This chapter focuses upon a single city whose palimpsest of place, as recorded in the arts and artifacts of its residents, offers abundant material. Like so many of the places explored in this study, it gradually edged out its native inhabitants from their land. The city has for centuries been the primary portal of entry to the U.S. for countless immigrants—some willing, some not. It became a center for the goods and finance of world commerce—an aspect often working in tension with its cultural side. The diversity and resilience of its population and its commercial prowess provide focus for this chapter. New York offers stunning parks, bridges, and architecture as well as galleries and literary centers. It is the most intensely urbanized place we visit in this study—its horizon one of the earliest to be pierced by skyscrapers. Central Park—an oasis of trees, ponds, and vistas—sits in the midst of it all. In midtown and downtown, the city rests on solid Manhattan schist bedrock. This and its coastal situation at the mouth of the Hudson River have provided the conditions for much of its development, including tall buildings and centers of commerce. Jan Morris proclaimed that in 1945 it represented the “supreme and symbolical American city” to a war-torn world (Morris 1998: 7). It was to see more troubling times through the 1970s, however, including projects for “urban renewal” that devastated communities. Now, there is increasing alarm that New York will be gradually inundated by the sea-level rise of the Atlantic Ocean—its progress accelerated by human-caused climate change.Footnote 1 This is part of the process, unfolding since the last ice age, of the ocean’s rise and expansion westward—a sequence that allowed New York to become the great East Coast harbor that it is.

Turn back 400–500 million years, and its position is well inland. New York City sits on the North American Plate, some distance from its eastern border, where the Oceanic Plate slips beneath it. North America shuttled around in various configurations—at an early stage forming the Laurasia land mass together with Asia and Europe. This collided with Gondwana, which housed Australia, Antarctica, Africa, India, and South America, to form Pangea. The Manhattan schist is attributable to volcanic eruptions that accreted to the North American Plate. The Bronx contains Fordham Gneiss—the oldest component of North America. Inwood Marble metamorphosed from limestone formed beneath the area’s rivers. Glaciers intruded into the area four times, the last of these during the Pleistocene era, which ended about 12,000 years ago. Its terminal moraine contributed to Brooklyn and Queens; Long Island is made up of its rubble. The glacier made the Hudson River deeper, dropped off boulders carried from Westchester County, and excavated down to bedrock in what is now Central Park (McCully 2018).

Indigenous Relations to the Land

Human settlement of the New York area dates back 11,000 years to a time when it was situated 120 miles inland. Ice sheets were withdrawing to the North (Cantwell and Wall 2001: 3). The landscape featured over 50 ecological communities, including mud flats, marshes, lakes, shrublands, coniferous forests of pine, fir, and deciduous trees such as birch, alder, and oak, providing habitat for both extinct and surviving species of animals (Sanderson 2009: loc 2715). The former included mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, and giant beavers. Among the animals surviving today (mostly elsewhere) are moose, elk, caribou, deer, bears, foxes, hares, martens, and fish. These were most likely hunted and butchered by the men. Women gathered edible plants from the wetlands and prepared both food and clothing. The natives produced little refuse, beyond shell heaps that are remnants of oysters and shellfish culling. Though there are traces of burial sites, little evidence remains of settlements, which were temporary and seasonal. Landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson, whose research team has employed various forms of computer modeling to represent Manhattan’s First People, estimates that in summer about 600 individuals made their home near the coast, with that number dwindling to around 200 in Mannahatta in winter.Footnote 2 The natives crafted tools that have been recovered by archaeologists. They used Clovis points (perhaps developed in the regions farther West and South and imported through trade). These were shaped from stone (chert, flint, or jasper), tapered from the point through a wider middle section. The lower third has grooves engraved lengthwise, making it possible to attach the point to a shaft. Natives also crafted stone tools for scraping the hides that served as clothing (Cantwell and Wall: 33–34, 63).

By 6000 years ago, the inhabitants were leaving more evidence of increasingly elaborate burial sites and a good number of seasonal camping places. Wintering inland, multiple families shared space in long houses, stretching as much as 60 feet. They were built with large saplings buried part way underground and an arched roof of interwoven smaller branches, topped with large pieces of bark. These were substantial enough to last multiple years. Natives located closer to coastal shellfish beds in summer, where small, conical wigwams fashioned from bent saplings with bark coverings provided temporary shelter (Sanderson). Their hunting prospects included deer, bear, raccoons, turkeys, and migratory birds (Cantwell and Wall: 67). Sanderson’s research models suggest widespread use of fire to clear out shrubs and small trees, allowing grass and berries to grow. The grass attracted game which could be more easily hunted. Most remarkable is the extent to which the Harlem area had been cleared. Burning on a more limited scale permitted the planting of crops.

Anthropologists begin to apply the “Native American” designation to people who inhabited the region starting 3700 years ago, leaving behind new designs for spear points, pots fashioned from stone, and red and silver-gray body pigments. Scientists hypothesize that hilltop burial sites of this period may establish “hereditary control over natural resources” as well as “collective guardianship” (Cantwell and Wall: 71). The next native group of 2700–1000 years ago bear the designation “Woodland Indians.” whose diet included land-spawning saltwater fish, nuts, berries, and medicinal plants. These people fashioned canoes from wood, used the coil method to craft clay pots, made twine and mats from plant fiber, and used clay pipes. Contact with residents of the Delaware Valley may have brought the collections of mica and agillate that may be an indication of trade practices used to maintain alliances (73–83). Society seems to have been largely cooperative. Wampum beads, fashioned from clam or other shells, were exchanged between bands as gifts, but there was no apparent concept of money.

The late Woodland Indians of the region became identified as the Munsees. Sanderson, provides the names of three distinct bands of the Lenape in the area of New York City, the largest being the Wrechquaeseck, who located in North Manhattan and the Bronx, the Rechgawawank, of Harlem and the Upper East Side, and the Manahate of Lower Manhattan. The wider ancestral territory of the Lenape stretches north to Connecticut, includes southeastern New York State, Delaware, and New Jersey. It is the significantly named Lenapechoking, which has been translated as “Land of the People,” suggesting collective claim to the place.

The Lenape began to decorate pottery and make more elaborate burials, complete with ossuaries, near their villages. They also decorated their bodies, fashioning tattoos from scars and applying face paint. For combat, they might paint half their face black, half white (Sanderson). The new technology of bow and arrow facilitated hunting. Fish and shellfish were also on the menu. The environment was so rich in food sources that agriculture came slowly, but there is evidence that the Lenape planted maize and kept small gardens. Villages had workshops for pottery and tool manufacture, as well as racks for drying fish and meat (Cantwell and Wall: 114). There are also traces of the original “Broad Way”—a path used to transport goods north from the present-day Battery at the tip of Manhattan.

Oral tradition is difficult to collect. There being so few survivors in the immediate region, anthropologists have resorted to inference from a wider diaspora of the Lenape and the nearby Iroquois and Algonquin people. These traditions support the turtle island myth of creation or re-creation. The world was at first covered with water, until a turtle surfaced, providing the land, where a tree sprouted and man emerged from its root; woman came from the tip of the tree when it bent to the earth (Sanderson, loc. 1412). Another myth explains the gift of fire, which a raven brought from the sun; in the process, its rainbow coloring was permanently charred black (loc. 1337). Corn came to earth when it was dropped from the beak of a crow (loc. 1420).Footnote 3 The wider tradition includes a “Great Spirit” in the sky, presiding over mortals, and a series of creation myths that suggest a spiritual relationship to the earth. Accordingly, the creator, Kisheliemulkong, generated four Keepers of Creation: Rock, Fire, Wind, and Water. Together they created Father Sun and Grandmother Moon and Mother Earth, Kukna. Next came plants and animals. A troublesome spirit, Matantu, created poisonous plants, thorns, and tormenting insects. Humans were created last, but the first couple were only temporary residents, returning to the spirit world. It was after a great flood that the turtle story of creation emerged. One spirit, Mesingw, encouraged proper conservation of hunted animals, urging the hunters to release the spirits of slain animals and not to take more than needed. Stories sometimes encourage proper conduct. Corn Mother, who had brought seed corn to earth, withdrew her gift when a young man denied her existence. An old man from the spirit world visited her in her home beneath the sea ice, pleading to restore the seed to the hungry people. He fed her a meal of oysters, provided gifts of tobacco and earrings fashioned from shells, and together with the little boy he’d brought along, sang and danced for her. Her sorrow relieved, she restored her gift (loc. 1476). These stories would typically be told during winter in communal long houses, sometimes by visiting story-tellers. Story-telling might be accompanied by ritual dances featuring masked representatives of both good and bad spirits. Basic to their oral tradition was respect and giving back to the plants and animals that allow them to flourish in Mannahatta and the wider Lenape world of the Lenapechoking,

New Arrivals and Ideas About the Land

The annals of European exploration of New York generally begin with Giovanni Verrazzano’s arrival in New York Harbor on the ship Dauphine in 1524. The Italian, sailing on behalf of France, pronounced it a “very agreeable place” (Wroth 1970: 85). He was convinced that the area was “densely populated,” reporting that some 30 small boats ran back and forth to inspect the visitors. They describe a greeting party “dressed in birds’ feathers of various colors” that approached the visitors “joyfully, uttering loud cries of wonderment and showing us the safest place to beach the boat” (86). An unfavorable wind from the sea (and perhaps the number of natives) prevented a landing. “With much regret,” Verrazzano continued on up the Atlantic coast in quest of a passage to India that he had begun in the Carolinas. His visit is commemorated in the place name given the narrow passage between Manhattan and Staten Island, where the Hudson River empties to the sea—the Varrazzano Narrows, spanned since 1964 by the Varrazzano Narrows Bridge (which it took the city over 50 years to spell correctly).

In 1609 Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor on the ship Halve Maen, giving the Dutch a basis to claim future rights to settlement. The Dutch East India Company had hired the Englishman to find a Northeast passage to Asia—a venture he had tried twice before. Prevented by ice from completing his journey from the Northeast, Hudson convinced his crew to try plausible approaches to Asia through the Northwest. Though he failed in this quest for a Northwest Passage, Hudson did sail into the Hudson River, sending a smaller vessel as far north as present-day Albany. When working their way down the coast to New York, the crew had harvested abundant cod and lobster. They experienced numerous contacts with natives, whom his Dutch First Mate, Robert Juet, consistently calls “savages.” There were grounds for caution on all sides. While near Maine, crew members set out in a small boat and despoiled a native village. Later, the English leader of a small exploratory party near Newark Bay and the narrows died from an arrow to the neck. The arrow would seem to indicate hostile Indians, but contentious crew members may have concocted the evidence.

We know something of the crew’s reaction to the new land through Juet’s writing, though his later involvement in a mutiny that proved fatal to Hudson suggests that his credibility is open to question. The report is understandably skewed toward such facts of navigation as depths and wind speed, rather than depictions of place (Juet 1625). The landscape impressed the men as “pleasant.” They made lists of available commodities—information gained largely from gifts the natives made and items they offered in trade. Resources included corn, beans, pumpkins, grapes, tobacco, oysters, beaver, otter, marten and deer skins, and venison. Juet thought there was good potential for minerals in the highlands. Hudson raised the possibility of the fur trade with the Dutch East India Company, and thus the area became attractive for its ability to offer goods valued in Europe. Already enticements for commercial development were offered to future entrepreneurs.

The diversity of New York was underway early. By 1613, Jan Rodiguez, who is credited with being the first European and the first black resident of New York, was engaged in the fur trade with natives, serving as an employee of the Dutch East India Company. In 1621 the West India Company was officially chartered, thereby gaining a distinct geographical designation for Dutch commerce to the West. They established Fort Orange, near Albany, in 1624 and New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan in 1625.

