New York belongs not to America but the world, so it is appropriate that Frenchman Francois Weil is the author of the excellent A History of New York (2000). Weil’s preface notes that the book was written just prior to the 9/11 attacks which deliberately targeted New York’s diversity and was an attack on both capitalism and multiculturalism, the two central themes of the city’s history and identity. New York is a radical city of intense movement. It is not America, says Weil, but “a potentiality of America, perhaps its most intense one”.
That potentiality was real for the several thousand sedentary Amerindians that enjoyed New York’s large bay rich with islands and wildlife. It first came to the notice of curious Europeans with Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524, but especially after the Dutch arrived in 1610. The East India Company hired Englishman Henry Hudson to find a North West passage to Asia and he sailed up the “Great River” later given his name. He turned back at Albany and established friendly relations with locals, trading tobacco, furs and provisions. Word of potentially lucrative fur trade got back to Amsterdam and Dutch ships soon crowded the harbour. In 1614 merchants formed the New Netherlands Company and gained a trade monopoly. Ten years later a permanent trading post was established under the new West India Company creating a fortified settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan. Needing the goodwill of locals to survive, they recognised property rights and bought Manhattan for sixty florins.
The fur trade was not as lucrative as settlers hoped. New Netherlands was losing money until the company dropped its monopoly and encouraged open trade. New Amsterdam became a North American entrepot, trading sugar with the English West Indies and slaves with fellow Dutch colony Curacao. The tobacco trade with Virginia was also prosperous, if illegal due to British maritime laws. Newly enriched Dutch merchants fought with West India Company director-general Peter Stuyvesant who tried to impose rules and regulations.
London looked enviously at this booming North Atlantic port and considered seizing it during the First Anglo-Dutch war of 1652-54. When King Charles II was restored to the monarchy in 1660, he peremptorily gave New Netherlands as a present to his brother James, Duke of York. A naval squadron led by Richard Nicholls demanded the town’s surrender, which Stuyvesant agreed to, under pressure from merchants concerned about destruction. The city was renamed New York for its new master.
Though the Dutch recaptured the city in 1673 during another Anglo-Dutch War, English rule was codified by the 1674 Treaty of Westminster. Huguenot and English traders arrived, but the economy remained dependent on furs. Growth was slow and New York only had 10,000 inhabitants in 1737, behind Boston which commanded English port traffic, and Philadelphia which profited from Pennsylvania’s rich farmlands.
New York diversified. It was a favourite port of pirates who got provisions and repairs, while spending their gains in the taverns, brothels and shops. New York was Britain’s only permanent garrison in North America and its closeness to Canada made it a military nerve centre. Merchants capitalised on this to make fortunes during 18th century conflicts such as King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, the War of Jenkin’s Ear and War of the Austrian Succession. Merchant shipping exploded as New Yorkers grew wealthy supplying and equipping Caribbean fleets.
In 1755 England was at war again in North America in the French and Indian War. New York became the British Army and Navy’s “general store” and headquarters for the campaign. Merchants and artisans had military contracts to supply clothing, food and drink while soldiers and sailors took over the inns from pirates. After the 1763 Treaty of Paris, New York became a centre of colonial dissent especially when Britain enforced taxation of molasses and introduced the Stamp Act to tax publications. The New York Sons of Liberty fired the first shots of the revolution in 1770 in protest at having to feed the army garrison. In 1776 Washington’s Continental Army was defeated in New York by a superior British force which occupied the city for seven years. While the war disrupted North American trade, it stimulated links with Liverpool, London and Ireland that the city would retain at Boston’s expense in the new republic. New York also soared past Philadelphia thanks to waves of British immigrants. New York state’s last free Amerindians, the Iroquois, paid the price for supporting the British, ceding their lands and withdrawing to Canada. By 1785 New York hosted the Continental Congress and was, briefly, the nation’s first capital. New York captured the newly opened Cantonese tea and silk market and the city reaped the reward of American neutrality during the French revolutionary wars. Export trade soared from $2.7m in 1792 to $26m in 1807.
The war of 1812 was only a temporary setback and afterwards New York dominance increased thanks to English merchants anxious to sell accumulated wartime stock at the city’s vibrant auctions. In 1817 the Black Ball Line transformed transatlantic travel by establishing the first regular shipping line to Liverpool. The line owners’ revolutionary idea was to sail ships on a fixed schedule and not wait for full holds as previous passenger fleets did. At the expense of southern coastal ports, New York also captured the growing export cotton market to Britain, driven on by Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and the slave trade. Local craft and manufacturing industries sprang up as did sugar refineries to deal with Caribbean imports.
