Brief History of New York City
After around one year, I finally decided to bring my blog up to date. This post is part of my dissertation about The Myth of New York City in Paul Auster's works. this post is a brief history of New York City . and I finally decided to choose my field of work as a researcher in American Studies. This field is Urban Studies. This dissertation was the first step in my way.
New York As a City
As E.B.White mentioned, “in New York the changes are endless” (25); according to this quotation, it can be concluded that talking about New York’s conditions and characteristics during the history is a kind of undue work. Because many things in the city has been disappeared. But as he mentioned in the foreword of his book, Here is New York, “the essential fever of New York not changed in any particular, and I have no tries to make revisions in the hope of bringing the thing down to date. To bring New York down to date, a man would have to be published the speed of light” (17).
Clearly, it is not possible. Because of those unchangeable things in New York City, knowing history of the city is as much important as wandering through the streets in 2010. To approve this claim, it can be quoted form Lankevich who introduce New York as an important center of American life and a template of American society. He says: “The main characteristic of New York, from its origin as a small Dutch town to the dominant urban complex of modern times, has been continuous and rapid change. Because of importance of this city, by examining its history or one of the aspects of its history or society, we may be able to understand better what America was, is, and, might become”(Lankevich 1)
Europeans found New York, as the city is known today, in 16th century. “In 1524 the great sails of Giovanni Verrazano, the Italian sailor-explorer who had been hired by the King of France appeared in New York Bay, it was the first known European to sight what today we call the Narrows at the entrance of New York Harbor” (Mushabac & Wigan 3)
Before entrance of European invaders, New York City belonged to Native Americans known as the Lenape. They live in this area 11, 000 years before Giovanni Verrazano sailed through the Narrows. They were fragmented and lost their lands. For the new comer who had taken possession of these lands, this is the time to choose a name. As Maeder narrates in his book, Big Town, Big Time, Dutch’s coined this city:
The new land might have become New France or it might have become New Spain when the sailor Gomez was fleetingly interested in the place. Instead, once the canny Dutch merchants who had dispatched Henry Hudson to the land across the sea, the place at the mouth of Hudson’s great river became New Netherland and in May 1623 the first permanent European inhabitants of New Netherland arrived abroad a Dutch vessel named the New Amsterdam. (Maeder 2).
But this name had not an eternal destiny. In 1664, Charles II decided to present this colony his brother the Duke of York. As Lankevich narrates: “Stuyveasand, governor of New Amsterdam, learned that king Charles II of England had granted to his brother James, the duck of York and Albany, a vast tract of land” (20). Stuyveasand was the loser of this battle. “The English had taken “the whole of New Netherland” and immediately called the same by the name of York” (21).
In contrast to Dutch era, English men involved with colonists’ protests. British taxation made colonists angry and this cause to tensions in New York. These tensions were the preface of American Revolution in 1776. New Yorkers were won this time. After revolution, Hamilton began to rebuild the city as Georg Washington’s secretary of the treasury. “In 1788, New York City served as the new nation’s first capital from 1785 to 1790. Even after moving government to other cities, New York was to remain an important economic and social center of the country. It would eventually overtake Boston as America’s largest City”(Kupperberg 47).
The decade of 1800 was the time for constructing. Central park was built in 1855; German-born engineer designed Brooklyn Bridge. The population raised and the city needed to an efficient transportation system, thus Grand Central Terminal was built. Immigration is another phenomenon in 19th century. In this time, “successive waves of immigrants from Europe led to a very rapid population increase which remains one of the dominant themes of American history” (Cannon and Fletcher 40).
The process of constructing continued to 20th century.
New York’s shape was hardly changed in 20th century. The reason was a urban planner, Robert Moses. The life of many New Yorker was influenced by his work. Marshal Berman describes his impact on city in his book, The Experience of Modernity, and portrait his works in Bronx. New York in the ’60s was the kingdom of intellectuals who were located in Greenwich Village. New York was an island for Avant-gardism; Bob Dylan, Abstract Expressionism and people who known as Homosexuals belongs to this decade of New York History.
In second decade of this century, New York experienced an economic shock. Lankevich argues that “during 1960s and 1970s the economic tide was running against a city that still earned 10 percent of all the money made in America and was home to ninety-six of the fortune 500 corporations” (214).
In last years of second millennium, a famous New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani, tried to fight with crime. He wanted to record New York City as safest city in the world. But September 11, 2001 attack disappointed him.
Bibliography:
Cannon, G., & Fletcher, E. J. Canada. Clermont-Ferrand: Michelin, 2007.
Kupperberg, Paul. A Primary Source History of the Colony of New York (Primary Sources of the Thirteen Colonies and the Lost Colony). New York City: Rosen Central, 2005.
Lankevich, George. New York City: A Short History. London: NYU Press, 2002.
Mushabac, Jane, and Angela Wigan. A Short and Remarkable History of NYC. First Edition ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999.
Maeder Jay. Big Town, Big Time. Champaign: Sports Publishing Llc, 1998.
White, E. B. Here Is New York. New York: Harper& Bros, 1949.
