PARADISE

Blame it on Henry Hudson, a British born but Dutch bankrolled mariner, and the crew of the Half Moon, an eighty-five foot, three-masted galley. In September, 1609, on a disoriented expedition in search of the elusive Northwest Passage to the Orient, he stumbled upon the river that now bears his name. (Henry was “...mostly good at getting lost.”)

Half Moon in Third Quarter
Phase, http://en.wikipedia.org

The land was paradisaical: “Boats crossing the bay were escorted by schools of playful whales, seals and porpoises. Twelve-inch oysters and six-foot lobsters crowded offshore waters, and so many fish thrived in streams and ponds that they could be taken in hand. Woods and tidal marshlands teemed with bears, wolves, foxes, raccoons, otters, beavers, quail, partridge, forty-pound wild turkeys, doves ‘so numerous that the light can hardly be discerned where they fly’ and countless deer ‘feeding or gamboling or resting in the shades in full-view.’ Wild swans were so plentiful ‘that the bays and shores where they resort appear as if they were dressed in white drapery.’ Blackbirds roosted together in such numbers that one hunter killed 170 with a single shot; another bagged eleven sixteen-pound gray geese in the same way. ‘There are some persons who imagine that the animals of the country will be destroyed in time,’ [wrote one traveler] but this is an unnecessary anxiety.”

Manhattan on the North River (now Hudson River), c. 1639,
http://en.wikipedia.org

 

Hudson’s reports on fur trade with the natives had an almost invariable effect on continental Dutch merchants: Visions of guilder signs in the shape of beaver and otter pelts danced in their heads. (“On the production end, hat makers used mercury to separate fur from felt, leading to routine mental illness and, perhaps, to the phrase ‘mad as a hatter.’”) Not only that there was the added incentive of confronting their maritime arch rivals, the British, in the area of global trading. However: “…the Dutch merchants did not rush across the Atlantic to reap the rewards. A trip to the New World was a major investment, which entailed considerable risk. It took time to plan a trip, gather a crew, and outfit the ship. As a result the first fur-trading voyage to follow in Hudson’s wake didn’t leave Amsterdam until 1611.”

The 1626 Purchase of Manhattan Island by Peter
Minuit, Courtesy of the New York Public
Library, www.nypl.org

In 1622 the Dutch West India Company, one of the first, if not the first global corporation, was founded. (“You can sort of think of the West India Company as Exxon with guns.”) Settlers began to trickle in, “...pitching on the inhuman waves in...well-crafted but still frightfully vulnerable wooden vessels, banging around in the narrow and rheumatic below-decks, with pigs rooting and sheep bleating...at every slamming swell, with the animal reek and their own odors of sickness and sour filth, each clutching his or her satchel of elixirs to ward off the plague, the devil, shipwreck, and ‘the bloody flux.’ The very names of their ships—Fortune, Abraham’s Sacrifice—signaled the two poles of hope and fear that governed them.”  

Delaware Lenape Jennie Bobb and
daughter Nellie Longhat, Oklahoma,
1915, http://en.wikipedia.org

In 1626 Peter Minuit (pronounced “Min-Wee”) sealed the deal and “purchased” the 14,000-acre island from what was “...probably a northern branch of the Lenni Lenape Indians....” for a little under $60. “It’s pretty clear why this particular sale...became a legend: the extreme incongruity, the exquisitely absurd price. It is the most dramatic illustration of the whole process of stripping the natives of their land. The idea that the center of world commerce, an island packed with trillions of dollars’ worth of real estate, was once bought...for twenty-four dollars’ worth of household goods...speaks to our sense of early American history as the history of savvy, ruthless Europeans conniving, tricking, enslaving, and bludgeoning innocent and guileless natives out of their land and their lives. It’s a neatly packed symbol of the entire conquest of the continent that was to come.”

