LifeinNewYork

Chapter 1

I’ll Take Manhattan

As my bus lurched toward the Lincoln Tunnel a sign proclaimed: no trucks over 12’ 6”. Underneath, in equally large letters, was painted: we mean it! Obviously I was entering a reckless, self-destructive society that couldn’t or, more likely, wouldn’t follow the kind of simple direction I’d learned in kindergarten. Back home in Buffalo, when my teacher told us not to eat paste she didn’t need to tack on a threat. And upon exiting the Thruway near the house where I grew up it wasn’t unusual to see a woman hand her entire purse over to the toll taker if she’d just had her nails done. After the Lincoln Tunnel sign I was half expecting a troll to ask me a riddle before I was allowed to enter the Big Bad City.

Having been raised minutes from the border I probably had more in common with Canadians than your average New Yorker. For instance, we Buffalonians know that if you play goalie they have to pick you for the team. Also, that peeing in a snowsuit to keep warm does not work the same way it does in a wetsuit – this will just make you colder and cause no small measure of embarrassment all around. I also knew that nose breathing in winter is better than mouth breathing for staying warm and hydrated. And that if you forget your lock de-icer you have to find a guy to pee in the lock for you. Clearly I was going to need a new skill set in this city of sharp right angles.

Of course, I wasn’t the first out-of-towner to arrive in Manhattan with nothing except high hopes. Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian

explorer and part-time pirate who was working for the French, dropped anchor in 1524. He was met by Native Americans who’d inhabited the area since around 10,000 BC, developing into the Iroquoian and Algonquin cultures. Verrazzano was followed by English explorer Henry Hudson, who was searching for a route to the Orient on behalf of investors from the Netherlands, and staked a land claim in 1609.

A local Lenni Lenape Indian told him the place was called Manna-hata, which is usually translated as “hilly island,” albeit another version holds that the name came from a similar Indian word for “place of general inebriation.” Eventually the hills would be mostly razed for development, but in its long and flamboyant history the city has certainly never lacked for spirits. That’s why there’s a famous cocktail called a Manhattan, while no one goes into a bar and orders a Minneapolis, a Des Moines, or a Moline.

The Dutch first settled in the lower part of Manhattan, now known as the Financial District, and it didn’t take long for the world’s most famous trade to occur. In 1626, Peter Minuit, the director of the Dutch colony, bought Manhattan from the Indians for goods valued at around $24. However, one could just as easily argue that the adroit traders here were the Indians since they didn’t believe in land ownership so much as stewardship – and therefore the Europeans were trying to buy something that couldn’t be bought in the first place.

Along with the desirable real estate came the magnificent place where the continent met the ocean, and created the world’s finest natural harbor. It was blessed with deep channels, sheltered ships from storms by extending inland for seventeen miles, and was rarely clogged with ice or else fogbound.

The colony of New Netherland, with its capital of New Amsterdam located at the southern tip of Manhattan, was exceptional from the start. Its reason for being didn’t stem from a search for religious freedom, an escape from political strife, or sons being drafted into the army but rather for the sole purpose of commerce. In fact, it would take eight years before anyone got around to building a church, though not because of any labor or lumber shortages, since several dozen saloons had gone up easily enough.

Originally focused around fur trading, but quickly expanding into agriculture and slave trafficking, commerce continued to trump conscience and political allegiances in the bustling settlement. Thus it also served as a popular haven for pirates, with the infamous Captain William Kidd owning a house on Pearl Street and a pew in Trinity Church. The citizenry was a rowdy polyglot, speaking eighteen different languages and frequenting a profusion of taverns, drinking clubs, and grogshops by the time the British came calling in 1664. Gathered in the harbor were only 450 soldiers aboard four ships, but the 8,000 residents couldn’t be bothered with whose face was on their money so long as they were able to keep making it. Director-General Peter Stuyvesant was forced to give up the whole settlement to the British so the locals could go right on farming and trading. Even Stuyvesant’s seventeen-year-old son welcomed the English invaders. The Dutch city was soon renamed after the Duke of York, brother to King Charles II.

Old Man Stuyvesant duly packed up and paddled back to Old Netherland to fill out the requisite “loss of colony” paperwork. However, after tidying up his career-ending affairs, Stuyvesant returned to his farm in the colony where he and his family spent their remaining years as full-fledged New Yorkers in the capital of capitalism. In return for his service, New York named the large residential development now located on the site Stuyvesant Town, or “Stuy Town” in local parlance, while Stuyvesant High School is one of the finest public secondary schools in the city, and a neighborhood in Brooklyn is called Stuyvesant Heights.

There were two wars still to come between the locals and their new landlords, but by 1820 New York was the leading port of entry for Europe’s exports to America. Its entrepreneurial residents were the first to get cutting-edge ideas and inventions from Europe and capitalize or improve on them. When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, the city became the transfer point for crops and merchandise going between the Midwest and the rest of the East Coast as well as Europe. Soon planters in the South began sending their cotton directly to wholesalers in New York, who would take their commissions and ship it onward to the mills