The closest we can get to a reaction of Munsees to the arrival of Europeans may be an account set down by a Moravian missionary in 1765. As Colin Calloway observes in his important collection of native texts, such accounts suffer from difficulties of translation and are generally crafted for a European audience (Calloway 2016: 10). In this record, as a Dutch ship approached, native fishermen spotted “something large” either swimming or floating in the place where “the sea widens.” They went ashore to gather more witnesses. These imagined it might be a big fish or other animal, a house, a canoe, or even the great Mannitto, or Supreme Being, coming to visit. They summoned scattered chiefs, who in turn called up warriors. They also prepared a welcome, including a sacrifice of meat to Mannitto, as well as food and dance performances. At closer range the natives identified the object as a house inhabited by differently dressed people, taking a man clad in red to be Mannitto. Once landed, by way of a greeting, the Munsees circled around. The man in red sipped from a cup and handed it to the chief next to him. A great warrior urged the chief to drink, fearing that Mannitto might be provoked if he refused. He did so, finishing the cup and then some, as did the others. Their consequent drunkenness supposedly resulted in a lasting place name, Mannahattanink, which this account translates as “a place of intoxication” (Calloway: 35–38). The narrative records the Dutchmen’s further amusement over the fact that the natives had no idea how to use the axes and hoes given them as a parting gift. Not only do the tools express a different relation to the land, but the natives’ application of them as adornments is understandable in a culture where the exchange of decorative items was an honored convention.

Differences over land and its tenure increased with additional visits. The Europeans put the axes to use in clearing trees for their mode of planting. Their desire for land ownership (as opposed to having land held in common, with the community moving seasonally) become clear. This same account describes a bit of European trickery to increase the area of land secured in a transaction. The newcomers’ request is for a plot of land of a size of bullock’s skin. They then cut the hide into a thin, continuous strip, outlining a much larger area. According to the European account, the Munsee interpret this ruse as indication of “superior wit.” Since they had plenty of land, this seemed not to matter. But the narrative closes with the observation that the Europeans “continued to ask for land and to proceed higher up Hudson River.” The Munsee, accordingly, “believed they’d soon want all their country, which at this time was already the case” (35–38). Calloway suggests the legendary 1626 purchase of Manhattan for trinkets valued at $25 was probably understood by the Munsees as a sharing of the land, not a permanent transfer.

Fort Massapeague is the name given to a historical landmark on western Long Island dating to the mid-seventeenth century. The site has yielded numerous finds for amateur archaeologists, starting in the 1930s. Shell debris suggest that Munsees crafted wampum for trade on the site and there are both Indian and European artifacts (Cantwell and Wall 2001: 136). This evidence suggests a period when Indians had agency in their relationship with the settlers (139). For a time, what William Cronon describes as “unrecorded trade” went on among Indians, hunters, sailors, and fishermen and there were further contacts with explorers, guides, and map makers. This offered “more possibilities for cooperation than for conflict” as Indians traded furs and skins for useful metal implements, weapons, clothing, and ornaments, adjusting their way of life accordingly (Cronon 1983: 82). Unwittingly, they also contracted diseases such as smallpox for which they lacked the antibodies built up through millennia by Europeans—the same fate to later affect Australia’s First People. This combination of circumstances doomed their traditional relation to the land.

Colonial Commerce: New Amsterdam

Among the older documents of New Amsterdam (a name first given in 1624 to a fort at the tip of Manhattan that became the city), is a letter written by Isaac de Rasieres in 1628, providing observations about prospects for development. He has a keen eye for good farming land in the area he calls “Manhatas.” It is a place “full of trees” with a rocky middle and he assesses how much labor will be needed to clear various locations for ploughing and sowing. The native grass is not yet good as hay, but he anticipates that this necessity for livestock can be cultivated and craves manure to enrich the soil. There are already a number of farms in operation and a fort under construction. He also identifies situations appropriate for a marketplace and a defensive battery.Footnote 4

De Rasieres judges the natives harshly, as “cruel by nature, and so inclined to freedom that they cannot by any means be brought to work”—the latter clearly a self-serving judgment. He also considers the women promiscuous. He is, however, attentive in describing native government and customs, as well as methods of hunting, fishing, planting, and cooking. He is impressed with the natives’ hempen fishing nets and the method of planting maize in hills, adding bean seeds a month later so that they can use the stalks of the maize for support. Of interest for the future of commerce, he describes their creation of strings of cockle shells that have become known as wampum, which by this time was used in trade.

By 1655, Adriaen Van der Donck emerged as an unabashed promoter of settlement and exploitation of resources in the New Netherlands. Trained in the law at the University of Leiden, in 1647 he went to the patroonship of Kiliaen von Rensselaer, which surrounded Fort Orange (present-day Albany) at the North end of the Hudson. After several years of law-enforcement there, he moved to Manhattan to represent settlers in their disputes with the Dutch West India Company. The Company had been through violent conflict with the natives under its first Director, Willem Kieft, who ordered an infamous massacre in 1643. Van der Donck’s protestations to the Dutch government about his general conduct in regard to settlers may have hastened Kieft’s ouster. The new Director, Peter Stuyvesant, faced Van der Donck’s insistent entreaties for reorganization of the colony. Met with Stuyvesant’s ire, which included charges of treason, Van der Donck returned with a delegation to make his case with the governing body in the Netherlands. His efforts achieved status for Manhattan as a Dutch municipality, though a looming war with the British prevented this from realization.

While waiting for government action, Van der Donck launched his own initiative to encourage settlement. Like colonizing agents we have encountered in the chapters on Ireland, Southern Africa, and Australia, he produced a map. This included enduring place names and a detailed account of the exploitable natural attributes of New Netherland, focused especially on the potential of the land for European-style cultivation. Van der Donck declares that the territory was appropriately named New Netherland, not only because native accounts credit the Dutch with first discovery, but also because of its similarity (even superiority) to the Netherlands “in fertility, equitable climate, opportunity for trade, seaports, watercourses, fisheries, weather and wind” (Van der Donck 2008: 22). An additional advantage is the navigable waterways of the Delaware Bay, the South River, Long Island Sound, the Hudson River, and the East River. The “double coastline” of barrier islands provides a useful defense from invaders. Wide plains are deemed “suitable for villages, farms and plantations” (14). The abundance of trees bodes well for building ships, houses, and fences for enclosing fields; once cleared the ground is “fertile beyond compare” (15). He proposes draining inland wetlands to grow hay and pasture suitable to European stock. Van der Donck offers a long catalog of native game and expresses ironic confidence that there is “no fear” that it can be “exhausted” (99). Europeans have already introduced apple, pear, cherry, and peach trees, which flourish, as well as roses, hollyhocks, and peonies. Imported farm animals include Dutch work horses for ploughing, cattle, hogs, and goats. On a practical note, he doesn’t recommend sheep, which can be stripped of their wool when set free in the woods. The practice of turning animals, and particularly pigs, loose to forage in the woods could lead to tensions with the natives, as the introduced species drove out wildlife and invaded the Munsees’ unfenced agricultural fields. The natives (having little sense of owning animals) were accused of stealing them.

Van der Donck displays considerable familiarity with indigenous animals and plants (though not their accurate nomenclature) and the agricultural practices of native or “Wilden” people, as the Dutch had come to call them. He recognizes that the land has already been altered by the Wilden, noting their practice of burning the bush in the fall to facilitate hunting and stripping bark from trees for the construction of canoes. Natives abandon grain fields when no longer fertile, resulting in rapid reforestation. Van Der Donck finds the men especially “averse to heavy, sustained labor of a slavish sort” (73). He reports that agriculture is primarily women’s work, manual labor they could achieve in close proximity to their offspring. He has a low opinion of their untidy, unfenced plots of pumpkins, squash, and corn. When introduced to European methods of enclosure, fertilizing, and tillage, he reports, the natives judge them “too much bother, care and effort” (98), but he has to admit they have a surplus of corn and beans to trade with the settlers. The potential to produce goods for trade and commerce is his culminating theme, which anticipates the possibility of great exports to the West Indies of grain, bacon, meat, fish, beer, and (assisted by the natives) pelts.

A century and a half later, Washington Irving mocks the Europeans’ self-serving claims to the land in his A History of New York (1809–48), which is told from the point of view of an opinionated old Dutch bachelor, Diedrich Knickerbocker. According to Knickerbocker, their first right is one of “discovery,” having claimed that “it is clearly evident that this fair quarter of the globe when first visited by Europeans, was a howling wilderness, inhabited by nothing but wild beasts.”Footnote 5 The next right that he identifies comes through “cultivation,” for which he adopts the logic of Emmerich de Vattel’s The Rights of Nations (1796). This claims that cultivation is “an obligation imposed by nature on mankind.”

Now it is notorious, that the savages knew nothing of agriculture … but lived a most vagabond, disorderly, unrighteous life,—rambling from place to place, and prodigally rioting upon the spontaneous luxuries of nature, without tasking her generosity to yield them any thing more; whereas it has been most unquestionably shown, that Heaven intended the earth should be ploughed and sown, and manured, and laid out into cities, and towns, and farms, and country-seats, and pleasure grounds, and public gardens, all which the Indians knew nothing about. (Irving, 43)

Hence, on the authority of a foreign deity, they lost their claim to the land.

William Cronon, while he focuses upon New England native practices, identifies some relevant advantages to the natives’ different way of “belonging to an ecosystem” that preceded the European methodology (Cronon 1983: 12). By leaving marshes intact, Indians preserved wildlife habitat; by moving their settlements with the seasons, they could exploit the seasonal diversity of specific coastal and inland areas and move to fresh supplies of wood for domestic use. Their blend of crops in a field (as opposed to European monoculture), enabled beans to fix nitrogen in the soil, benefitting the corn that supported them (48). Seasonal burning also replenished the soil, increasing the yield of wild berries while facilitating the hunting of deer (50). Van der Donck is correct in anticipating a time when “Christians will have multiplied and the Indians melted away,” using this as a reason to have recorded their “manners and customs” (73). Wars of the 1640s interrupted Indian planting and hunting cycles, as did the vast fatality rate from disease. Many of the Munsees moved west to find game and beavers as these were hunted out. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Munsees of Manhattan had virtually disappeared. As historian Francis Jennings has said, “Europeans did not find a wilderness, but by introducing disease, created one” (quoted in Cantwell and Wall 2001: 143).

The Early Growth of a City

The earliest settlers (called Swannekens by the natives) were Walloons—French-speaking Protestant Dutch, but New Amsterdam rapidly became a diverse city. The Dutch introduced enslaved Africans in 1625. Northern European employees of the Company joined them, as did additional Dutch in the 1640s. Jews were arriving by 1650. Manhattan grew from southern tip northward, starting with a fort constructed at the Battery in 1620s. Much of the labor was performed, not by Europeans, but by enslaved African Americans. The Dutch West India Company established triangular trade linking Europe, Africa, and New Amsterdam as they increased their involvement in the slave trade. Some of the earliest African Americans bore names that revealed their place of origin: Paul D’Angola, Ascento Angola, Simon Congo, Lewis Guinea, and Jan Guinea.