 

William T. Sherman and Commissioners in Council with Indian
Chiefs at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, Photo by Alexander Gardener 1868,
http://en.wikipedia.org

The polyglot, static (under 400 souls including slaves) multilingual (eighteen at any given time) population “had a good claim to being the motliest assortment of souls in Christendom.” The place was a mess: chaotic, lawless, dilapidated, squalid and immoral. “Because the company had shown so little interest in promoting a permanent settlement, there were many more men than women, and too many of these men were footloose bachelors, down-and-out adventurers, fugitive husbands, runaway servants, and waterfront riffraff who had decided to spend a few years toiling for the company while on their way from wherever to God-only-knows.”

Collier's Greater New-York, Petrus
Stuyvesant, Courtesy of the New York
Public Library, www.nypl.org

By 1647 the powers-that-be back in the lowlands had seen enough of the incompetence and corruption that passed for “management” in their now-failing commercial outpost. They brought in their top gun, thirty-four-year-old Peter Stuyvesant, and instructed him to “whip the place into shape.” Stuyvesant, who had lost his right leg to cannonball during a naval battle as a soldier for-hire—“before losing consciousness, he ordered the siege to continue”—believed God had spared his life for a mission such as this one. Intelligent, intense, willful, short-tempered, honest, hawk-nosed and no-nonsense, he informed town elders on the day of his inauguration, “I shall govern you as a father to his children.”

And, govern he did, although with unwanted assistance from Adriaen van der Donck, a visionary lawyer, who virtually forced Stuyvesant to create the first municipal government in North America on February 2, 1653. “The city dates its political foundations...to this moment,” according to writer/historian Russell Shorto. 

The Bed by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893,
Courtesy of the Yorck Project,
http://en.wikipedia.org

Politics, as we know, makes strange bedfellows—none stranger than Stuyvesant and van der Donck. But, they got results: “Roads were paved with cobbles. Brick houses replaced wooden ones; tile roofs came in...and the old thatch ones were banned as a fire hazard [along with wooden chimneys].... A proper wharf was built off of Pearl Street [, and a] street survey...was commissioned.... [T]he town picked itself up.... [S]treets and stoops were swept clean. Trees were aesthetically pruned.... An order went out to all farmers to tear down pigsties and chicken coops that occupied prominent roadside positions. Owners of vacant lots on the main streets were slapped with an extra tax to encourage them to develop their property.... The place was maturing thanks to largely municipal leadership.... It gave people a sense that this island on the edge of the wilderness, which had always veered sharply between lawlessness and tyranny, had become a place where families could let their dreams take root.”

Animals of New Netherland, facsimile from van der Donck's "Vertoogh,"
Courtesy of the New York Public Library, www.nypl.org

Stuyvesant and the municipal government created the first school, hospital, orphanage, prison, fire department and post office not to mention the taxes to pay for them. Protective manufacturing and retail pricing regulations were instituted along with a three-year residency requirement to conduct business in town. Garbage was collected (putting a lot of pigs out of work) and speed limits enforced. (Drivers had to get down off their wagons, hold their horse reins and walk, except on what would become Broadway, where you just had to slow down.) Knife fighting in public and fornicating with Indians (presumably anywhere) were outlawed, so was drinking on Sundays. Bars (1 out of every 4 of the 342 structures in town) had to close by 9 p.m. Whorehouses had to close, period, and to add insult to injury, there was no shacking up before marriage.

Shearith Israel Synagogue, Courtesy
of the New York Public Library,
www.nypl.org

Interfaith and interracial marriages were not uncommon, and the town became, what you could call, “America’s first melting pot.” This despite Stuyvesant’s bigotry: “Cultural diversity management was about the last item on [the man]’s list of job skills, and it’s safe to say he was less than thrilled to see Manhattan’s streets becoming an ethnic kaleidoscope. Religion was at the root of it: [He] despised Jews, loathed Catholics, recoiled at Quakers, and reserved a special hatred for Lutherans.” He tried to deport the Jews but the town’s more tolerant mother country—“the most progressive and culturally diverse society in Europe”—refused to grant him permission. Congregation Shearith Israel went on to become the oldest existing congregation in America.