New York’s population grew to 123,000 by 1820. Its status as America’s “empire city” was confirmed in 1825 with the opening of the 363-mile Erie Canal. City mayor Clinton De Witt took up the idea of making New York “the granary of the world” in 1810 by linking Lake Erie with the Hudson River. “Clinton’s Ditch” was an instant success and gave the city unprecedented access to western markets. The Champlain Canal linking Lake Champlain and the Delaware and Raritan canals linking Philadelphia quickly followed, as did the Ohio, Miami and Wabash canals taking Ohio traffic from New Orleans. Traveller La Rochefoucald-Liancort said that of all American eastern seaboard cities, New York was “called by its position to the greatest destiny.”
Young steamboat captain Cornelius Vanderbilt took advantage of the end of monopolies on Hudson ferries and amassed a fortune before turning his attention to railroads. Trains were late arriving in New York thanks to the canal dominance with only one link to Philadelphia in the 1830s but by the 1850s a large network of railroads and bridges connected the city to all parts. Vanderbilt slowly bought all the lines into the city and built Grand Central station to service them in 1856. By then steamships were replacing sail on the harbour and routes to Europe grew: Liverpool, Bremen, Hamburg, Le Havre and Marseilles. The main import, apart from people, was European textiles; cotton and woollen clothes from England, linen from Ireland and Germany, silk from Lyon and luxury fabrics from Paris. Going the other way were cotton, grain, flour, potash and smoked meats.
Great shops emerged in the 1820s. The centre of commerce was Broadway where Irishman Alexander Turney Stewart opened his “Marble palace of fabrics and fashions” in 1846. It was a showroom for a wholesale business that Stewart ran on a national scale. His success prompted Rowland Hussey Macy to open a modest specialty store which thrived on low pricing and aggressive marketing. In 1888 Macy moved into a new large store on Broadway and 34th which then seemed remotely out of town but would pay dividends within a decade.
New York’s thriving port led to a financial district behind the docks at Wall Street. America’s economy ran largely on credit and financial agreements were negotiated at Wall Street with firms springing up specialising in banking, finance, speculation, insurance and information. A stock exchange began in 1820 spurred on by the Erie Canal. Abundant money, huge volumes of transactions and new techniques like call loans established New York as the leading bourse. The number of commercial banks exploded from 82 in 1860 to over 500 in 1883. They were helped by the 1863 National Bank Act which established a national currency backed by government securities and put New York at the top of the financial pyramid. John Pierpoint Morgan began working for a New York bank in the early 1860s before starting his own company. He grew wealthy liquidating civil war debt and became an influential adviser for railroad companies.
Economic omnipotence transformed the city. The city grew from 220,000 people in 1830 to one million by the civil war, before jumping to 2.5 million in 1890. Most were from Germany and Ireland. Irish resentment at being at the bottom of the ladder, exploded into the New York draft riots of 1863, and again seven years later with deadly sectarian riots during the Orange celebration of the Battle of the Boyne. The Irish were courted by Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine epitomised by “Boss” Tweed’s corrupt regime of the 1870s.
By then New York had conquered Manhattan and spread out to Brooklyn, Hoboken, Newark and Jersey City. The first suburban train line linked New York and Harlem in 1832 and by 1860 three million people used it every year. More still travelled by cumbersome horse-drawn omnibuses which were gradually replaced by faster horse-drawn streetcars, and the streets were congested by the 1860s. A decade later, the elevated railway began with six lines across Manhattan and Brooklyn. A 16-year engineering project came to fruition in 1883 with the Brooklyn Bridge towering over the East River, altering the scale of the city.
Buildings rose to meet the bridge. More than 20,000 six and seven storey buildings were constructed in the 1880s and 90s to house cramped New Yorkers. Shortage of space near Wall Street led to further vertical growth. Buildings reached 26 stories by 1890, 47 in 1908 and a “cathedral of commerce”, the Woolworth Building, rose to 60 stories in 1913. Woolworth architect Cass Gilbert saw it as “a machine to make the land pay”. A new business district grew around Grand Central Station in the 1920s. Here were new monumental structures, first the Chrysler Building, then the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. Launched just days before the 1929 financial crash, the Empire State became the world’s tallest building, but was three-quarters empty without an anchor tenant and failed to make money until the 1950s.