Houses facing the East River were built in the step-gabled Dutch style. We get a satirical yet informative description via Irving’s Diedrich Knickerbocker:

The houses of the higher class were generally constructed of wood, excepting the gable end, which was of small black and yellow Dutch bricks, and always faced the street, as our ancestors, like their descendants, were very much given to outward show, and were noted for putting the best leg foremost. The house was always furnished with an abundance of large doors and small windows on every floor, the date of its erection was curiously designated by iron figures on the front, and on the top of the roof was perched a fierce little weather-cock, to let the family into the important secret, which way the wind blew. (Irving 2008: 103)

Knickerbocker also favors us with a description of the Battery, which was increasingly given over the public enjoyment:

… The mighty bulwarks of Fort Amsterdam frowned defiance to every absent foe; but … confined their martial deeds to frowns alone. The mud breast-works had long been leveled with the earth, and their site converted into the green lawns and leafy alleys of the battery; where the gay apprentice sported his Sunday coat, and the laborious mechanic, relieved from the dirt and drudgery of the week, poured his weekly tale of love into the half-averted ear of the chambermaid. The capacious bay still presented the same expansive sheet of water, studded with islands, sprinkled with fishing boats and bounded by shores of picturesque beauty. But the dark forests which once clothed those shores had been violated by the savage hand of cultivation, and their tangled mazes, and impenetrable thickets, had degenerated into teeming orchards and waving fields of grain. (113)

He ends the passage by observing the ecological costs of European modes of cultivation. In 1641 one of the earliest enduring structures in New Amsterdam was a brick tavern. Later called the Dutch State House, Stadt Herbergh served mainly as a customs house. It sat on the waterfront of the East River until the coastline was repeatedly altered with wharves, sea walls, and landfill. The Dutch converted a stream into a canal, which would later become Broad Street. In 1653 a palisade was erected north of the European settlement. On the other side of this wall (in the present-day location of Washington Square/Greenwich Village) were Dutch farms, and beyond that, a Native American village “Sapokanican,” meaning tobacco field. The Dutch farms were later given to Angolan residents who paid annual fees to Dutch West India Company—their settlement (situated where Washington Square Park is today) providing a buffer from the Indians. The African Burial Ground (in the downtown area of the present-day Civic Center) was made a National Monument in 2006. Its displays document the lives and occupations of Manhattan’s early, black population.Footnote 6 Walls bear the symbols of various African groups settled there as enslaved people. The Dutch had manumitted some enslaved people (but not their children) by 1644 and for a brief period, Blacks were land-owners. One of the lives documented in the National Monument is that of Solomon Pieters, whose will, written in 1694, left his land to his wife, or (if she should die) to their four daughters. In 1660, Wall Street replaced the original wall and, with Broadway running to the north, a recognizable street pattern began to emerge. With expanding population, in 1658 New Haarlem became the second Dutch settlement in Manhattan, the way having been prepared by the clearing of the North Forest in that location 1639.

The British had long controlled New England and were a source of concern to the Dutch. The two nations had been engaged in Anglo-Dutch Wars, fighting largely for commercial advantage. In 1664, a fleet organized by James, Duke of York conquered the city, which was renamed New York in his honor. Boston remained the most influential city in the British colonies, however. Though the Dutch had a brief return to power in 1673, the British began to shape the future of the city, one place name and building at a time. Notable additions were the King’s House Tavern, built next to the Dutch State House in the 1670s and Trinity Church at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street in 1697. The fort at the Battery was rechristened Fort George. Kings College, later Columbia University, located at the intersection of West Broadway and Church Street, was founded in 1754.

African American culture transitioned under British control. The British increased the slave trade, establishing a slave market on Wall Street in 1711; by the early century 20 percent of the City’s population was enslaved. A revolt erupted in Maiden Lane, near Broadway in 1712, resulting in the execution of 21 Blacks. The British imposed harsher control on the enslaved population than had the Dutch, restricting travel, assembly, and marriage, and denying them burial grounds within city limits.

As time went on, British settlers joined the original Dutch population, followed by French Huguenots toward the end of the seventeenth century. Scots and Germans arrived some 50 years later, enriching the European diversity of the city. Settlement patterns tended toward ethnic clusters with their own cultural manifestations. In 1703, the Dutch were in southern and central areas of the city, the English, on the east side (the commercial hub) and the French Huguenots just north of the Dutch or alongside the English (Cantwell and Wall 2001: 193). It was a small, walkable city, and people tended to live where their business was located. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was the newly arrived ethnicities, as well as Blacks and Jews that tended to cluster, while the Dutch and the English were widely distributed. Wealth settled within reach of the busy commerce on the East River, establishing a map for economic inequality.

From Colony to Nation

Alexander Hamilton arrived in New York as a youth, in effect on work-study. An illegitimate child and an orphan, his writing ability had impressed the merchants he clerked for in his native British West Indies. They awarded him fees for his education, while he continued to be their agent. Arriving first in Boston, he gravitated quickly to New York, which he considered “my political parent” (Chernow 2004: 97). After doing preparatory work at Elizabethtown Academy in New Jersey and applying to Princeton University, he enrolled in King’s College in 1773. As Ron Chernow describes New York of that era, it was the second most populous city in the colonies (after Philadelphia) and the center of business, law, and politics. New Yorkers spoke 14 languages and it accepted strangers, many of whom could find employment on its busy wharves.

Though strongly affiliated with the Tories, New York was also a center for revolutionaries. The First Continental Congress met there in 1765. George Washington and his Continental Army passed through New York en route to his campaigns at Lexington and Concord. Hamilton’s own revolutionary activities cut short his college studies. He joined a local militia, eventually constituted as the “Hearts of Oak,” and composed political essays, some anonymously, for such publications as the New York Gazetteer and the New York Journal. After Washington held a public reading of the Declaration of Independence in New York on July 9, 1776, the Continental Army occupied the Battery and Fort George. Patriots demolished the nearby statue of King George on the Bowling Green. The British responded with a naval bombardment. Hamilton assisted in the militia’s effort to save the cannon guarding Fort George. He later served as a captain of the New York Artillery as the Continental Army tried unsuccessfully to keep the British out of the city. They were badly defeated in the Battle of Long Island on Brooklyn Heights. Hamilton’s command was more successful in New Jersey, particularly at the Battle of Princeton. Washington’s forces took refuge for the next seven years in New Jersey, where Hamilton would serve him for much of the time as an aide de camp. Toward the end of the war, he returned to military action as a battalion commander. Hamilton was an active participant in the Battle of Yorktown, which dealt the British a decisive defeat.

As a place, New York suffered during British occupation. Trees and fences were sacrificed for firewood; metals were melted for bullets. Wharves rotted, and formerly fine homes were left in ruins. After the Tories hastily departed the City in November 1783, Washington rode in triumphally. He held a farewell to his troops at Fraunce’s Tavern on Pearl Street—a meeting place of the Sons of Liberty in the years before the Revolution and a structure that survives today.

Hamilton had courted Elizabeth Schuyler (daughter of one of Washington’s generals) in early 1780 while he was serving George Washington in Morristown, New Jersey. Her well-to-do family was of Dutch stock and resided on a vast estate, The Pastures, in Albany, where the couple was wed that December. By 1782, Hamilton had self-educated himself as a lawyer and began practicing in Albany. The war completed, he returned to the City. The Hamiltons’ successive residences demonstrate where the prosperous community was headed. Their first home was a rental at the East end of Wall Street—a fine address favored by prosperous merchants in that day. As described by Chernow, the location boasted three-story brick buildings, sidewalks, and a cobblestone street. Hamilton had practical ideas about pitching streets in the center to promote drainage. The couple was a short walk from Trinity Church and the Park Theatre on lower Broadway. Later addresses included 26 Broadway and a country house in Harlem Heights, “the Grange,” built for them in the Federalist style (Illustration 6.1). Hamilton had earlier enjoyed shooting birds in the area. He maintained his law office at Garden St. and the couple had a town house 54 Cedar St. The Grange remained the residence of Eliza and her children after Hamilton’s fatal duel with Aaron Burr, and they later moved to up-and-coming Greenwich Village. Hamilton’s state funeral procession moved through Beckman St., Pearl St., Whitehall, and Broadway to Trinity Church, where he is buried.

Alexander Hamilton’s desk. Photo by the author

Hamilton had ambitions for his adopted city. He played a role in the establishment of Columbia College. A lasting asset to New York City, it replaced King’s College, which had ceased operation during the Revolution. To facilitate commerce after independence, Hamilton founded the Bank of New York in Manhattan in 1784. He became a member of the Manumission Society after it was founded in 1785. New York quickly emerged as the economic center of the country and Hamilton devoted considerable ink to seeing that commerce would thrive there and throughout the country. He wanted New York to be the U.S. Capital, and briefly (1789–1790) it was the first city to be so designated. Hamilton compromised on this wish, however, to negotiate for the financial stability of the new nation, which he felt required Revolutionary War debt forgiveness to all the states. The capitol moved for a decade to Philadelphia before settling in the District of Columbia (territory formerly in Maryland and Virginia) in 1800.

As Secretary of the Treasury (September 1789–January 1795), Hamilton investigated a number of challenging areas including national credit, the need for a national bank and coinage, and the prospects for manufacturing. His “Report on the Subject of Manufactures” (1891) debates the merits of manufacturing with those of agriculture, whose advocates felt that “nothing can afford so advantageous an employment for capital and labour, as the conversion of this extensive wilderness into cultivated farms” (Hamilton 1961–1987: 647–648). His retort is that manufacturing offers “superior productiveness” by freeing farmers from the need to make their “clothing and other articles” and allowing the use of “diverse talents” and , even improving the means of cultivating the soil. A strong manufacturing sector would also allow the U.S. to compete better with Europe for future prosperity. Hamilton suggests that the middle and northern states would specialize in manufacturing, while the South was more suited to the agricultural production needed for manufacturing. Already he could offer 17 categories of manufactured articles, ranging from the animal skins to gunpowder (685–686). He is concerned that transportation of commodities be promoted by the construction of roads, canals, navigable rivers, and bridges to reach remote parts of the country, initiating a transformation of the landscape and its accessibility. He also anticipates the need for protective duties against foreign trade and the circulation of bank paper. Capitalism had emerged as the operative word in commerce, thoroughly grounded in New York City.

Transformations of Landscape and Population

By 1812, New York was the dominant port in the U.S. Fort George had been demolished, replaced by a battery on a small artificial island, later named Castle Clinton. Later joined to the shore, it transitioned by 1824 into an entertainment center known as Castle Garden—demonstrating the desirability of public gathering places. In 1855 it changed again into the country’s first Emigrant Landing Depot, functioning as such until the opening of the more remote Ellis Island in 1892. For many years Castle Clinton housed an aquarium, and (developers’ efforts to the contrary) it survives today as a museum and a departure point for visits to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, operated by the National Park Service.

As the population grew, developers transformed the landscape, in places creating environmental and cultural havoc. A case in point is Collect Pond, which had provided clean drinking water to New Amsterdam. The African Burial Ground was established just south of it. Streams originally flowed from the pond through marshes to the Hudson River and the East River. Nearby features included Bayard’s Mount and a hill called Chalk Corner, comprised of Native American shell mounds that built up when native villages were in the area. By 1811, these elevated features had been scraped into Collect Pond as landfill. But the ground that formerly was a pond was poorly drained; it emitted methane gas from buried vegetation, and it subsided, causing the newly constructed houses to rapidly deteriorate. Malaria and yellow fever flourished. Members of the middle and upper classes abandoned the area to recent immigrants, particularly the Irish and Blacks, who occupied subdivided slum housing. The notorious Five Points, plagued by disease, poverty, and murder, had been created.

Amid the chaos of nineteenth-century New York, new political and cultural patterns emerged. Groups not identified with Dutch or British heritage assumed political power, their number including Catholics and Blacks (the latter empowered by the end of slavery in New York in 1827). Music of Irish and African origin and dance traditions coexisted, competed and merged, paving the way for music halls, tap dancing, and jazz. In the 1820s and 30s, Blacks settled in Weeksville, situated in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and in Seneca Village, where Central Park later displaced them. Smaller settlements existed West and South of Washington Square. Blacks had their own newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, started in 1827, and New York became a nexus for the Underground Railroad. Fleeing Maryland, Frederic Douglass arrived in New York in 1838. Sojourner Truth lived on Canal Street. A statue of Harriet Tubman, famous for leading enslaved people to freedom (1850–1860), sits above an underground railroad (the subway) in New York City—the work of Allison Saar (Illustration 6.2).

