The Building of Manhattan Read online

  All sales of real estate had to be approved by the authorities to prevent fraud. Moreover, in 1655 a commission of four surveyed the entire town, with orders to straighten out streets and fix the location of lots. They not only laid out seventeen streets, they surveyed and fixed prices for the lots.

  One building contract is described in I. N. Phelps Stokes’ The Iconography of Manhattan Island: “Isaac de Foreest registers at the office of the provincial secretary a contract made between him and two English carpenters ... for building for him a dwelling house 30 feet long and 18 feet wide with 2 transom windows and 2 round windows, 4 girders with brackets and 2 free girders, one partition, one passage way tight inside and outside, and the entire house tight all around, to construct in the same house a pantry and three doors. Together with a tobacco house 60 feet long with the inside work: 1 small kitchen 20 feet long and 16 feet wide covered with clapboards, also an English chimney. Likewise to cover the dwelling house in such a manner as to be secure against water and snow.’ The carpenters are to be paid 300 Carolus guilders for the job.”

  In the contract for another house, to be 60 feet long by 24 feet in width, Jan Damen agreed to provide builder Jeuriaen Hendrick-sen and his men “with provisions and drink until the work is completed,” in addition to payment.

  There was a distinctive feature about these houses that gave New Amsterdam the look of a typical Dutch town — the houses all had steep roofs and many had stepped gables rising right up to the roof peak.

  Seal of the Town of New Amsterdam, 1654, showing the beaver, its trading lifeblood. In 1626, 7,258 beaver skins were shipped to Holland. In 10 years that number had doubled. Skins were used as money—one skin was worth eight guilders, a little more than three dollars. Indian wampum, which the Dutch called “seawan,” was made from seashells. “Manhattan wampum,” which had a value in Dutch coinage, was a superior polished seashell.

  WOOD, STONE, AND BRICK

  Wood was plentiful on Manhattan Is-was plentiful on Manhattan land. It provided firewood for the open fireplaces over which the housewives did all their cooking and which heated the homes. It provided the heavy beams that framed the houses, the roof shingles, and the clapboards that enclosed the walls of the wooden houses.

  The furniture was made of wood, as were many of the utensils, the hooks and door hinges, barrels, tubs, pumps, windmills, wagons, wagon wheels, and boats. Hardwoods were especially plentiful. Even the gears for the wind- or water-powered sawmills—which as early as 1633 had been set up on Manhattan Island—were fashioned out of hardwood.

  The carpenters—the ship’s carpenters, the woodworkers, the wheelwrights, the barrel makers—and the other craftsmen used simple wooden hand tools with metal cutting edges to saw, cut, and fit the wood used in their trades.

  Joints were especially closely fitted, to give rigidity to the frame of the house, as the beams were held together with wooden pins hammered into carefully positioned holes.

  In the early years these workmen had to import all their tools, handmade nails, bricks, plaster, and glass. But very quickly brick kilns, as well as sawmills, were set up along the Hudson River. By the 1650’s even glass was being made locally in New Amsterdam.

  FORT AMSTERDAM

  STUYVESANT SURRENDERS

  In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam as the new director general of New Netherland, responsible for maintaining authority in all the land between the Delaware River in the south and the Connecticut River in the northeast.

  New Amsterdam was the territory’s biggest settlement and its center of government. The rest of New Netherland was mostly unbroken wilderness. A few trading posts had been established, notably Fort Orange— now Albany, New York.

  These were turbulent years for the Dutch. English settlers were moving onto their land, Indians were sometimes on the warpath, Swedish settlers tried to colonize their Delaware River lands, and they were losing their large colony in Brazil to the Portuguese. In Europe, the Dutch and the English were at war from 1652 to 1654.

  In New Amsterdam itself Peter Stuyvesant issued legislation and orders, administered justice, assigned land to the settlers, arranged the daily life of the town, and supervised the militia. His overbearing manner brought protests and, in 1653, a change for New Amsterdam: a city council and a government for the town, to be administered separately from the rest of New Netherland.

  These Dutch were good merchants and traders but they had neglected their defenses. One day in 1664, four English ships anchored in the harbor and demanded the surrender of the town “Scituate upon the Island commonly knowne by the Name of Manha-toes.”

  Faced with this ultimatum, and with inadequate means of defense, the influential men of the town persuaded Stuyvesant to do the sensible thing and turn the town over to the English. Alone in his protestations and with less than a day’s supply of cannon shot, the one-legged Stuyvesant surrendered. The English promptly took possession of the town and renamed it New York.

  The changeover was an easy one—the Dutch and everyone else retained full property and inheritance rights, and business went right on as usual.

  Nine years later, for a few months, the Dutch navy seized the town once more and renamed it New Orange. Finally, by treaty, the English again were in possession of all of New Netherland and the small town on the tip of Manhattan Island.

  The Dutch, whose influence would be felt for many generations to come, had ruled for about 40 years. The population of New York was less than 2,000 people.

