Happy Birthday New York City! NYC will be 400 years old in 2024

History - Happy Birthday New York City! NYC will be 400 years old in 2024

Hills, forests, rivers, swamps and wild animals such as bears, wolves, frogs and falcons: scientists believe that the island of Manhattan once had a greater ecological diversity than the famous Yellowstone National Park in the west of the USA. The Algonquin natives called it "Manahatta", the island of many hills.

In the 16th and early 17th centuries, European seafarers such as Giovanni da Verrazzano and Henry Hudson discovered and explored the area around the island on the east coast of what is now the USA for the first time. Shortly afterwards, the first trade began, eventually with a monopoly held by a Dutch company. Colonization began in 1624, when the first immigrants from what is now the Netherlands, Belgium and France settled on the island. In 2024, New York celebrates its 400th birthday - it has expanded its urban area to include two other islands and the American mainland and has become a major world metropolis with around eight million inhabitants.

However, scholars such as Russell Shorto, head of the "New Amsterdam Project" at the New-York Historical Society, say that the first years of colonization have left their mark on the metropolis to this day. "The Dutch brought capitalism in its early form and a pioneering policy of tolerance, laying the foundation for the world's most dynamic metropolis," says the New Amsterdam Project, named after the city's first name, New Amsterdam. "They also brought slavery with them and failed to fulfill their ideals in other ways. These ideals and failures eventually became our own."

Who were the immigrants?

The immigrants initially all settled at the very southern tip of Manhattan, where the financial center is located today and where plaques indicating the early days and a few stone remains can still be found. Among the immigrants: Catalina Trico and her husband Joris Rapalje from what is now Belgium, who had eleven children in New Amsterdam. "For me, they are the Adam and Eve of New Amsterdam," says Shorto. "Their offspring now number in the millions." Shorto also works with the "New Netherland Project" in Albany, the capital of New York State, where thousands of documents from the founding period are stored, translated and studied.

Allegedly, New Amsterdam co-founder Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from the natives in 1626, according to legend for pearls and other trinkets of comparatively little value. However, the concept of land ownership probably did not exist among the Native Americans at the time and the Dutch were aware of this, scholars argue today. New Amsterdam was granted city rights in 1653.

The relationship between the new arrivals from Europe and the natives was characterized from the beginning by trade, by some efforts at mutual understanding - but ultimately above all by brutal displacement by the Europeans, by some resistance from the natives and by fear, writes Russo in his book "The Island at the Center of the World". To protect themselves from raids, the Europeans built a protective wall that would later become the famous Wall Street. The former Native American trading route across Manhattan later became the famous Broadway.

From New Amsterdam to New York

It was not the Dutch government but a Dutch trading company that oversaw New Amsterdam at the beginning, and so the early years were characterized by "tolerance, free trade and water", as the "New Amsterdam Project" puts it. And to this day, the metropolis of millions is characterized by its harbor location on the Atlantic, is considered one of the centers of world trade and a "sanctuary city" in which - at least on paper, but to a large extent also in practice - people of all origins, religions and identities can live safely and feel at home.

In 1664, New Amsterdam passed to the English and became New York, but remained disputed for a while until the United States finally became independent in 1774. In the early years of the USA, New York was even briefly the capital, the first president, George Washington, was sworn in at the southern tip of Manhattan - but the big politics were then made elsewhere, New York remained the capital of trade and tolerance. "We can trace back our ideals of tolerance and individual freedom," says Shorto. "They made us who we are, and they give us hope for the future. But they also came coupled with their opposites and we are struggling to untangle the threads."