Harriet Tubman Memorial Sculpture by Allison Saar. Photo by the author

In 1842, Charles Dickens published his American Notes for General Circulation, describing his impressions of various parts of New York City. Though he finds New York dirtier than Boston and remarks on its high temperatures, he finds its principal avenue bright and bustling:

Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway! The pavement stones are polished with the tread of feet until they shine again; the red bricks of the houses might be yet in the dry, hot kilns; and the roofs of those omnibuses look as though, if water were poured on them, they would hiss and smoke, and smell like half-quenched fires. No stint of omnibuses here! Half-a-dozen have gone by within as many minutes. Plenty of hackney cabs and coaches too; gigs, phaetons, large-wheeled tilburies, and private carriages—rather of a clumsy make, and not very different from the public vehicles, but built for the heavy roads beyond the city pavement. (Dickens 2000: Chapter VI, 67ff.)

Women with bright parasols and ribbons are responsible for much of the color, outshining the barons of commerce. The patrician in Dickens credits “the best society in this city,” like that of Boston, with being “generally polished and refined.” Its “houses and tables are elegant; the hours later and more rakish; and there is, perhaps, a greater spirit of contention in reference to appearances, and the display of wealth and costly living.” However, he follows other parts of the populace assiduously, showing an eye for the disadvantaged, as he does in his fiction. He takes interest in two Irish immigrants: “It would be hard to keep your model republics going, without the countrymen and countrywomen of those two labourers. For who else would dig, and delve, and drudge, and do domestic work, and make canals and roads, and execute great lines of Internal Improvement!” He also explores public institutions, witnessing prison conditions in The Tombs, whose exterior impresses him as a “dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama!” He questions the prisoners’ lack of exercise and fresh air. Escorted by police, Dickens crosses streets that are knee deep in mud and climbs rickety stairs into the squalid quarters of Five Points (See Riis 1997). He visits at some length the horrid living conditions of its black tenants, but also attends a performance of their fiddle music and dancing capers (his report complete with the racial stereotype of rolling eyes).

Walt Whitman brings us into a distinctly American, much more celebratory treatment of New York in his Leaves of Grass, its first edition appearing in 1855. His lusty persona absorbs and adores diverse geographies, peoples, and non-human beings, the discourse frequently taking the form of extensive, rhythmic catalogs, using novel metrics. As his origin, Whitman adopts the phrase, “Paumanok,” a Native American designation for Long Island. Paumanok provides early lessons about the tenuous nature of life, as he recalls the mournful cry of a male bird who has lost his mate in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (Whitman 1965: 181). Natural cycles are also evoked in that poem, as he declares, “I too Paumanok,/ … have bubbled up, floated… and been wash’d on your shores” (186). His “A Paumanok Picture” preserves the sight of boats with fishing nets, and “Paumanok” celebrates “sweet brooks of drinking-water—healthy air and soil!/ Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine” (321). Whitman was born into a farming family of Dutch and English stock. They transplanted from ancestral lands on Long Island to Brooklyn when he was a young child. Whitman learned the printing trade, taught briefly, and moved on to editing and journalism in both Manhattan and Brooklyn, one notable position being editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1846–1848).

In “Song of Myself,” the poet memorably presents himself as “Walt Whitman a kosmos, of the son,” partaking of its scope and diversity (41). In “City of Orgies,” he boldly proclaims, “City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one day make you illustrious” (92). As with selecting “Paumanok” for Long Island, in Sands at Seventy, Whitman explains his frequent use of “Mannahatta” for the city: “My city’s fit and noble name resumed” for the “marvelous beauty” of its native meaning, “A rocky founded island—shores where ever gayly dash the coming, going, hurrying sea waves” (351). Whitman enjoyed walking through Manhattan and especially observing its inhabitants. As he explains through a catalog of the city’s offerings, his love of Manhattan is centered on its people, both men and women. He particularly admires its laboring people, rather than its “pageants” and “processions” or the “interminable rows of your houses, nor the at the wharves” not “bright windows with goods in them” or “converse with learn’d persons.” Instead, “as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love,/ Offering response to my own—these repay me,/ Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me” (92). He does, however describe “A Broadway Pageant” involving a parade of visiting Japanese in which “million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her pavements.” There is a “haze of guns fired” and “forests at the wharves, thicken with colors” from flags on masts. There are “foot-standers” and pennants in the street and “the facades of the houses are alive with people.” Thus the orient comes to “superb-faced Manhattan… “my city,/ Where our tall-tipt marble and iron beauties range on opposite sides, to walk in the space between” (177). It is a city open to world commerce.

Manhattan had cultural advantages for an aspiring poet and abundant material for his original descriptions. He learned from theater and opera in the East Village. He celebrates invigorating sounds—the “heav’e’yo of stevedores, unlading ships by the wharves …The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts … /The steam-whistle” comparing them to violincello and cornet, “a grand opera” (26). Ships are a quintessential element of its visual appeal at sunset, as recorded in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” He records “numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats,” vessels arriving with flags of all nations “the gray walls of the granite storehouses by the docks,” and “fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,” (117), tops of houses, and sea-gulls strikingly illuminated. It is a “mast-hemm’d Manhattan” and he declares, “Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta!” (119). He expected this lost naval panorama to await future generations, and thankfully he preserved mid-nineteenth-century aspects of New York as a place.

As we approach what has become known as the “Gilded Age,” authors such as Henry James and Edith Wharton offer an acute psychological portrayal of stylish Manhattan residents and the development of the commercial city. At the start of his novel, Washington Square, James lets us into the thinking of an aging New York physician: “He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes’ walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820” (James 2011: 1). Commercial bustle was gradually taking over his neighborhood, one of its effects being “that, as the years went on, half his patients came to be overworked men of business.” Furthermore, “most of his neighbours’ dwellings (also ornamented with granite copings and large fanlights) had been converted into offices, warehouses, and shipping agencies, and otherwise applied to the base uses of commerce.” Hence, he moved to the “ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835”—Washington Square, at the heart of Greenwich Village (13). There he had constructed “a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble,” closely resembling the abodes of his neighbors. The abundant vegetation of the central square “increased its rural and accessible appearance.” Nearby, at its starting point Fifth Avenue was already “august,” exhibiting “a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies” (13).

Though an aging doctor may have been set for life in Washington Square, the newlywed Arthur Townsend has a lifelong plan for moving up in New York: “At the end of three or four years we’ll move. That’s the way to live in New York—to move every three or four years. Then you always get the last thing. It’s because the city’s growing so quick—you’ve got to keep up with it. It’s going straight up town—that’s where New York’s going.” Already exemplifying a throwaway, consumer economy and a tedious tendency toward repetition, he rationalizes, “I guess we’ll move up little by little; when we get tired of one street we’ll go higher. So you see we’ll always have a new house; it’s a great advantage to have a new house; you get all the latest improvements. They invent everything all over again about every five years, and it’s a great thing to keep up with the new things. I always try and keep up with the new things of every kind” (27).

Parkland

As the population of Manhattan grew and moved farther north, it claimed more and more of the surviving forests and open spaces, covering them over for residential and business purposes. It was time to take stock. When John Randel and a team of surveyors laid out the Manhattan plan for hundred-foot-wide avenues running north-south and 60 or 100-foot-wide cross streets, they considered large parks unnecessary, given the island’s surrounding waters. In addition to the Battery and City Hall Park (once called “The Fields”), there were nine urban squares at the time, to which a few were added in the 1830s. Some of the squares, including Washington Square (formerly part of a larger parade ground) had been reduced in size. In a series of editorials for the New York Evening Post starting in July 1844, romantic poet and editor of the Post, William Cullen Bryant, advocated for the preservation of surviving areas suitable as parkland. Change in the city was among his reasons: a stroll in open fields had been within a half hour’s walk of New Yorkers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but no longer. Summer heat and the “corrupt atmosphere” made it regrettable that city planners had not taken the “refreshment and recreation” of citizens into consideration. He bolstered his arguments with examples from his experience of London’s parks and gardens, finding that New York fell short (Olmstead and Hubbard 1970: 23). After a review of remaining land, he suggested as an ideal site Jones’ Wood, set on the East River, extending to Third Avenue, between Sixty-sixth and Seventy-fifth Streets. In 1851, the newly elected Mayor of New York, Ambrose C. Kingsland, urged the Common Council of the City to establish a park in response to the northern movement of the City’s population. In what might be considered moral environmentalism today, he made arguments for the welfare of all classes: “Such a park, well laid out, would become the favorite resort of all classes. There are thousands who pass the day of rest among the idle and dissolute, in porter-houses, or in places more objectionable, who would rejoice in being enabled to breathe the pure air in such a place, while the ride and drive through its avenues, free from the noise, dust and confusion inseparable from all thoroughfares, would hold out strong inducements for the affluent to make it a place of resort” (25). The Committee on Lands and Places recommended establishing such a park and saw Jones’ Wood as a good location.

Andrew Jackson Downing, a nurseryman from Newberg, New York, and editor of The Horticulturalist, argued for an even larger park and for reserving land in the center of the island—a minimum of 500 acres between Thirty-ninth Street and the Harlem River. The space would be varied and sufficient “to have broad reaches of park and pleasure-grounds, with a real feeling of the breadth and beauty of green fields, the perfume and freshness of nature” (27). It would contain the existing Croton Aqueduct, whose reservoirs could form lakes to enhance the scenery. He imagines a variety of people and their pleasures in the park: “Pedestrians would find quiet and secluded walks when they wished to be solitary, and broad alleys filled with thousands of happy faces, when they would be gay. The thoughtful denizens of the town would go out there in the morning to hold converse with the whispering trees, and the wearied tradesmen in the evening, to enjoy an hour of happiness by mingling in the open spaces with ‘all the world’” (27). Like Bryant, Downing had experienced London’s parks, citing them in contrast to New York’s sites of public recreation. While in London he had met a young landscape architect-in-the-making, Calvert Vaux, who joined him in his business landscaping country houses in Newberg. Vaux would perpetuate his ideas in designing Central Park.

The second half of the eventual Central Park design team, Connecticut native Frederick Law Olmsted, entered the picture as the first Superintendent of the newly constituted Central Park in 1857. He was appointed by Egbert L. Viele, the Park’s Engineer, who had been engaged by the Park Commissioners to begin building the Park in 1856. Olmsted was more of a “literary” than a “practical” man and he thought this placed him at a disadvantage with Viele and others as an applicant for the position. But his literary strengths won him decisive support from Washington Irving (36). The park he found on his first tour as Superintendent was characterized by “low grounds … steeped in the overflow and mush of pig-sties, slaughter-houses, and bone-boiling works, and the stench was sickening” (40). Trained as a topographical engineer, Viele had already conducted a thorough survey of the land, inclusive of Seneca Village, the dominantly African American settlement of 250 people within park limits. His geological profiles and the emphasis he placed upon drainage were important, though his ideas as a designer fell short. Instead of accepting this plan, and influenced by Vaux, the Commissioners opted for a design competition. They stipulated a number required features and offered a cash reward. Vaux was interested. He recruited Olmsted for their joint proposal, titled simply “Greensward.” (Illustration 6.3). Vaux appreciated Olmsted’s sensitivity to landscape as shown in his first book, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852). In addition, Olmsted’s post as Superintendent gave him access to the grounds (24–25).