  1664: NEW AMSTERDAM IS NOW NEW YORK

  The English had taken possession of a boisterous, contentious, and frequently dangerous town, renamed for their own Duke of York. Properly laid-out streets with their stepped roof houses, vegetable gardens, and grazing areas for domestic animals seemed secure behind the northern defensive “waal,” which ran in a straight line from river to river.

  Yet only nine years earlier, in 1655, nearly 2,000 Indians of the Hudson River tribes had gone on a three-day rampage, burning farms on Manhattan Island. Staten Island, and New Jersey, and threatening New Amsterdam itself. More than 100 Dutch settlers had been killed; more than 150 others—mostly women and children—had been captured and hundreds of cattle killed or driven off. The outlying settlers had fled to safety behind this wall of the fortified community. By 1699 the Indians had ceased to be a threat and the town had been built beyond the “waal,” which was torn down. In 1709, by ordinance, a slave market was erected at the foot of “Wall” Street, “at which place all negro and Indian slaves to be let out to hire, or to be sold. took their stand.” Today’s Wall Street area is the financial center of the city and the nation.

  COLONIAL NEW YORK: 1664-1783

  Fire was the great destroyer of early New York. In September 1776, only days after Washington’s army had retreated from Manhattan Island, a disastrous fire swept through the city, leaving one-fourth of it in ruins. St. Paul’s Chapel, at Broadway and Fulton Street, survived that fire and is today the oldest public building, in continuous use, in the city. It was built in 1766 of Manhattan-mica-schist and brownstone.

  New York grew slowly under the Eng- lish: from 1,500 people in 1665 to nearly 25,000 in 1775. It lived through the French and Indian War, epidemics of smallpox and yellow fever, lack of adequate pure water. appalling sanitary conditions, occupation by military forces, and the American Revolution of 1776-83.

  Through it all, buildings were torn down, or leveled by fire. Some of the early Dutch stepped-roof buildings would last until the Great Fire of 1845, but the city was now English and it took on a new look as it prospered and expanded.

  Areas of the city began to be associated with specific activities: a shipping and waterfront area, a business district, warehouses, a light manufacturing center. The residential areas were divided according to wealth and social position. Obnoxious trades such as tanning and the slaughtering of animals were kept at the far edges of the ever-growing town.

  Travel was slow and difficult, hindering
the northward expansion of the town. When pressure for building space became insistent, the town even sold lots under the East River. Merchants bought the lots, filled them in with dirt and rubble, and built a new business district. Today, that once underwater area is Water Street, two blocks inland.

  During the American Revolution, New York City became the key military position controlling the Hudson River and separating the New England Colonies from the Southern Colonies. As the vital strategic center for fighting the rebellious Americans, New York was occupied by the British for the entire seven years of the war.

  War itself came to Manhattan Island on September 15, 1776, when a British naval barrage drove Washington’s men from positions along Kip’s Bay, between present-day 34th and 42nd streets. Washington reorganized his army at Harlem Heights and held off a British attack there. But within weeks he was outflanked and abandoned the island, leaving the British in control.

  Beginning in that year, 1776, New York became a camp for the British army, a prison for captured American soldiers, a haven for runaway slaves, and the refuge for thousands of Loyalists who opposed the Revolution and had left their homes elsewhere in the Colonies for the safety of the city.

  It was a city in turmoil, and it was a desperate time for its inhabitants. When the war ended in 1783 with the Americans victorious, the defeated British officers and soldiers, and perhaps as many as 35,000 Loyalists and free blacks, passed through the embarkation port of New York City. Some went north into Canada, some to the West Indies, and some went back to England.

  The exodus took eight months, and then on November 25, 1783: “in the Morning the American Troops marched from Haerlem, to the Bowery Lane. They remained there until about One o’Clock, when the British Troops left the Posts in The Bowery, and the American troops marched into, and took possession of the City.”

  New York city was prostrate — in ruins from Trinity Church to the Battery. Its population was half of what it had been seven years earlier. There was a desperate shortage of housing and of buildings of any kind. This 1767 map shows the city’s old defense fort still standing on the tip of the island. By 1789 most of it had been torn down. allowing use of the dirt to enlarge the Battery, and Broadway to be extended to the water’s edge.

  Street names in the city often underwent name changes in the early years, sometimes for patriotic reasons. After the Revolution, King’s College, which had been founded in 1754, became Columbia College, now Columbia University. King Street became Pine Street, Duke Street became Stone Street, and Little Queen Street became Cedar Street.

  Manhattan’s largest natural freshwater pond was the Collect Pond, called by the Dutch “Der Kolek” — “Rippling Water.” Once full of fish and fed by springs of great purity from a depth of 60 feet, it was surrounded by hills and drained into both the East River and the Hudson. Indians left mounds of shells there.

  Tanneries, slaughterhouses, and breweries all helped to pollute the pond; by 1815 the hills had been leveled and the pond was filled in.

  MECHANICKS, SLAVES, AND APPRENTICES

  New York began the task of recovery. As a seaport city of many nationalities it had always attracted people who were eager to show their worth in commerce, the professions, and as craftsmen. It was a city of opportunity. It was also a city of great contrasts.

  There were black slaves — 14 percent of the population. There were indentured servants and there were apprentices.

