🗽 A History of New York

New York did not come into being because anybody wanted to live there. It came into being because there was a good harbour. Everything else — the skyscrapers, the subway, the dollar slice, the eight hundred languages — is simply what happens when you funnel people through one throat for four hundred years.

An Island for Sixty Guilders

Before the Europeans came, the Lenape lived on the island. They called it *Manna-hata*, which most likely means "hilly island" — and hilly it was, until it was levelled two hundred years later to make room for streets.

In 1626 the director of the Dutch colony, Peter Minuit, bought the island for goods worth sixty guilders. That famous line about "twenty-four dollars for a handful of beads" comes from the nineteenth century, and almost everything in it is wrong: the exchange rate is invented, nobody mentioned beads, and above all — the Lenape had no notion that land could be sold. They were agreeing to share the use of it. The Dutch were signing a bill of sale. Both sides went home satisfied and one of them was mistaken.

Nieuw Amsterdam was the result: a few hundred people, a mill, a fort and a tavern. Even then, according to one Jesuit, eighteen languages were spoken here. The number has only gone up since.

The Wall That Became Wall Street

In 1653 the settlers began to fear the English and built a palisade across the island. It was built largely by enslaved Africans, whom the West India Company had been importing into the colony since the 1620s. The wall never stopped anybody and was eventually taken apart for firewood, but the street that ran along it is still called what it is called: Wall Street.

The English arrived in 1664 and did not have to fire a shot. Director Peter Stuyvesant — a soldier with a wooden leg and a temper nobody praised — wanted to fight, but his own burghers handed him a petition saying that they did not. He surrendered. The town got a new name, after the Duke of York, brother of the English king.

Three years later the Dutch and the English settled it for good at Breda. The Dutch kept Suriname and the little island of Run in Indonesia, because nutmeg grew on it, and let New York go. At the time it looked like an excellent piece of business.

The Year New York Was the Capital

The revolution went badly for the town. Washington lost it in 1776 after the battle of Long Island, a few days later nearly a quarter of the houses burned down, and the British then sat here for seven years. They left only on 25 November 1783, and New York went on celebrating that day for another hundred and fifty years.

Then came a period the city is still proud of: in 1789 the first American president took the oath at Federal Hall on Wall Street, and New York was the capital of the United States. For exactly one year. Then Congress agreed the capital would be somewhere else, and moved out. New York made up for it with money.

The Grid and the Canal

In 1811 a commission looked at Manhattan and decided there would be a grid. Twelve avenues, a hundred and fifty-five streets, no squares, no curves, nothing. It was a plan without a scrap of imagination and it was brilliant — a grid can be parcelled, sold and built on without thinking, which is exactly what the next hundred years consisted of. The one thing cutting diagonally across the whole island is Broadway, because it follows an old Lenape trail and nobody could be bothered to straighten it.

The real turning point, though, came in 1825, when the Erie Canal opened. Suddenly there was a water route from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, and it ended in New York. The cost of shipping grain from the Midwest fell to roughly a tenth. Boston and Philadelphia lost within a single decade, and New York was never second again.

Twelve Million People and One Door

Between 1892 and 1954 about twelve million people passed through the receiving station on Ellis Island — Irish, Italians, Jews from eastern Europe, Germans, Poles, Greeks. Processing took a few hours; around two per cent were turned away, mostly for illness. The story that officials changed people's names is a myth — names were copied from the ships' manifests. Immigrants changed them themselves, later and voluntarily.

They lived in tenements, where one window served three rooms and one toilet served a whole floor. What that looked like was first shown by the photographer Jacob Riis in his book *How the Other Half Lives* in 1890, because flash photography had just learned to work in the dark.

What brought change, though, was not reforming speeches but a single fire. In 1911 a hundred and forty-six people, mostly young immigrant women, burned to death in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. The emergency doors were locked so that the workers could not take fabric home. Out of that came the workplace safety rules that are still in force.

And in 1904 the subway opened. It cost a nickel and ran from City Hall to 145th Street.

The Park That Looks Like Nature

Central Park is not a surviving piece of landscape. It is a construction. Every hill, every pond and every apparently random boulder was put there by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, to a plan of 1858. Millions of cartloads of earth were moved and over a quarter of a million trees and shrubs were planted.