Greensward plans for Central Park. New York Historical Society. https://nyhistory.tumblr.com/post/84138556839/april-28-1858-the-first-prize-of-2000-is. 2 Greensward Plan

“Greensward” was a carefully crafted and argued plan, from the defining one-word title to the well-grounded justifications of each of the features in the design, enhanced by before and after drawings and detailed mappings of the designs. The prose of these literary men is pleasing to read. Olmsted and Vaux aspired to bring the solace of rural landscapes to the increasingly populous, built-up, bustling city. In their design, they addressed variations in the existing topography, sizing up ways to provide the most satisfying vistas and, to compensate for boggy ground with a lake, surrounded a large, elevated reservoir with a bridal path. They used rocky outcroppings as a scenic backdrop, while incorporating required elements. They recognized the need for more specialized plans in the varied terrain of the southern portion of the Park and saw the potential for wider vistas in the more rolling terrain to the north. In their “Preliminary considerations,” they assess some of the losses already occasioned by urban development:

The demolition of Columbia College, and the removal of the cloistral elms which so long enshadowed it; the pertinacious demand for a division of Trinity churchyard; the numerous instances in which our old graveyards have actually been broken up; the indirect concession of the most important space in the City-Hall park for the purposes of a thoroughfare and the further contraction it is now likely to suffer; together with the constant enormous expenditure of the city and sacrifices of the citizens, in the straightening and widening of streets, are all familiar facts, that teach us a lesson of the most pressing importance in our present duty. To its application we give the first place in our planning. (216)

Given that roads had made such incursions on earlier landscapes, it is understandable that one of the first challenges they take on is the roads required to provide thoroughfares traversing Central Park, facilitating East-West traffic in the city. Their brilliant solution was to sink them seven feet below the landscape, making the thoroughfares nearly invisible to walkers, horseback riders, and slower-moving vehicles using gracefully curving park roads. The sunken thoroughfares preserved the unity of effect of the park as a whole. The designers acknowledge that these straight, fast routes must be kept open at all hours and be accessible to police. The integrity of the park is also guarded by planting trees on the peripheral streets and avenues. This is done “for the purpose of concealing the houses on the opposite side of the street, from the park, and to insure an umbrageous horizon line” (220). A central goal is to “withdraw the mind from streets and walls of the city” (251). The design calls for numerous bridges, many of them designed by Vaux, as well as required buildings. Where possible, bridges are built into the contours of the site, accommodating boulders where present. Architecture is consistently subordinate to natural scenery. In other writings Olmsted contrasts his practice of “Natural” garden design, which was only a century old in his day, with the “Architectural” styles that can be traced to the ancients. The “essential pleasure-giving is natural” in his preferred form, where “artificial elements are employed adjunctively to designs” (256). Olmsted is cranky about popular styles of park gardening: “sacrificing natural scenery to coarse manufactures of brilliant and gaudy decoration under the name of specimen gardening; bedding, carpet, embroidery, and ribbon gardening, or other terms suitable to the house, furnishing and millenary trades” (143). While he acknowledges the importance of playgrounds, and accommodations for small children nearby, he is concerned about the incursions a zoo with large animals would make on the Park.

In the 1860s, Central Park was frequented by affluent New Yorkers who liked the amenities of promenades, carriage roads, and bridal paths. The view of the Park made its periphery attractive for building mansions and accordingly the Gilded Age’s “Millionaires’ Row” sprang up along 5th Avenue on the fashionable East Side. The Park was intended as a place for quiet contemplation, an improvement over “objectional” places like porter houses, and the unhealthful atmosphere of the city—a morally uplifting activity for all New Yorkers. Free concerts and skating in the park attracted some members of the middle class (Rosenzweig and Blackmar 1992: 225). However, to enter the park in the early days, women had to be accompanied by a man. The supposed benefits to health and morality did not extend fully to people of lesser means. Though working-class people might use their free Sundays to travel some distance to the Park, there were restrictions on what sorts of sports, refreshments, and activities could take place there. Some preferred the amenities of Jones’ Wood, which included a German-style beer garden, or the amusements to be found at Coney Island (212). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Park’s offerings had evolved. There were refreshment venues, goat rides for the children, and tennis courts in the meadows. Bicycles were a popular conveyance for women who by then enjoyed the park on their own.

Migrant Experience

New York has received generations of immigrants and migrants, each with their own experience of entry and striving. John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925) uses modernist effects of perspective, montage, and sound as it follows the fortunes of a variety of new arrivals to New York City. In the process it surveys the character of Manhattan itself. Bud, a man fleeing his past, arrives at the ferry slip and immediately seeks the center of it all, Broadway. The initial cityscape is grim as Bud moves

past empty lots where tin cans glittered among grass and sumac bushes and ragweed, between ranks of billboards and Bull Durham signs, past shanties and abandoned squatters’ shacks, past gulches heaped with wheelscarred rubbishpiles where dumpcarts were dumping ashes and clinkers, past knobs of gray outcrop where steamdrills continually tapped and nibbled, past excavations out for which wagons full of rock and clay toiled up plank roads to the street. (Dos Passos 1969: 499)

But he continues “until he was walking on new sidewalks along a row of yellow brick apartment houses, looking in the windows of grocery stores, Chinese laundries, lunchrooms, flower and vegetable shops, tailors’, delicatessens” (499). Over the years he seeks in vain for a job. Gradually sinking into despair, he takes his life jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge.

Two cabin boys arrive in port, a Frenchman, Emile, and a dark-skinned Italian nicknamed Congo. Emile wants to stay: “In America a fellow can get ahead. Birth dont matter, education dont matter. It’s all getting ahead” (497). He can trade on his French background to make his living with a French widow who runs a delicatessen. Congo comes and goes, keeping his connection with shipping. Eventually he prospers, bootlegging liquor during prohibition. New York presented the prospect of more equal opportunity than these men had experienced before.

Sitting with his young daughter Ellen watching ships at the Battery, “Ed Thatcher looked out across the bay that stretched in blue sparkling reaches into the brown haze towards the Narrows. The Statue of Liberty stood up vague as a sleepwalker among the curling smoke of tugboats and the masts of schooners and the blunt lumbering masses of brickbarges and sandscows. Here and there the glary sun shone out white on a sail or the superstructure of a steamer. Red ferryboats shuttled back and forth” (534). Ellen matures and makes her own way as a young woman given opportunity in the city. She achieves success in the play, “Zinnia Girl,” leaving a lackluster husband for a new lover, and then another. We follow her as she takes a bus up Fifth Avenue on a summer day, registering the current fashions, including men in spats, and passing landmarks of significance to her: the hotel St. Regis. Sherry’s, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Delmonico’s.

Lacking clients, a struggling young lawyer, George Baldwin, becomes an ambulance chaser, seeking out the widow of driver whose milk wagon has been hit by a train. His itinerary skirts Washington Square where “the large windowed houses opposite glowed very pink, nonchalant, prosperous. The very place for a lawyer with a large conservative practice to make his residence.” He proceeds into “dingy West Side, where there was a smell of stables and the sidewalks were littered with scraps of garbage and crawling children,” the neighborhood of what he pronounces to be “low Irish and foreigners, the scum of the universe” (523).

When Jimmy Herf arrives in port as a boy, his memorable first sights of New York include the Battery, Trinity Church, and the Pulitzer building (540). After his mother dies, he is raised by an uncle, but soon launches out on his own. Walking down Broadway toward the steamship lines he encounters “towhaired Norwegians, broadfaced Swedes, Polacks, swarthy stumps of men that smell of garlic from the Mediterranean, mountainous Slavs, three Chinamen, a bunch of Lascars” (587). He becomes a reporter in Hell’s Kitchen and is briefly involved with Ellen. Toward the end of the novel, having squandered his twenties, Jimmy stands in Washington Square, looking up Fifth Ave through the arch. He walks up South Street and around blocks “looking for the door of the humming, tinselwindowed skyscraper” (803). In the end he is headed optimistically to no particular destination, the product of a city ever reinventing itself.

The city, and especially its brownstone houses, subdivided into smaller flats, is the setting for stories about spirited girls in immigrant neighborhoods who cope and survive despite racial, ethnic, and economic disadvantages. A classic in this genre is Betty Smith’s 1949 novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, its action starting in 1912. A second work of this genre is Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl Brownstones (1981), set in Brooklyn a generation later, starting in 1939. The tree that Francie Nolan gazes down upon at the beginning and end of Smith’s novel is symbolic of her resiliency. Popularly called “The Tree of Heaven,” it persists: “No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenement districts” (Smith 1968: 7). The popular wisdom is that once one of these takes root, “poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats.” Such is the flat that houses Francie, her mother Katie (a first-generation Austrian-American), father Johnny (a charming Irish-American, susceptible to drink), and her brother Neeley. Its four rooms are lined up, with windows front and back, and a leaky, inadequate air shaft in the middle—a classical railroad flat. The family cooks, eats, bathes, and socializes in the kitchen, reserving for special occasions the front room, with a piano left behind by a former tenant and a fireplace lit only at Christmas. One advantage of this flat is its location high in the building, which allows Johnny to show his children a view of the Williamsburg Bridge and the surrounding area. There is an inexpensive theater nearby and Francie finds beauty in their nearby church.Footnote 7

The children know how to work their neighborhood. They earn pennies by collecting metal and rags and are canny in their negotiations with both the dealers and the shopkeepers. Francie learns from her mother how to negotiate for a piece of meat with the local butcher. Her father might be seen as a cultural geographer—knowledge he shares with his children. Johnny proclaims Bushwick Avenue the “high-toned boulevard of old Brooklyn.” Its “wide, tree-shaded avenue and the houses were rich and impressively built of large granite blocks with long stone stoops. Here lived the big-time politicians, the monied brewery families, the well-to-do immigrants who had been able to come over first-class” (167). Francie takes seriously the value her hard-working mother places on reading and writing. Frustrated with the offerings of the local school, she finds a better one in an old neighborhood. Johnny helps her select a house nearby as the fake address needed to register. He suggests that the Scotch, English, and Welsh had been in this “timeless, shabby place” for a hundred years, and that it existed “when Washington maneuvered his troops across Long Island” (147).

Francie’s struggle for education must wait when the family loses Johnny to alcoholism. She toughs out a commute into Manhattan for a job. Negotiating the big city is a challenge for 14-year-old masquerading as 16: “The crowds continually swarming about her made her tremble. She felt that she was being pushed into way of a life that she wasn’t ready to handle.” On her mother’s advice she carries a hat pin to ward off men’s groping hands on the crowded El train (333). Her loyalty to the old neighborhood remains and the resilience learned on its streets equips her to move on.

Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones opens with a chronicle of the brownstone structures found on Chauncey Street in the Brooklyn neighborhood where Selina Boyce and her family live:

First, there had been the Dutch-English and the Scotch-Irish who had built the houses. There had been tea in the afternoon then and skirts rustling across the parquet floors and mild voices. For a long time it had been only the whites, each generation unraveling in a quiet skein of years behind the green shades.

But now in 1939 the last of them were discreetly dying behind those shades or selling the houses and moving away. And as they left, the West Indians slowly edged their way in. Like a dark sea nudging its way onto a white beach and staining the sand, they came. The West Indians, especially the Barbadians who had never owned anything perhaps but a few poor acres in a poor land, loved the houses with the same fierce idolatry as they had the land on their obscure island. (Marshall 1959: 4)

Marshall personifies the brownstones in a manner reminiscent of James Joyce’s Dubliners stories. They resemble “an army masses at attention … all one uniform red-brown stone. All with high massive stone stoops and black iron-grille fences staving off the sun. All draped in ivy as though in mourning” (3). Many have bay windows, and a few, turrets. The Boyce flat has a glorious sun room in the front, which is uninhabitable in warm weather. Selina visits with the last of the white gentility in her brownstone, now reduced to an upper floor of the building—an elderly widow and her daughter whose friends have moved on to Long Island. Another resident entertains a constant flow stream of gentlemen “visitors.” It is the end of an era for the brownstones, which, will soon be demolished for a public housing project.