  Laborers worked from sunup to sundown, with few comforts. Unless they owned land or tenements worth at least £20 in their own or their wife’s name they could not vote for city office holders. They also had to be twenty-one, a freeman of the city for the preceding three months, and have had lived in the ward where they voted for at least one month.

  The construction workers who had the sheer physical job of rebuilding the city still depended on their own muscle power. They were aided by block and tackle, wheels, pulleys, counterweights, and the pulling power of horses and oxen to move and to raise heavy timbers, brick and mortar, and large blocks of stone. Until 1786 even the nails were handmade.

  In England, James Watt had invented his steam engine. In Manhattan, in 1796, an inventor experimented with a steam-powered paddle boat in the city’s Collect Pond. But at the end of the 18th century, physical strength was still the force that built the city’s new mansions, warehouses, government buildings, and other structures.

  The free laboring man now formed fraternal organizations for particular trades. These were created for social reasons, to improve working conditions, and to help fellow workers in time of illness—even to provide funeral expenses. More than thirty skilled trades were included in The New York Mechanick Society.

  THE APPRENTICE

  Some families paid for their children to be apprentices. Others, orphans or children unable to care for themselves, were bound to a master for a specified number of years — to live with, and work for, the master while learning his trade or skill.

  In 1788 an act was passed to regulate the treatment of apprentices:

  “by which it was provided that no master should compel his apprentice to sign any bond or make oath not to set up the same trade, under penalty of £40 fine. An infant was to be bound only until 21 years of age except in the case of binding for the payment of passage money [from Europe], under which circumstances the age limit was extended to 24 years. On the other hand, an apprentice refusing to do his duty was to be committed to the Bridewell [the jail for the poor] until willing to work, and those absenting themselves from work were to serve double the time of their absence or to make satisfaction in some other way.”

  THE INDENTURED SERVANT

  To secure passage from Europe to America, penniless people had to work for those who bought their passage, for a specified number of years. Many ran away before their time was up: rewards were offered for their capture and return.

  THE SLAVE

  Eleven black slaves were brought to New Amsterdam by the Dutch West India Company in 1626 and their labor helped build Fort

  Amsterdam. Thereafter blacks as slaves were a part of Manhattan labor and life until July 4, 1827, when New York State declared all slaves within the state to be free.

  A slave market existed in the 1700’s at the foot of Wall Street. Advertisements for the sale of male and female slaves, with rewards for the return of runaway slaves, were frequent all through the 1700’s, while some other owners manumitted — or freed—their slaves. There were freed slaves who were granted land in Manhattan by the Dutch West India Company as early as the mid-1600’s.

  In 1788 an act was passed by the state regulating the treatment of slaves. Among other things, it provided that:

  “every negro, mulatto, or mestee who was a slave at that time, should remain so for life, unless manumitted, and that the children of slave women should be slaves. Selling any slave brought into the state after the 1st of June 1785 was punishable by a fine of £100 and the freeing of the slave.... Employing, or harboring a slave without his master’s permission was forbidden under a penalty of £5 for every twenty-four hours he was detained up to his value, and if the slave were lost the person harboring him was liable for his value. No one could trade with a slave, without his master’s permission, under penalty of forfeiting £5 and three time the value of the goods traded, while selling liquor to a slave, without the owner’s permission, was punishable by 40 shillings fine.”

  Additional provisions of the act stipulated the conditions for freeing slaves: they could not become the responsibility of the city due to age or infirmity, and they had to be capable of supporting themselves.

  CAPITAL OF THE NEW NATION: 1785-1790

  Seal of the City of New York, 1784

  On the 23rd of April, 1789, George Washington made a spectacular entry into New York on a specially built barge, magnificently festooned and rowed across the water from the New Jersey shore by thirteen men in white uniforms. He landed near the foot of Wall Street. Salutes of thirteen guns were fired b
y boats and shore batteries. The ships, docks, and streets were thick with cheering people.

  George Washington had arrived in New York to take up residence and, on the 30th of April, to take the oath of office as the first president of the United States. New York was the capital of the new nation.

  It was a short-lived honor. The Constitution had given Congress the power to establish the permanent seat of government— which it did, in the building of a new city for government affairs only: Washington, D.C.

  New York was a city of trade, business, and commerce. It was now the largest city in the nation. With its great natural harbor, and freed from the war and its restrictions, it was rapidly overtaking Boston and Philadelphia as the busiest shipping port in the nation. Its merchants were again sailing to far-off lands, even to the tea-ports of China.

  Looking up Broad Street toward Wall Street and Old Federal Hall, where, on the upper balcony, Washington took the oath as president. After use as New York’s City Hall, the building was torn down in 1812.

  New York City began to expand in size and in population. The census of 1790 for the city and county listed 8,500 white males older than 16 years, 5,907 males under sixteen, 15,254 white females, 1,101 other free persons, and 2,364 slaves.

  The city streets were narrow and dirty, and many of them were impassable. New laws imposed a fine of 40 shillings on any householder not keeping his walk and road under repair. The footpath on each side of the street had to be one-fifth the width of the street, paved with brick or flatstone, and curbed. The cartway between had to be arched and paved.