For the park to exist, a village had to disappear. On its site stood Seneca Village — about two hundred inhabitants, mostly free Black people who, unlike poor white tenants, owned their land, and with it the right to vote. In 1857 the city took it by eminent domain. A memorial has stood there since 2001.

The Race for the Tallest Building in the World

You can build upwards on Manhattan because hard rock called Manhattan schist lies beneath it. Two things were missing: the steel frame, which arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, and a lift a person would dare to get into. The second problem was solved in 1854 by Elisha Otis, who had himself hoisted into the air at an exhibition and then cut the rope in front of the audience. The car dropped a few centimetres and stopped. Sales took off.

Around 1930 a race broke out. The builders of the Chrysler Building had a steel spire secretly assembled inside the building, and when the competition on Wall Street thought they had won, pushed it up through the roof. It took ninety minutes. The Chrysler was the tallest building in the world for eleven months — then the Empire State Building beat it, put up in some fourteen months.

The timing was catastrophic. It opened in the middle of the Depression, stood empty for years, was nicknamed the *Empty State Building*, and did not turn a profit until after the Second World War. It held the record for forty years all the same.

Bankruptcy, Graffiti and One Party in the Bronx

The fifties and sixties belonged to Robert Moses, an official who never stood for election, never held a driving licence, and nevertheless decided where New York's expressways would go. He built parks, beaches and bridges; but his routes required about a quarter of a million people to be moved out. He was stopped only by the journalist Jane Jacobs, when she saved Greenwich Village from an expressway across lower Manhattan.

In the seventies the city went practically bankrupt. When Washington hesitated over help, the Daily News ran a headline that is quoted to this day: *Ford to City: Drop Dead*. The president never said it, but he lost New York at the next election. The subway was painted from top to bottom, in 1977 the power went out for twenty-five hours and there was looting.

And it was in exactly this period that the city produced two things that went round the world. In 1969 the customers of the Stonewall Inn stood up to a police raid for the first time, and today's pride marches are counted from that revolt. And on 11 August 1973, at a party in the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc played nothing but the drum break of one record over and over on two turntables, so that people could dance longer. That is the date from which hip hop is reckoned.

September the Eleventh and What Came After

In 1990 there were 2,245 murders in New York, an all-time high. The city had a reputation known even to people who had never been there. Since then the numbers have fallen so steeply that the causes are still argued over: policing tactics, the end of the crack epidemic, demographics, the economy. All that is certain is that they fell under every mayor, and that in 2017 the murder count dropped below three hundred — the lowest since the fifties.

Then came 11 September 2001. Two aircraft, two towers, 2,753 dead in lower Manhattan. The towers fell in under two hours and clearing the rubble took eight months. On their site there now stand two sunken pools with exactly the footprint of the original towers; the names of all the victims are cut into the rim, and the water falls down into a square opening whose bottom cannot be seen.

Michael Bloomberg, mayor from 2002 to 2013, ran the city like a company — which you can hold against him or to his credit, as you please. He banned smoking in bars and restaurants, built hundreds of kilometres of bike lanes, threw the cars out of Times Square, opened a park on an old elevated railway (the High Line), and secured a third term by having the law that forbade it changed. His era also saw the peak of the street-stop practice that a court ruled unconstitutional in 2013, because it fell almost entirely on Black and Hispanic New Yorkers.

In 2012 Hurricane Sandy flooded the subway tunnels with salt water. In 2020 New York was America's first great casualty of the pandemic: there was a field hospital in Central Park and every evening at seven people clapped for the medical staff from their windows. The city emptied out and then filled up again.

New York in Numbers

About eight and a half million people live here today and over eight hundred languages are spoken — it is the most linguistically diverse city in the world, and dozens of those languages have more speakers here than anywhere else. The subway has four hundred and seventy-two stations and runs around the clock, which is true almost nowhere else. More than a third of the inhabitants were born abroad.

The five boroughs were only joined into one city in 1898. Brooklyn was independent until then and the third largest city in the United States; the vote to join passed there by a few hundred votes, and part of Brooklyn still calls it "the great mistake of 1898".

And the tower that has stood beside the site of the World Trade Center since 2014 measures, spire included, 1,776 feet. That is not a coincidence and not a rounding error in the conversion to metres. It is a date.