Overall, a feeling of security prevailed. Like most feelings of security, it was short-lived.

See, life in mid-17th century North America was much like it is today––there were enemies wherever you looked—and Stuyvesant was looking at at least 3,000 hostile Indians. Not only that certain British colonies were too close for comfort. (Looking South, he had Maryland and Virginia, looking North, Massachusetts and Connecticut.) By 1652 the British and the Dutch were at war on other fronts, and the Dutch presence in the New World, as far as the British were concerned, was “unwanted competition” on a good day. An attack was not only possible; it was probable.

Totius Neobelgii Nova et Accuratissima Tabula,
by Hugo Allard, New Amsterdam c. 1647,
http://en.wikipedia.org

[Somewhat Relevant Etymological Aside #1: The Dutch disparagingly referred to the New Englanders as ‘jan cheese.’ Etymological evolution brought us ‘jan kees’ and then, our own modern term: ‘yankees.’ Probably. First applied to the colonists in the French and Indian War by General James Wolfe to refer to his New England-born scouts, their lack of discipline and sloppy appearance, during the American Revolution, other Brits took up where he left off.

The lyrics of the original anonymous folk song, “Yankee Doodle,” mocked the colonists’ uniforms. Fops on either side of the Atlantic referred to powdered wigs and flamboyant style in general as “macaroni,” so calling a mere feather in a hat “macaroni” was “a deft little dig” at American style. It undoubtedly annoyed the hell out of the sartorially hypersensitive General Washington. Two could play at that game. In retaliation, the patriots rewrote the lyrics, adopted the song as more of an anthem and whipped their arrogant British asses.

Surrender at Yorktown, Courtesy of the New York Public
Library, www.nypl.org

 
During Gen. Cornwallis’ humiliating surrender at Yorktown “...the British evinced a petty, spiteful attitude toward the Americans, gazing only at the French soldiers until Lafayette prodded the band to strike up ‘Yankee Doodle,’ forcing the conquered army to acknowledge the hated Americans.... The entire wonder of the American Revolution was visible for all to see. It wasn’t the well-dressed French Army who were the true victors of the day, but the weather-beaten, half-clad American troops.”

George M. Cohan, Courtesy of
the New York Public Library,
www.nypl.org

Since the term was more often than not pejorative in the Civil War era, Southerners nicknamed Northerners “Yankees.”

Flash forward to the First World War, when George M. Cohan, who wrote “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” promises that “the Yanks are coming” in his 1917 hit song “Over There.” From then on all Americans, not just northern ones, are “Yanks,” and by the time of our post-Pearl Harbor’s entry into the Second World War, the word takes on a positive connotation....

It didn’t last long. Just two years after the war ended, protesters in South Korea were carrying “Yankee Go Home” signs, and that was only the beginning. Richard Nixon’s 1958 “goodwill tour” encountered rock-throwing students, who handed out leaflets that suggested he was a “Yankee warmonger” and further recommended “Death to Yankee Imperialists.”

Lou Gehrig, George Herman [Babe] Ruth and Tony
Lazarri, Courtesy of the New York Public Library,
www.nypl.org

All of which has nothing whatsoever to do with the 1929 Yankees, who were the first to wear numbers on their backs (reflective of their batting order): Ruth 3, Gehrig 4…until DiMaggio came around, and the consensus was the hell with it. The pinstripes, by the way, were chosen to make the Babester look slimmer.]

Anyway, New Netherland, the surrounding British colonies.... Where were we? 

The Dutch Republic was so worried about a possible British sneak attack—apparently, all mothers worry—that their authorities ordered defenses be strengthened forthwith. Stuyvesant and his only recently enshrined town magistrates decided “to surround the greater part of the City with a high stockade and a small breastwork.” Mother knows best. This protective wall, constructed of 12-foot high and 18-inch thick oak logs embedded into 3-foot deep post holes and sharpened to a nice point on the top, ran 2,340 feet from the Hudson to the East River. Funded by New Netherland rich folk and completed by July 1653, it was mostly built by—who else?—slaves.

