The making of New York

New York is a young city by European standards and has packed a great deal into four hundred years. Knowing roughly how it got here makes a visit considerably better, because an unusual amount of the history is still standing and much of it is free to look at.

Before and after the Dutch

The island was Lenape land, and the name Manhattan comes from their language. The Dutch West India Company established a trading post at its southern tip in the 1620s and called it New Amsterdam. In 1664 an English fleet arrived, the Dutch governor surrendered without a fight, and the place was renamed after the Duke of York.

The Dutch period left more than it might appear. Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx all carry Dutch names, Wall Street follows the line of the defensive wall that marked the settlement's northern edge, and the tangle of short crooked streets in the Financial District is the original seventeenth-century town plan — which is why that one part of Manhattan is so much harder to navigate than everything above it.

The city was briefly the seat of the new nation's government: Congress sat here in the late 1780s, and George Washington was inaugurated as the first president at Federal Hall on Wall Street in 1789. The capital moved to Philadelphia the following year and then to Washington.

The port that made the city

New York's rise was not inevitable. What settled it was the Erie Canal, opened in 1825, which connected the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and made New York the natural outlet for the produce of an entire continent. Within a generation it was the dominant port in the Americas, and the money that followed built most of what visitors now come to see.

The port also brought people. Immigration processing ran at Castle Garden in what is now Battery Park, and from 1892 at the purpose-built station on Ellis Island, which handled something in the order of twelve million arrivals before it closed in 1954. A very large share of the American population has an ancestor who came through that harbour, which is why the Statue of Liberty carries the weight it does — it was the first thing many of them saw.

Those arrivals were housed in the tenements of the Lower East Side at densities that are hard to credit, and the reforms that followed — building codes, sanitation, public health inspection — were among the first of their kind anywhere.

Why it looks like that

Two decisions explain the shape of the modern city.

The first was the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which laid a rectangular grid of numbered streets and avenues across the whole of Manhattan above the existing town — across farmland, hills, streams and the occasional village, most of which were subsequently flattened or filled to fit. It was coldly commercial, widely criticised for having no regard for the terrain, and it is the reason the island is so easy to find the way around.

The second was consolidation in 1898, when Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island were merged into a single city. Brooklyn had until then been a large independent city in its own right, and some of its residents have not entirely forgiven the arrangement. It is also why "New York" means two quite different things — the five boroughs together, and the island most visitors mean when they say it.

Building upwards

The skyscraper was made possible by two things arriving together: steel frames, which meant walls no longer had to hold the building up, and safe lifts, which meant anyone would willingly go to the twentieth floor. Manhattan had the additional advantage of hard bedrock to build on and no room to spread sideways.

The result was a race that peaked between the wars and produced most of the city's best-loved buildings in a few extraordinary years around 1930. It is covered in more detail under the skyscrapers.

Harlem

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s is among the largest things New York has given the world, and it is routinely left out of short accounts of the city.

The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of Black Americans north out of the segregated South, and a great many of them to Harlem. What followed was an extraordinary concentration of writing, music, theatre and political thought — Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, W. E. B. Du Bois — which reshaped American culture and exported itself worldwide.

It is worth noting without sentiment that the most famous of the Harlem venues, the Cotton Club, employed Black performers and admitted white audiences only. The renaissance happened in a segregated city, and the music that came out of it travelled further than the people who made it were allowed to.

Broadway, jazz and the art world

The American musical was largely invented in a few blocks of midtown. Songwriters worked out of the Tin Pan Alley publishing houses, and the shows moved uptown with the theatre district to settle around Times Square, where they remain. The longest-running production in Broadway history, The Phantom of the Opera, closed in 2023 after thirty-five years.

Jazz had two homes here: Harlem's ballrooms, and the small clubs of 52nd Street in the 1940s and 1950s, where bebop was worked out night after night in rooms the size of a front parlour. Several of the surviving jazz rooms in Greenwich Village are direct descendants.

And after the Second World War the centre of the art world moved from Paris to New York, more or less permanently. The abstract expressionists worked downtown in cheap lofts, and the galleries that followed them have migrated steadily — from Greenwich Village to SoHo to Chelsea — always one step ahead of the rents they helped raise.

The Bronx, and the music that came out of it

In the early 1970s, at block parties in the South Bronx, disc jockeys began isolating and extending the percussion breaks in records so that dancers could keep going, and people began talking rhythmically over the top. Hip hop grew out of that, in one of the poorest and most neglected parts of the city, and became the dominant popular music of the world.

It is a better illustration than any of how New York works: something invented with almost no money, in a borough most visitors never reach, that ended up everywhere.

Stonewall

In June 1969 the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, and for once the customers fought back. The riots that followed over several nights are generally taken as the start of the modern gay rights movement, and the annual marches that commemorate them happen in most large cities in the world. The building is still there and the surrounding streets are now a national monument.

The hard years

Accounts of New York tend to skip from the glamour of the 1930s to the present. The decades between were grim. Manufacturing left, the middle class left for the suburbs, the subway and the parks fell apart, and by 1975 the city was close to bankruptcy — the federal government's initial refusal to help produced one of the most famous newspaper front pages ever printed. Crime rose through the 1970s and 1980s and peaked around 1990.

What followed was a long and contested recovery, and the disagreement about what caused it — policing, economics, demographics, the end of leaded petrol — is still live. What is not in dispute is the scale: the city a visitor walks around today is dramatically safer than the city of forty years ago, and a good deal more expensive.

September 2001, and what stands there now

The attacks on the World Trade Center killed nearly three thousand people and are within living memory for most adult visitors. What occupies the site now is worth describing accurately, because older writing on New York is full of plans that were subsequently changed.

The footprints of the two towers are now sunken memorial pools, each ringed with the names of the dead, with water falling continuously into them. Beneath and beside them is the 9/11 Memorial Museum. The tall building alongside is One World Trade Center, which opened in 2014 and reaches 1,776 feet — a deliberate reference to the year of independence.

Two corrections to things frequently still written. The building is not called the Freedom Tower; that name was used during planning and dropped. And the Windows on the World restaurant, which was at the top of the original North Tower, was destroyed with it and has not been rebuilt. There is an observatory, which is a different thing.

Where the history is visible

The useful part of all this is that very little of it requires a ticket.

• Lower Manhattan's street plan is the Dutch town, walkable in an hour.
• Federal Hall on Wall Street stands where Washington was inaugurated.
• Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty are reached by ferry, and the free Staten Island Ferry passes close to the statue without stopping.
• The Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side preserves actual flats and tells the immigration story through the families who lived in them.
• The memorial pools are open to the street at no charge; the museum is ticketed.
• Harlem rewards a walk, and the Apollo Theater still operates.
• The Stonewall Inn and the streets around it are a short detour in Greenwich Village.
• The grid itself is a two-hundred-year-old decision that anybody can stand in the middle of.