the irascible, peg-legged governor of the Dutch West India Company's New Netherlands colony—which included most of what is now New York State, New Jersey, and parts of Delaware and Connecticut—complained constantly to his superiors in Holland about the riffraff he was asked to rule. The one thousand or so colonists in his capital. New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, spoke eighteen different languages. Stuyvesant had Quakers tortured for their strange ways and English tongue, ousted Swedish interlopers from their Delaware River settlement, and led expeditions against neighboring Indians. But Stuyvesant could not hold back the English, who were busy gobbling up the northeastern corner of the New World. In 1664, without firing a shot, English Colonel Richard Nicolls convinced Stuyvesant to surrender New Netherlands without a fight. Nicolls immediately changed the colony's name to "New York" in honor of James, the Duke of York, who had dispatched his four warships. The English, however, would prove to be no more successful at suppressing the culture's polyglot influences, and the Americans who succeeded them rarely tried. Today more than 130 languages and dialects are heard in teeming New York. Why did New York, and not Plymouth, Jamestown, or, for that matter, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Boston, get to be the "world's capital city" and its acknowledged financial center, a towering axis of the arts, and the cramped home to nearly eight million people? In four words: pragmatism, rivers, moxie, and tolerance. The Dutch already had a grip on the island that an unknown Englishman, who explored the Lower Hudson River two years before Henry Hudson arrived in 1609, had labeled "Man-ahatin." Dutch West Indias' agent, Peter Minuit, bought the entire island from Native Americans in 1626 for sixty guilders' worth of goods. That translates into a few hundred, or perhaps as many as one thousand, of today's dollars. Oliver E. Allen notes in New York New York, his comprehensive history of "The World's Most Exhilarating & Challenging City," that "to the Algonquin Indians who peopled the area, as to most Indians, land never belonged to any person or group, and all 'purchases' were regarded as temporary. The trouble was, the Indians never got a chance to renegotiate." Allen estimates the 1990 value of Manhattan real estate at $30 billion. Most of the British colonies were founded as overtly religious enterprises, or as havens from Old World persecution. But from the beginning, New Netherlands was a business venture. Commerce, not ideology, has called the tune ever since. Poking around the coastline of North America on behalf of the Dutch in 1609, English explorer Henry Hudson marveled at the wide. Joseph Stella's 1939 oil The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme is owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art. More than twenty workers died building the world's first steel suspension bridge— including its German-born designer, engineer John Roebling. Many laborers suffered attacks of the bends working in the underwater caissons that became footings for the bridge's towers.