Wall Street Sign, 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org

 
“We were brought here against our will to work, and work we did. In fact, we built the wall for which Wall Street is named. Not only literally but figuratively…it was the trade in African flesh that provided the fundamental capital on which Wall Street, the financial Wall Street, is built,” observes Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III.

The one, gaping hole in the plan? In 1664, the Brits attacked by sea (with four frigates and over 2,000 men) rather than over land. Big shock. It was obvious, and even verified, that the Dutch were heavily out-gunned and out-manned. Still Stuyvesant (“I’d rather be carried to my grave than surrender”) refused to give an inch.

Section of the Wall Street Palisade, Courtesy of the
New York Public Library, www.nypl.org

Once the townspeople got wind of the generous surrender terms the British were offering their less principled heads prevailed. (Stuyvesant tore up the document so that no one could read it. Pressed later, he handed over the pieces, which were then pasted together.) Ninety-three prominent merchants, including Stuyvesant’s seventeen-year-old son, petitioned the boss to change his mind good and soon. “For all these people, living peaceably under an English prince, who promised to continue the way of life they had fashioned, was patently better than fighting and dying.”

“Stuyvesant’s tragedy is that no sooner does he get this place all spiffed up and ready for action than the English sail in and take the place,” historian Mike Wallace points out. Reluctantly and at the eleventh hour, he surrendered his seventeen-year rule. (He would retire to a fruit farm in what’s now Greenwich Village.) The Dutch left the New World for gouda, and two days later, the British renamed New Amsterdam “New York” in honor of the King’s brother, the Duke of York.

Portrait of Washington Irving, 1809,
by John Wesley Jarvis,
http://en.wikipedia.org

[Somewhat Relevant Etymological Aside #2: In another half century or so, a Native New Yorker provided his city “with its first nickname”: Gotham. Washington Irving, studied law, passed the bar, never practiced, traveled in Europe for his health and realized he was a writer—a profession he defined, eons before the Onion, Stewart and Colbert as follows: “We are laughing philosophers and clearly of the opinion that wisdom, true wisdom, is a plump jolly dame.... [W]e write for no other earthly purpose but to please ourselves.” In a number of irreverent and droll (1807) essays that appeared first in the newspaper and then as a pamphlet, Irving calls Manhattan “Gotham,” a reference to the actual English town whose not so actual inhabitants had a reputation for “playing the fool” to get their way that “...served to underscore [Irving’s] depiction of Manhattan as a city of self-important and foolish people.” Imagine. Soon after his A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty became a bestseller, Irving became the first internationally known American author and the first American to earn his keep exclusively by writing. Narrated by the fictitious elderly Dutchman Diedrich Knickerbocker, a surname meaning “baker of marbles,” Irving put the Knick in the New York Knicks among other things.]

The Schenck-Crooke House (formerly located in the
Mill Basin Section of Brooklyn), 1934, Archetypal
of Dutch Colonial Architecture, http://en.wikipedia.org

“...by the last two decades of its existence, the Dutch colony centered on Manhattan had become a vibrant, voluble society—so much so that when the English took over Manhattan they kept its unusually free-form structures, ensuring that the features of the earlier settlement would live on.”

After the Revolutionary War, New York emerged as the nation’s financial center and temporary capital (not permanent, since Secretary of State Jefferson regarded it as “a sewer filled with all the depravities of human nature” and preferred the capital to be located in a malaria-infected, but at least, southern swamp). The Continental Congress set up headquarters on Wall Street, adjacent to 57 Wall Street, where Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury and Creator of the Bank of New York, was living with his wife and child.

Tontine Coffee House (Left) & Merchants' Coffee House (Right)
by Francis Guy, 1797, http://en.wikipedia.org

Brokers, at that time, held informal auctions twice a day in the Merchants’ Coffee House. (Summer auctions, held just outside, came to be known as the “curb market.”) Convinced that the process could be more refined, more modern, some of them met under a buttonwood tree on May 17, 1792 and hammered out a set of rules and regulations governing the sales of securities.