Selina’s brownstone looks out across Chauncey Street to Fulton Park, but on the other side of the Park, Fulton Street has a clashing, “raucous” mood, particularly cacophonous on a Saturday night in summer: “A whirling spectrum of neon signs, movie marquees, bright-lit store windows and sweeping yellow streamers of light from the cars… children crying high among the fire escapes of the tenements; the subway rumbling below; the unrelenting wail of a blues spilling from a bar” (37). Selina’s father, Deighton, is in his element as a flâneur, sauntering down the street in his fine silk shirt, squandering the proceeds of a modest family holding back in Barbados. Selina’s mother, Silla, like Francie’s mother, Katie, in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is the hard-working provider for the family, her dream being to be a homeowner farther south in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights.

Grown into a college girl, Selina can walk on her own through Manhattan—an experience tinged with racism and inaccessible class privilege, but in other aspects offering resonance with her psyche. On the East side she holds “her books like a shield” as she passes “tall apartment houses” with “richly appointed lobbies” and on Fifth Avenue, with its “luxurious displays” and “meticulously groomed, mink-draped” patrons who make her feel like “a dark intruder in their glittering inaccessible world.”

But Times Square was different—“that bejeweled navel in the city’s long sinuous form” where the lights were like “hot stars bursting from chaos into their own vivid life” (213). Its “chaos echoed her inner chaos.” She “walked with a swagger,” listening to jazz that poured from the Metropole (213). Selina could tune herself to the city in ways that Francie of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn could not. But like Francie, Selina preserves a fondness for the old neighborhood and especially the brownstone that housed her in childhood. Foreseeing the large project that would replace her childhood home, she imagines “footsteps ringing hollow in the concrete halls, the garbled symphony of radios and televisions, children crying in close rooms, life moving in an oppressive round within those uniformly painted walls” (310).

Cultural Havens

While much of the development of Manhattan proper moved north in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Greenwich Village remained relatively quiet. By the early twentieth century, the area may have lost its Jamesian social climbers, but by the nineteen teens it cultivated a rich, bohemian, creative culture, providing the scene for artists, writers, musicians, anarchists, and the salons, hotels, restaurants, and the hangouts that accommodated them. Eugene O’Neill, Lola Ridge, Djuna Barnes, E.E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Alfred Kreymborg, Max Eastman (editor of The Masses), Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, and John Reed were all residents. Mabel Dodge held gatherings in her salon at 23 Fifth Avenue. In this period, the area was relatively untouched by urban renewal, modern updating, and commercialism and it was poorly connected to urban transit. Its relative seclusion offered a congenial setting for artistic and intellectual pursuits. In the years following World War I, Greenwich Village provided an enclave for the LGBTQ community. As prohibition transformed bars into speakeasies, the gay community could socialize out of view from police and the general public. In the 1950s, the area around Washington Square saw the flourishing of what was called the New York School, which included painters, poets, musicians, and dancers. Inspired to put their own twist on surrealist and avant-garde movements, artists such as Jackson Pollock produced paintings in which the action of their creation was integral—the results often disjointed and psychologically suggestive. Resident beat poets Alan Ginsburg and William S. Burrows wrote positively and openly of homosexuality. The Stonewall Riots of 1969, would place Greenwich Village at the origin point of the modern gay rights movement.

Hart Crane was a resident of Greenwich Village at intervals. The Ohio native came to the city in 1916 to study at Columbia, but soon turned to poetry. The Little Review and The Seven Arts welcomed his work. “The Bridge” (1930) is his modernist collage constructed from the perspective of the Brooklyn Bridge. Reminiscent of Whitman (who is invoked at Paumanock), the poem witnesses the course of a day in the harbor, even as it provides passage into the culture, technology, and commerce of the wider city and country. Seagulls are in flight and sunrise appears in “two-three bright window-eyes aglitter,” from Manhattan’s “Cyclopedian towers” (Crane 2006). As in this example, nature and architecture weave together, with gulls amid the cables and towers of the bridge, and stars surrounding smokestacks of a power plant. The harbor resonates with fog horns, work on the wharfs, and the sounds of winches. In an evolving cityscape in motion, Crane negotiates the city by trains and cars, subways, escalators, and swinging glass doors, identifying such innovations with “Thomas. A. Ediford.” Extending from the city, he imagines “macadam from Far Rockaway to the Golden Gate.” In separate sections, Crane invokes the legacies and geographies of Pocohontas, the ship Cutty Sark, and the Wright Brothers at Cape Hatteras. Completed in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge would remain a focal point for numerous writers and artist, some of whom we will encounter.

Marianne Moore was 30 years old in 1918, when she and her mother took up residence at 14 St. Luke’s Place, Greenwich Village. Her early life was set in much smaller communities. Born in Missouri, she moved at age seven to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She spent college years at Bryn Mawr in a Philadelphia suburb. Moore learned about modernism and its New York scene while at Bryn Mawr, making her first visit there with college friends in 1909. She placed some of her experimental poetry in New York-based little magazines such as Others and The Dial. In December, 1915, she met with Others editor, Alfred Kreymborg in New York and visited Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291. Moore’s taste for privacy and her arrangement of living with her mother in Greenwich Village limited her interactions with more bohemian writers and artists in there. Her poetry and prose ranged well beyond Manhattan, especially to Brooklyn. Still, as editor of the influential literary magazine, The Dial (1925–1929), she became a major participant of the making of modernism in the Village. When The Dial ceased publication in 1929, Moore and her mother retreated to Brooklyn, where she found the anonymity it offered congenial. By 1965, Mrs. Moore had died and the old Brooklyn neighborhood was troubled with crime, so Marianne Moore returned to Greenwich Village, where she remained for the rest of her life.

New York is a player in her poetry, the abstracted images interpreting urban space, even as they served multiple meanings. While most of her collected prose takes the form of book reviews, Moore represents New York as a place in essays for general readership written late in life; by then she had become a popular public figure and seemed to enjoy the persona. Moore’s poetry takes novel approaches to the commerce of New York. The early poem “New York” begins with the potentially cynical phrase, “the savage’s romance, /accreted where we need the space for commerce.” The mixed imagery initially juxtaposes representations of Native Americans, live animals, and the early trade in pelts with phrases that suggest their display and use in the garment industry: “teepees of ermine”; foxes, their “the long guard-hairs waving two inches beyond the body of the pelt”; “picardels” (Elizabethan collars) “of beaver skin.” It settles into a catalog of things that New York is not, including affluent, royal display—the “beau with the muff,” the “guilt coach.” It also isn’t the “scholastic philosophy of the wilderness,” the popular image of Niagara Falls, “ingenuity,” and even the “plunder” that much of the poem seems to comment upon. She settles on an affirmative line from Henry James, “accessibility to experience”—a phrase some have selected to describe a value she found in New York (Moore 1981: 54).Footnote 8

Commerce is tangential to “Dock Rats” (1920). Moore could readily visit the harbor from her home in Greenwich Village. In line with her fascination with animals, she chooses a rat as her observer, a creature that imagines “there are human beings who seem to regard the place as craftily/ as we do.” Both human and animal find the harbor, set on a wide, twinkling river “a good place to come home to.” Here the observer/rat can catalog, somewhat in the manner of Whitman, a list of “the finest shipping in the world,” including “the four-master, the liner, the battleship,” the tug, the steam-yacht and ferry-boats, each in its own slip “making/a row of chessmen set for play.” If the metaphor seems unlikely for a rat, its attention to smells emanating from East and West, and to other animals is more in character; “wharf cats and the barge-dogs” are noticed, as well as creatures from exotic locations, “a parra-keet/from Brazil,” or a monkey “in readiness for an over-/ ture. Moore is innovating with her array of lines on the page and loose rhythm and rhyme. She concludes, life on the New York harbor is not necessarily motivated by “expediency,” but once “accustomed to it, shipping is the/ most interesting thing in the world.”Footnote 9 One might just see such interest as expedient to poetry.

Brooklyn Bridge: connects her two New York addresses and is memorialized both in poetry and prose. In her essay, “Brooklyn from Clinton Hill,” Moore evokes its “cables …, towers, and centrally fixed arcs of filament united by stress, refined till diaphanous when seen from the Manhattan Bridge, silhouetted either by sun or the moon” (Moore 1987: 544). Historically, she associates the structure with the “endurance” of the Roebling family: John, his son Washington, and the “heroic” Mrs. Roebling, who completed the project in 1883, after father and son died. One of the finest of her late poems is “Granite and Steel,” which evokes both the monumental piers and the graceful steel cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. Moore visualizes the American struggle for freedom with its “Enfranchising cable.” Also dominating the Bay is another structure form the 1880s, “Liberty” with “her feet as one on shattered chains/once whole links wrought by Tyranny.” Moore evokes the bridge through physics and geometry, a “Caged Circle of steel and stone”; “‘O catenary curve’ from tower to pier.” Such perfection serves as “enemy of the mind’s deformity,” manifested as “man’s uncompunctious greed,/ his crass love of crass priority”—a reference to recent “obstructing acquiescent feet/about to step ashore when darkness fell.” The bridge is a “composite span” made possible by German, French, and American inspiration, just as her poem is a composite of previous accounts of it. It is positioned between sea and sky: “silvered by the sea” and “a path amid the stars/crossed by the seagull’s wing.” And along with such romantic Whitmanesque evocation, it is, finally, “an actuality” (Moore 1981: 205).

In a short essay, “Crossing Brooklyn Bridge at Twilight,” written for the New York Times in 1967, Moore offers a quick list of treasured institutions in Manhattan: the Gotham Book Mart on 47th Street, with its motto “Wise Men Fish Here”; the unicorn tapestries in the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum, the whale at the Natural History Museum, and lectures, music, and illuminated manuscripts offered by the Pierpont Morgan Library. Moore is witness to the gains and losses of redevelopment. Her 1968 essay for the New York Times, “The Library Down the Street in the Village” records the salvation of the Jefferson Market Courthouse, which dates to 1876. She describes it lovingly as an “awkward architectural elephant” and “our Venetian high Victorian Ruskinian Gothic relic” (Moore 1987: 620). Moore records urban gains and losses in poetry. She regrets the sacrifice of a beloved amusement park for the development of LaGuardia Airport and salutes last-minute rescue of “the old brown home” of music in New York, Carnegie Hall (230).

Greenwich Village had another champion in Jane Jacobs, a journalist turned activist. Starting in the mid-1950s Jacobs spearheaded resistance to the grand transportation and “urban renewal” schemes of Robert Moses, New York’s long-term Commissioner of Parks and Chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (see Jacobs 1961). Moses’ grand plans included the extension of a four-lane highway through the center of Washington Square, “slum clearance” in Greenwich Village in favor of high rises, and construction of a Lower Manhattan Expressway, extending Interstate 78 through SoHo and Little Italy. This would have razed hundreds of supposedly “blighted” buildings, including SoHo residences with remarkable cast-iron facades.

A second cultural mecca arose in Manhattan’s second city, New Haarlem, which was settled by the Dutch as a farming town in 1658, at a time when it still had considerable Native American presence. Washington’s army fortified and successfully defended the Harlem from the British in 1776, though the victory was temporary and, once they occupied the area, the British burned what was there. After the war, much of Harlem was taken up by the wealthy in large estates, where farming was still pursued. As noted earlier, Alexander Hamilton built his country home there. Lower Manhattan seemed distant, as it was reached slowly by stagecoach or boats plying the East River.

