New York: history and heritage

About New York: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE New York Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

New York was built by people from somewhere else. The Lenape fished its bays; the Dutch traded furs; the English renamed it; and from the 1840s onwards ships brought the Irish and Germans, then Italians and Eastern European Jews through Ellis Island, while African Americans, Puerto Ricans and, after 1965, newcomers from every continent followed. Each left its mark on the city’s neighbourhoods, food and skyline.

At a glance

Population: 8,804,190 in the five boroughs (US Census Bureau, 2020 Census), the largest city in the United States; more than a third of New Yorkers were born abroad (NYC Department of City Planning).

Names through history: Lenapehoking (the Lenape homeland), Mannahatta, New Amsterdam (1625), New York (1664), briefly New Orange (1673–1674).

A city built by people from somewhere else, one ship and one neighbourhood at a time.

Peoples: the Lenape; Dutch, English, Africans free and enslaved; then Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, African American, Puerto Rican, Dominican and many more.

Shaped by: the Dutch West India Company, the English crown, American independence, the Erie Canal (1825), the consolidation of the five boroughs (1898) and the great migrations.

Lenapehoking

For thousands of years the islands and shores of the harbour were part of Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape, who fished, farmed and traded here. Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed into the harbour in 1524, and Henry Hudson explored the river that bears his name in 1609.

New Amsterdam

The Dutch West India Company founded New Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan in the mid-1620s, and in 1626 bought the island from the Lenape for goods valued at 60 guilders, according to a Dutch letter of the time; what each side understood by the deal is still debated. It was a trading post rather than a religious colony, and by the 1640s a visiting Jesuit reported eighteen languages spoken there. Wall Street takes its name from the Dutch wall at its northern edge, and Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bowery from Dutch names. Enslaved Africans built much of the colony; the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan honours them.

The English city

In 1664 an English fleet took the town without a fight, and it was renamed for the Duke of York. After American independence New York was briefly the nation’s capital. The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, linked the port by the Hudson to the Great Lakes and the Midwest, and made New York the country’s commercial capital.

The Irish and the Germans

The Great Famine of 1845–1852 sent hundreds of thousands of Irish across the Atlantic. They crowded into Lower Manhattan, faced hostility, and went on to dig the city’s canals, aqueducts and subway, staff its police and fire departments, and build St Patrick’s Cathedral (1879). German immigrants created Kleindeutschland on the Lower East Side. In 1898 Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island were consolidated into Greater New York.

Ellis Island

Between 1892 and 1954 more than twelve million people passed through Ellis Island, beneath the Statue of Liberty (1886). Southern Italians settled in Little Italy, East Harlem and Brooklyn, bringing the pizzerias, cafés and feast days that are now part of the city’s identity; Jews from Eastern Europe built a Yiddish-speaking world on the Lower East Side and the garment trade, and laid foundations for Broadway and American comedy. The Tenement Museum on Orchard Street tells their stories family by family. In the twentieth century African Americans from the South created the Harlem Renaissance, and Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and, after the immigration reforms of 1965, Chinese, Caribbean, South Asian and West African New Yorkers remade whole neighbourhoods.

The modern metropolis

The city’s skyline tells its story upwards: brownstones and Italianate row houses, the Brooklyn Bridge (1883), the neo-Gothic Woolworth Building (1913), the Art Deco Chrysler Building (1930) and Empire State Building (1931), and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958). The Metropolitan Museum of Art (founded 1870), Carnegie Hall (1891), the Museum of Modern Art (1929) and Broadway make it one of the world’s cultural capitals.

Our advice: take the first ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, then walk from Battery Park up through the Financial District to the Lower East Side and the Tenement Museum. You will have followed New York’s newcomers from the dock to their first homes.

Sources

Population: US Census Bureau, 2020 Census; NYC Department of City Planning. History: National Park Service (Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island; African Burial Ground); Tenement Museum; New-York Historical Society; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “New York City”.

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