Drawing of Wall Street, Courtesy of Prints and
Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
USZC4-2461

The “buttonwood agreement,” as it was pastorally and misleadingly called, marked the birth of Wall Street. Built in 1793, only a year after the agreement, the Tontine Coffee House was to stockbrokers and merchants what Café Wha, The Gaslight, the Village Vanguard or The Bitter End were to musicians in the 60s and 70s. It was where you would go to congregate or confer, and so over time, The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) came to call it “home,” officially in 1817, unofficially much sooner. With the coming of the Civil War: “The old merchant economy [of New York], ruled by the importers, shippers, and wholesalers, was being superseded by a much bigger game, one that required far more capital…. Copious transfusions from Europe and a new breed of moneyman came to the fore to raise and manage the vast sums: the investment banker.”

Floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Courtesy of
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, U9-10548-6

Over the coming years the Dutch outpost would thrive and “...Wall Street...[would come to be] the nation’s money market, the focus of the implacable economic muscle that has made New York unquestionably the most powerful city in the world and has caused it to be idolized, feared, hated, and wondered at throughout the globe.”

Taken down in 1699 by real estate developers, who erected houses in its place, Stuyvesant’s wall was long gone, the lane alongside it paved over, hence Wall Street.

Almost precisely four centuries after the explorers and travelers told of a paradise inhabited by densely populated schools of fish, an inestimable number of game and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of beaver, otter, wild swans and doves, we should perhaps remind ourselves, “...You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.”

"...the way old Phoebe kept going around and around...
in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could've been there."
Central Park Carousel, by Michael Lewison

Bibliography

Allen, Oliver E.; New York, New York: A History of the World’s Most Exhilarating and Challenging City.
Bender, Thomas; New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time.
Brooks, Van Wyck; The World of Washington Irving.
Burns, Ric; New York, PBS Home Video.
Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace; Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.
Chernow, Ron; Washington: A Life.
Cramer, Richard Ben; Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life.
Dolin, Eric Jay; Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America.
The Eagles; “The Last Resort,” Hotel California.
Ellis, Edward Robb; The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History.
Gill, Jonathan; Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to the Capital of Black America.
Holt, Alfred H.; Phrase and Word Origins.
O’Connell, Shaun; Remarkable, Unspeakable New York.
Shorto, Russell; Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America. 
Still, Bayrd; Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present.

“...mostly good…”; Gill, 9
“Boats crossing....”; Burrows, 4
“On the production....”; Shorto, 76
“You can….”; Burns, PBS Home Video, DVD
“...pitching on….”; Shorto, 37
“...probably a….”; Ibid, 54
“It’s pretty….”; Ibid, 50
“New York....”; Burns, PBS Home Video, DVD
“…had a good…”; Burrows, 31
“Because the....”; Ibid, 34
“…whip the…”; Burns, PBS Home Video, DVD
“…before losing…”; Shorto, 147
“I shall….”; Allen, 23
“The city dates…”; Shorto, 258
“Roads were…”; Ibid, 266
“America’s first…”; Ibid, 272
“Cultural diversity…”; Ibid, 274
“...the most…”; Ibid, 6
“…a deft little dig…”; Burrows, 227
“…the British….”; Chernow, 418
“…the Yanks are…”; Cooper, 401
“…to surround the…”; Shorto, 260
“We were….”; Burns, PBS Home Video, DVD
“I’d rather….”; Ibid
“For all these people….”; Shorto, 300 
“Stuyvesant’s tragedy….”; Burns, PBS Home Video, DVD
“We are all….”; Bender, 123
“…served to underscore...”; Burrows, xii
“…by the last...”; Shorto, 6
“…a sewer….”; Burns, PBS Home Video, DVD
“curb market”; Burrows, 311
“The old merchant….”; Allen, l86
“…Wall Street [would come…”; Ibid, 1
“You call…”; The Eagles, “Last Resort”