This began to change in 1831 with the chartering of a railroad, which by 1851 ran 127 miles northward from East 23rd Street. By the mid-nineteenth century, the landscape was transformed into broad avenues with gracious single-family residences, many of them occupied by Dutch and German families. Brownstone row houses followed. Oscar Hammerstein (grandfather of the lyricist) had an opera house built on 125th Street in 1889. Factories arose on the river. These required laborers, many of them African American, who migrated north after the Civil War. Further accessibility came from the construction of elevated trains (Els), which reached Harlem by the 1880s. Harlem became more diverse in the late century with the arrival of Jewish residents. A little later, the presence of Italians in East Harlem won it the name, Little Italy. Accessibility was further enhanced when the IRT (Lexington Avenue) subway reached Harlem in 1904. Harlem real estate ran through boom and bust cycles. With over-construction and the advent of apartment buildings, finding a home in Harlem became more affordable. This fit in with African American expectations. Maya Angelou distills the sentiment in her foreword to The Black New Yorkers: The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology.

African Americans [needed] a place which would reflect their energy and creativity. They needed a village where the chief resembled them, a series of rites where they were addressed formally, and courteously. Shop windows where their exotic desires were on display. In fact, a city not made with hands, but with need and yearning. Over decades Harlem became that shared promise. (Angelou 2000: vii)

The return of soldiers and shortage of laborers after World War I encouraged more migration of Blacks from the South. Others already living in the crowded lower East side were lured to Harlem’s wide streets, newer housing, and cultural life. Philip A. Payton, who chartered the Afro-American Realty Company in 1904, located under-occupied tenement properties, starting on E. 133rd and 134th Streets. These he purchased, managed, and rented to black patrons. The arrival of African Americans, like the earlier advent of Jewish home-owners, met with resistance and efforts at containment. The Harlem Property Owners Association suggested that a 24-foot fence be erected at 136th St. and that the incursion be kept east of Lenox Avenue. The Hudson Realty Company made attempts to buy buildings away from Blacks and stock them with white tenants. Gradually, black Harlem was established and expanded. By 1930, it reached south to Central Park, east to Lexington Avenue, north to the Polo Grounds, and west along both sides of St. Nicholas Avenue. In 1920s it became famous as the setting for the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem comes alive as a place in the writing of the Harlem Renaissance. James Baldwin was born here and uses Harlem as a setting in Go Tell it on the Mountain and If Beale Street Could Talk. James Weldon Johnson summarizes Harlem’s advantages as a setting in his Black Manhattan:

Negro Harlem is situated in the heart of Manhattan and covers one of the most beautiful and healthful sites in the whole city. It is not a fringe, it is not a slum, nor is it a “quarter” consisting of dilapidated tenements. It is a section of new-law apartment houses and handsome dwellings, with streets as well paved, as well lighted, and as well kept as in any other part of the city. (Johnson 1968: 65)

Some of the excitement Selina felt from Times Square in Paule Marshall’s novel resonates with Harlem. In Home to Harlem, Claude McKay’s character Jake takes in the colors, textures, and smells, as well as the human dynamism, he experiences as he returns after the war: “He thrilled to Harlem. His blood was hot. His eyes were alert as he sniffed the street like a hound. Seventh Avenue was nice, a little too nice that night” (McKay 1928: 10). In a Lenox Avenue cabaret he meets “a little brown girl” who “aimed the arrow of her eye at him as he entered” (11). He personifies his dark-skinned Harlem, finding it musical and passionate:

Oh, to be in Harlem again after two years away. The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it. The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter, the ohney-talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and ‘blues’ playing somewhere, … singing somewhere, dancing somewhere! Oh the contagious fever of Harlem. Burning, everywhere in dark-eyed Harlem …. Burning now in Jake’s sweet blood …. […s in original]. (15)

It offers dynamism “with the elevated racketing over you’ head. Subway bellowing under you’ feet…. Same old New York. Everybody dashing round like crazy” (25).

The expansion and prosperity of black Harlem are empowering:

The niggers done plowed through Hundred and Thirtieth Street. Heading straight foh One Hundred and twenty-fifth. Spades beyond Eighth Avenue. Going, going, going Harlem! Going up! Nevah befoh I seed so many dickety shines in sich swell motor-cars. Plenty moh nigger shops. Seventh Avenue done gone high brown. Oh Lawdy! Harlem bigger, Harlem better … and sweeter. (25–60)

Though he must travel away from the city after finding work on the railroad, Jake returns regularly to Harlem, where he enjoys the popular pastime of promenading on Seventh Avenue: “Brown babies in white carriages pushed by little black brothers wearing nice sailor suits… or the elegant strutters in faultless spats; West Indians, carrying canes and wearing trousers of a different pattern from their coats and vests, drawing sharp comments from their Afro-Yank rivals” (290).

Harlem offered favorite institutions and haunts. The Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, the Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue, and the Clam house, one of the places where the homosexual crowd gathered. A’Leia Walker (heiress to the hair products fortune of Mme. C. H. Walker) held a popular salon in her mansion on W. 136th St. Barnard opened its doors to Zora Neale Hurston after she won a literary prize at Opportunity magazine, and Langston Hughes attended Columbia University. His ashes are interred in Harlem’s Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, resting beneath a cosmogram medallion in a floor that evokes his 1920 poem “A Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In Bruce Nugent’s stream of consciousness poem, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” (1926), we follow the Alex in the blue of the Harlem night. He meanders in thought, motion, and sexuality. Alex recollects that at one party “Zora had shone again …her stories … she always shone… he was glad he had gone to Monty’s party” (Nugent 1907: 349). At church he encounters Zora Neale Hurston again, along with Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. A spiritual based on a poem by Hughes is sung with great sensual appeal by a young man, who has set it to music. In the 1930s Duke Ellington could be found playing piano or conducting the jazz orchestra at the Cotton Club. Trumpeters “Dizzy” Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, and jazz singers Ethel Walter and Adelaide Hall. Progressive whites such as Carl Van Vechten, Nancy Cunard, and Fannie Hurst frequently wrote about the Harlem scene, or, as in the case of Charlotte Mason, became demanding patrons of its talented black residents. The Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Small’s Paradise—big clubs featuring black performers that catered to white patrons—occupied 133rd St. between 7th Ave. and Lenox. Harlem now features murals commemorating the centenary of Gillespie.

A sense of its atmosphere and community can be had in Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz, which is set in Harlem. Its central characters, Violet and Joe Trace, move to an apartment on Lenox Avenue in 1926. For this couple in their 50 s, this is an improvement over their railroad flat on Mulberry Street in the Tenderloin. In Harlem, “the buildings were like castles in pictures and we who had cleaned up everybody’s mess since the beginning knew better than anybody how to keep them nice” (Morrison 1993: 127). The new abode is large enough that they can rent out two of its rooms for added income.

Early in the novel, an anonymous resident narrator allows us to see the effect of Harlem as a place, vividly evoked:

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. (7)

The time is auspicious. The War has ended with no expectation of another. People are dreaming up new bridges and fast subway trains. The narrator is canny about how to get along in the big city. Harlem provides employment opportunities to Blacks, and (with limits) the right to live a convenient, comfortable life. It has some, but not all, the institutions that are needed—as recognized in two significant parentheses:

It is worth anything to be on Lenox Avenue safe from fays and the things they think up.Footnote 10 Where the sidewalks, snow-covered or not, are wider than the main roads of the towns where they were born and perfectly ordinary people can stand at the stop, get on the streetcar, give the man the nickel, and ride anywhere you please, although you don’t please to go may places because everything you want is right where you are: the church, the store, the party, the women, the men, the postbox (but no high schools), the furniture store, street newspaper vendors the bootleg houses (but no banks), the beauty parlors, the barbershops, the juke joints, the ice wagons, the rag collectors, the pool halls, the open food markets, the number runner, and every club, organization, group, order, union, society, brotherhood, sisterhood or association imaginable. (10)

Shuttling back and forth in times and places of origin, as well as everyday transactions, we become involved in a unique, interconnected community of characters and their views of one another. This includes a capacity to accommodate eccentricity, and even a tragedy announced very early in the novel: Having taken a lover many years his junior, Joe Trace shoots her “just to keep the feeling going” (3). Comprised of everyday transactions and powerful relationships, exhibiting energy, exhilaration, and soulful blues, it exemplifies the spirit of its title, its time, and place.

A more sobering story emerges in Faith Ringgold’s (1985) mixed-media work, “Street Story Quilt,” representing a Harlem brownstone facade at three successive times (The Accident; The Fire; and The Homecoming).Footnote 11 It unfolds the life history of a black man (Abraham Lincoln Jones), who loses family members, first in a car crash and later, a fire; he later returns damaged by the Viet Nam War. But its windows also reveal residents going through their everyday lives and the narrative continues as (facilitated by his grandmother) he gains an education and returns to the neighborhood as a successful writer and performer. The brownstone facade changes through time, its open windows gradually barred, charred, grated, and boarded over. Its decline mirrors the fate of her neighborhood predicted by Selina in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. Faith Ringgold demonstrates the power of the African American arts of story-telling and quilt-making—the latter perfected by a long succession of women.

Harlem today offers the setting for extraordinary statues and murals. We have already visited Allison Saar’s statue of Harriet Tubman. Adam Clayton Powell, Harlem pastor, champion of civil rights, and New York’s first black Congressman, is commemorated with a dynamic statue by Branly Cadet, located in front of the State Office Building that bears Powell’s name. It is appropriate to the birds that enliven New York’s cityscape that Harlem is the home of a public arts initiative, the Audubon Mural Project. Harlem was the home of John James Audubon in his final years, and he is buried there. The Audubon study, “Survival by Degrees,” finds that at least half of the bird species in North America are endangered by climate change. The project depicts representative birds on a variety of surfaces, including entire facades, storefront shutters, and even coolers (Illustration 6.4). One of the larger murals evokes the African American great migration that brought so man, ultimately, to New York.

Audubon Mural Project at 5740 Broadway. Photo by the author

Scraping the Sky

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the introduction of steel skeletons, electrification, and the hydraulic elevator made it possible for buildings to reach new heights. These structures also made maximum use of the increasingly valuable real estate of New York City. The 11-story Tower Building, built in 1889 at 50 Broadway, holds the distinction of being New York’s first skyscraper (Glanz and Lipton 2003: 24–25). This kicked off a spate of skyscraper construction, originally favoring lower Manhattan around Wall Street and City Hall, but gradually moving uptown. Combining technological advances with architectural designs advanced by the Parisian Ecole des Beaux-arts, the buildings presented stylish facades both at street level and—drawing attention to their height—as adornment toward the top. There was a requirement that structures above a certain height had to recede, providing greater access to open sky, and this affected the style of the original structures. Skyscrapers made commerce glamorous. Displays in shop windows and restaurants attracted the attention of pedestrians. Upper stories accommodated large office suites. A lasting and iconic New York landmark is the triangular Beaux-arts-style Fuller building designed by Daniel Burnham and completed at 175 Fifth Avenue in 1902. It was quickly and enduringly dubbed the “Flatiron Building” for the home appliance it resembles. Originally the subject of derisive reviews, it gained stature as the subject of notable photographers, who liked atmospheric conditions and dramatic angles, as in celebrated photos by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen.

The Neo-Gothic Woolworth Building, with its Tudor style entrance, Romanesque arcade, and an elaborate tower that reached new heights, has been considered the “capstone” of New York’s early skyscrapers.Footnote 12 Designed by architect Cass Gilbert and completed in 1913, it occupies a prominent position on Broadway, adjacent to City Hall Park. Dubbed the “Cathedral of Commerce” in its own 1916 promotional brochure, its artistic sophistication contributed to the “City Beautiful Movement” and lent respectability to the founder of the pervasive chain of Woolworth’s 5 and 10 cent stores. Raised in a Pennsylvania farming family, F. W. Woolworth opened his first store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was inspired by architecture he encountered once he was prosperous enough to travel in Europe. Woolworth brought these tastes to the furnishing of his own chateau at 999 Fifth Avenue, in the same “millionaire district” that housed William K. Vanderbilt. A tycoon of the nation’s growing consumer economy, Woolworth brought his promotional skill to a grand opening that culminated when President Woodrow Wilson flicked a switch in his Washington office to illuminate the skyscraper with thousands of electrical lights, visible to a crowd who were treated to a celebration in the park. The strong vertical reach of the new skyscraper attracted Alfred Stieglitz’s attention and he featured John Marin’s watercolors of the building in his gallery.