New York was at the cutting edge of American technology with AT&T subsidiary Bell Labs opening up in 1907. Research and development turbo-charged the telephone, electric and electronic industries in the following decades. But the garment industry remained the city’s major employer. Thousands of seamstresses worked from home in the 1850s when menswear dominated. By the 1920s the growth was in women’s clothing and the workshops of Manhattan made New York America’s fashion capital. Most factories moved to Brooklyn and Jersey as Manhattan real estate prices became prohibitive. As New York spiralled from 2.5 million people in 1890 to 7.5 million in 1940, the growth was outside Manhattan. City planners struggled to deal with the resulting megalopolis and industrial wastelands while highway infrastructure and private cars hollowed out the city. New suburb Radburn, New Jersey proclaimed itself “the city of the automobile age”. The subway, which began in 1904, countered the trend, but was a mishmash of private operators and unconnected lines until crusading mayor Fiorello La Guardia brought them under municipal control in 1940.
New York remained the city of dreams for migrants, now coming from across Europe. Italians flooded in from the 1890s and by 1910 the largest ethnic group was Russian and Eastern European Jews. Puerto Ricans arrived in significant numbers after the 1898 war with Spain while the great Southern migration during the Jim Crow era saw an explosion in the black population. Most settled in poorer parts of Harlem and Brooklyn, and over 30 years the idea of the “ghetto” emerged, fueled by racism and ruthless market forces. But poverty was everywhere during the Great Depression and even the city’s great lungs Central Park was home to a “hooverville” (shantytowns named in bitter reference to President Herbert Hoover). In the Roosevelt era, over a quarter of a million New Yorkers were employed on urban infrastructure initiatives. Again La Guardia was a driving force. The popular independent anti-Tammany mayor nicknamed “Little Flower” did more than most to preserve the city’s social fabric and his era was the “height of New York’s progressivism”.
Fritz Lang visited in 1924 and immortalised the futuristic city in his film Metropolis. Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was unimpressed when he arrived a year later. Machines and skyrises did not make a true industrial civilisation, he said, “intellectually New Yorkers are still provincial.” But economic dynamism did spill over culturally. Times Square became the base for travelling groups and vaudeville. Theatres proliferated alongside Tin Pan Alley music halls. They attracted a nightlife of hotels, restaurants and cabarets, temporarily forced underground during Prohibition. New York captured the new cultural industries of radio and television, but not cinema thanks to Hollywood’s dominance. Despite Mayakovsky’s disdain, an intellectual tradition emerged led by Walter Lippman, Enza Pound and Gertrude Stein. In Greenwich Village, avant garde painters, writers and rebels mixed in studios and cafes and read the New Yorker. Sculptor Gertrude Whitney became an influential patron of the arts and founded her own museum after the Metropolitan Museum refused to house her collection. Black cultural heritage found voice in jazz, which began in the south but became synonymous with Harlem.
After the Second World War devastated Europe, the “American century” was in full swing and New York was at its heart. The new United Nations headquarters symbolised the city’s worldwide calling. Yet paradoxically the city benefitted little from the new postwar order as the city’s advantages were offset by high costs of production. New York’s workshops closed down, as did factories, breweries and the Navy yard. The demolition of the magnificent Pennsylvania railway station in 1963 and its replacement with the banal Madison Square Gardens was keenly felt. Multinational companies left the city for cheaper alternatives and New York fell into deep debt, especially after the 1973 Oil Shock. When Washington refused to help, the New York Daily News ran the famous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead”. Bankruptcy was avoided with a last minute compromise.
New York got its budget in order and renewed immigration formed a cheap labour force. The service sector never slowed and Wall Street was still healthy. Financier David Rockefeller launched the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1973 and like the Empire State had a slow start in depressed times, but filled up as the economy improved. New York used financial nous, and technological and communications innovations to thrive amid global competition. International firms and banks needed New York offices to take advantage of the city’s liquid assets, commodity markets and financial deregulation. Economic renewal was matched by advances in tourism, education and health sectors and the city’s port and three airports (one named for La Guardia) all benefitted. New York’s growth was not reflected in population which has been roughly the same since 1940, though the metropolitan area has greatly expanded. It remains a city of migrant opportunity though by the 21st century the major incoming groups were Dominicans, Jamaicans and Chinese, rarely settling in Manhattan. These changes have not been without racial tensions, heightened by growing inequality from the Reagan era. Yet it adds to the dynamism and magnetism of New York, a city that constantly redefines itself. As one pre-9/11 observer noted, it “managed to outlive its own death”. After that monumental attack, and even as America approaches the end of its own myth, New York remains the world’s most potent mixture of multiculturalism and capitalism.
Woolly Days 