Lower East Side History

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When the Duke of York arrived with four frigates and two thousand armed men in the harbor of the North River, as the Hudson River was then called, New York was still a sparse collection of Dutch-run farms and tiny villages, protected by a single mud-walled fort located where the old Customs House, now Museum of the American Indian,  stands at the southwest end of Manhattan, the island the Dutch had named "New Amsterdam." It was there on the sodden ramparts that Peter Stuyvesant stood stalwartly alone with peg-legged bravado, announcing to the burghers that he intended to lead the battle against the English forces arrayed along the bay.

No one joined him. As he retired to his farm -- today New York's East Village -- New Amsterdam became New York and the memory of its Dutch heritage would live mostly through the satirical caricatures invented by Washington Irving bearing little relation to authentic history.

If the Dutch instilled in New York its essential character of commercialism, diversity, liberalism, tolerance and even rowdiness, the English contributed administrative order commensurate to a growing city diversifying into global industries (most prominently, sugar refining) -- no longer a single company's trading outpost. Under English order, charters were granted for important public institutions including Columbia College and New York Hospital. The town became a respectable, thriving city that could impress any visiting European with its accommodations, its culture, its wealth. English society also contributed a classism and classist devotion to opulence that has stuck with the city since.

If the conflict for the Dutch was primarily cohabitation with the natives, conflict for the English was trying to rule a defiant population. The rigidity of English classism dismayed the free-wheeling Dutch, who were unaccustomed to being mastered and administered. The feeling was mutual. The English frowned particularly upon the outrageous automony of the Dutch women, operating their own businesses, drinking in the taverns, speaking their minds freely and openly and independently. An English woman's place was in the home.

To the English, who, unlike the Dutch, did not free their slaves, equally disturbing must have been the widespread presence of free, land-owning Africans, and worse from the English point of view, the frequent consorting of those free Africans with the British-owned slaves.

These tensions broke out into rebellions against the English, long, long before the Boston Tea Party. First, in 1689, Jacob Leisler led a rebellion of Dutch, disgruntled with English strictures and worried that the English crown might pass into Catholic hands. Leisler controlled the city for eighteen months.

In 1712, a group of at least twenty-three Africans, both slave and free, burnt down an important British building and attacked the crowd gathered to douse the fire. In response, twenty-one blacks were executed, some burned alive; six more avoided a tortured execution by dispatching themselves. In response, the white authority strictly abridged the rights of blacks and effectively prohibited the freeing of slaves.

Twenty-nine years later, arsons appeared all over the island. Although little is known about the source of the arsons -- they were blamed on Africans and on a white couple who owned a tavern frequented by blacks – the bald fact of the arsons and the direction of blame tells the nature and depth of the tensions. That some eighteen blacks were hanged, thirteen burned alive and seventy deported, draws a livid picture of the pitch of fear and vengeance among the British in the burgeoning city.

Toward the close of British rule, New York was the site of one of the first battles of the American Revolution -- and one of Washington's many notable retreats -- after which the city was occupied by British and Hessian troops until the end of the war. Although the war and harboring of troops badly disrupted city life, New York recovered quickly as the nation's first capital and pre-eminent port. But the city's fate was not fully revealed until early in the 19th century with the digging of the Erie Canal.

(Written by Rob Hollander)

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