Enter an unlikely painter of skyscrapers. Georgia O’Keeffe first visited in New York in 1907, when she enrolled in the Art Students League on West Fifty-seventh Street. Recognizing that New York was the place where avant-garde American art was happening, she returned regularly. Born to a farming family in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, however, she retained a love for open spaces. O’Keeffe and some of her friends visited, an exhibit of Auguste Rodin’s work at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. They were treated to a loud defense of the unconventional work by Stieglitz himself. Though not impressed by the Rodins, O’Keeffe returned to 291 to see a Matisse exhibit, and she may have felt encouraged to experiment more with her own work.

After her family relocated to Charlottesville, Virginia, O’Keeffe worked for four summers as a teaching assistant for Alan Bement’s art classes at the University of Virginia. Bement’s regular faculty appointment was at Teacher’s College in New York. He described the artistic groups flourishing in the City and encouraged her to return there to study in 1914–1915. She reconnected with Steiglitz after a student friend took a set of O’Keeffe’s charcoal drawings to his gallery. Stieglitz, in turn, promoted her work as representative of a female sensibility in modern art. O’Keeffe’s vibrant Western landscapes joined her charcoals in a solo show at the gallery in 1917. For two years she alternated between the West (adding Santa Fe to her beloved landscapes), and a growing relationship with Stieglitz in the artistic center of New York.

O’Keeffe’s New York residence and life with Stieglitz began in a small studio at 114 East Fifty-ninth Street. O’Keeffe liked to walk in Central Park with a friend, noticing especially the trees and the sky. As residents of midtown Manhattan, the couple observed its transforming skyline. Their ultimate New York residence was a two-room-plus-bath apartment, 30 flights above the street on the northeast corner of the Shelton Hotel. Designed by Arthur Louis Harmon and set at Lexington Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, this was the tallest hotel in Manhattan in 1924. From the windows of their apartment, unobscured by curtains, there was a panoramic view that included, toward the west, the treetops of Central Park and New Jersey cliffs across the Hudson River; to the east were barge traffic on the East River, the Queensboro Bridge and factories. The height and the building’s set-back architecture gave the couple a fine view of city lights and a chance to gaze at the sky (Lisle 1980: 148).

The Shelton quickly gained lofty company from the new generation of skyscrapers—most notably the Chrysler Building, completed in 1930, and the Empire State Building, completed in 1931. O’Keeffe regularly took city walks at the end of a work day, but she liked being above the tumult, tolerating city life much as Marianne Moore would, for its stimulation. O’Keeffe leaves a small legacy of cityscapes, blending tall buildings with natural effects and registering more what the city “felt” like than how it looked. Most were painted from 1925 to 1929. These include “The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.” (1926), where the morning sun appears to take a bite out of the building and creates a dappled projection on its facade. “New York Street with Moon,” (1925) presents a street-level perspective that emphasizes the angles of the Ritz Tower against a night sky with clouds, moon, and a trace of the sunset and a steeple at the horizon. A street light wearing a halo of white occupies the foreground. Another night-time painting of the “Ritz Tower” (1928) also takes an interest in lighting effects, again with a prominent street light, illuminated windows and ground-level arches, while the sky contains a half moon and diagonal streaks of clouds. Her painting of the Radiator Building at night again shows the effects of architectural illumination; she substitutes the name Stieglitz, shining in red lights, for the original Scientific American sign. A view of the “East River from the Thirtieth Floor of the Shelton Hotel” (1928) records boat traffic and pollution billowing from factory chimneys. Like Marianne Moore, O’Keeffe offers a memorable rendition of the Brooklyn Bridge, painted in 1949. Some see this as her farewell to the City. Seen slightly to one side, the large silver main cables support a web work of smaller ones—lines, curving to and from the dual, pointed arches of the towering piers, framing blue sky.

The recent history of the Manhattan skyscraper is dominated by the story of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, they were topped off in December 1970 (North Tower) and July, 1971 (South), with the North Tower assuming the title long held by the Empire State Building as the tallest building in the world. The Center was conceived as a pet project of David Rockefeller to revitalize lower Manhattan. Sacrificed in the process were community businesses that had occupied 16 city blocks, as well as the struggling port—once the gateway for Manhattan’s commerce. Most vocal in objecting to the project were the entrepreneurs of the area’s “Radio Row.” But the Rockefellers had a long tradition of urban renovation, their projects including Rockefeller Center, the construction of high-rise public housing in the former Harlem neighborhood of Morningside Heights, and Lincoln Center in East Side San Juan Hill neighborhood—setting for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. Real Estate interests combined with the Port Authority, at whose behest the favored port for the area relocated to New Jersey.

Whereas granite and terra cotta design elements adorned the sides of the first generation of New York’s skyscrapers, the mid-century international style brought glass and metal to the forefront. Yamasaki’s design created narrow columns of glass separated by verticals of bright aluminum, coming together in a row of slight gothic arches at the top. An observation platform on the South Tower and the Windows on the World Restaurant on the North gave visitors panoramic views extending some 50 miles. Yamasaki endeavored to give visitors at street level a bit of human proportion, but the overall impression was a massive pair of tall, narrow rectangles. On a week day, 50,000 people might work there, with an additional 200,000 visitors (see Darton 1999). All that collapsed on the morning of September 11, 2001, when two hijacked flights crashed into first, the North and then the South Tower.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), is told largely from the point of view of an amazingly bright nine-year-old boy, Oskar Schell, whose father, Thomas, had died in the World Trade Center two years earlier. It is a fragmented narrative, a collage of diverse elements and time frames, jarring in its very form. Sent home from school early on that fateful day, Oscar has listened to a series of messages his father left on the answering machine, some of these after Oskar had arrived home. Supposedly to protect his mother, Oskar hides the recording device, replacing it with an identical model purchased at a nearby Radio Shack (Foer 2005: 68). But he plays the message on the original machine repeatedly, dwelling on his inability to pick up the phone while the drama was in progress. Hiding the device is the first of a number of deceptions he makes and registers with added sense of guilt.

Oskar and his father had enjoyed a happy, intellectually stimulating relationship. Rather than watch TV, the two searched the New York Times for errors. As a bedtime story, Thomas invented the tale of a lost sixth borough of New York—an island that gradually separated and moved off to sea, leaving Central Park as its only remnant. He encourages Oskar to search there for lost remnants of this missing borough. Not only does he find a variety of things, but he has a knack for refashioning them into jewelry. Oskar remembers his father’s pronouncements on architecture: “I saw the Trump Tower, which Dad thought was the ugliest building in America, and the United Nations, which Dad thought was incredibly beautiful” (316) (Oskar uses the words “incredibly” and “extremely” often). He has ideas for inventions that are based on his scientific knowledge and incorporate his accumulation of facts about culture and the world. But they are often bizarre or poignantly aimed at coping with his fears. For example, he imagines skyscrapers reaching down beneath the surface of the earth to accommodate the vast number of people already dead.

Oskar writes letters to famous people he admires. Among these, Jane Goodall replies, as does Ringo Starr, and after a long series of form letters, Stephen Hawking writes at length, saying he’d like to meet the boy. But letters go far beyond this. Oskar’s grandmother, a survivor of the bombing of Dresden in World War II, tells him that she too wrote to people she didn’t know as a girl. As the novel progresses, we get her recollections of her marriage and solo parenting of Oskar’s father, Thomas. Appearing without explanation are letters written from Oskar’s grandfather to his son Thomas, dating back to the 1960s. These add to the back story of Jewish grandparents surviving the traumas of war to emigrate to the U.S., where they made a living as jewelers in the neighborhood. Oskar can see the windows of his grandmother’s apartment across the street from his bedroom. A bit of intrigue comes from the fact that grandma has a man renting a room from her—a man we learn has been rendered mute by his own experience of trauma.

Like the young heroines of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Brown Girl Brownstones, Oskar is confident in his own neighborhood. He is inquisitive, posing challenging questions to limousine drivers and shopkeepers, and making up excuses for his comings and goings with Stan, the doorman. But he has phobias that affect his travel through the city. Some of these—such as avoiding going up tall buildings, using the subway, or crossing suspension bridges—seem related to his trauma and loss with 9/11. “Heavy boots” is the expression Oskar gives to his depression; occasionally he deliberately bruises himself. Frantic playing of a tambourine, often performing “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” helps him cope. Oskar documents things, making use of his long-gone grandfather’s camera, a gift from his grandmother. The narrative is accompanied by edited texts and photos of doorknobs and keyholes, unusual shots of animals, buildings, piers and bridges, such as Oskar might have taken. The illustrations also include shots of a man falling from the World Trade Center. Oskar can see the body going back up into the skyscraper in one of his dreams.

Oskar is used to solving puzzles devised by his father. Searching for clues in the top of Thomas’s closet, Oskar discovers a vase containing a key in an envelope marked “Black.” He vows to follow this lead and find the lock it fits by seeking out every person named Black in the New York City telephone book—thus setting up an exploration of all five boroughs. One “Black” on Oskar’s list lives in Oskar’s own building, one floor above. After sharing tales of an amazingly long life—worldwide travels as a war correspondent, marriage to a woman who died 24 years earlier, and his card index documenting people’s names and their occupations—the old man agrees to accompany Oskar on his far-flung searches. In the process he gets back out into the world, even as he eases some of Oskar’s anxieties about bridges and subways. Among those encountered in this wider circuit, Abby Black lives in a narrow house in Bedford Square once occupied by poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. She enters into a long conversation with him, despite interruptions from a man yelling from another room. Ada Black, who resides in a building near Central Park, owns two Picassos. She lets Oscar view as much of her apartment as he wishes and copes with his critique of the rich. Abe Black gets him to brave the roller coaster in Coney Island. There is a Staten Island woman who keeps a museum of her husband’s life. Unable to locate Agnes Black at her address in a rundown section of the Bronx, he learns that she worked, and undoubtedly perished, at Windows on the World. Ruth Black lives atop the Empire State Building, serving informally as a guide to the building. Other destinations include Far Rockaway, Boerum Hill, Long Island City, Dumbo, Spanish Harlem, the meatpacking district, Flatbush, Tudor City, Little Italy, Bedford Stuyvesant, Inwood, Red Hook (286), Sugar Hill, and finally Hamilton Heights, where Peter Black lets Oskar hold his baby. Starting in 2009, a new World Trade Center, began to rise (Illustration 6.5).

The World Trade Center 2019. Photo by the author

All of this suggests that the highly diverse strangers of this city can have the need and capacity to relate to, and even comfort, one another. This was seen once again in the City’s coping with the Covid-19 pandemic and in its support of the “Black Lives Matter” movement following the murder of George Floyd. Repeatedly, New York makes a community of disaster. Increasingly, its museums, including large institutions (e.g., The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the small (The Tenement Museum), are telling the stories of a more diverse set of its people. The phenomenally successful musical, Lin Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” applies the arts of Rap and Hip-Hop in its reinterpretation and repopulation of Chernow’s biography of one of our “founding fathers.” New York has repurposed deserted freight train tracks to make its “High Line,” combining art installations with native plantings back in their place of origin. New York passes hope and aspiration on to the next generation as it repeatedly redesigns and reinvents itself.