Downtown: My Manhattan Page 4
By then, the Indians must have regretted their innocence in those early years of the seventeenth century. Those first Manhattanites had offered welcome and paid for their naïveté. Centuries would pass before their initial impulse was revived, by people who came across oceans.
Today, at the railing of Battery Park, I can see the ridge in Brooklyn where we lived. Up there in 1944, over on the left, I saw from our rooftop the skyline erupting into brilliant light after the Allied landing at Omaha Beach. The blackouts were over! The war would be next! My father said so. “Those Nazi bastards are finished!” And part of the deal, if you lived where we lived, was that the skyline would be ours, night after night, forever.
Here at the railing, my consciousness always shares this piece of the Battery with that place in Brooklyn. Two places separated by water. Two eras, separated by ten thousand small things. For a moment, and sometimes longer, I fill with certain shards and fragments from the summer of 1945, after the war was won in Europe. That summer was the beginning of the era we called After the War, even though the era was not official until mid-August, when Japan surrendered. Most vivid of all to me was (and is) the sound of foghorns and ships’ whistles and endlessly pealing church bells on the day that the old Queen Mary came steaming into the harbor. She was bringing home 14,526 of the men and women who had beaten the Nazi bastards. While crossing the Atlantic, they had slept on the floors of old cabins. They had slept on open decks. They had slept in engine rooms. But what the hell: If you had come out alive from the Battle of the Bulge or Anzio or Bastogne, nothing mattered except going home.
In Manhattan ’45, the British writer Jan Morris brilliantly re-creates that day, reminding me of the navy dirigible I saw from our roof. It floated above the great ocean liner, moved over the Narrows and the hidden underwater mesh that had stopped the Nazi U-boats, and then was in the Upper Bay. The Queen Mary was followed, flanked, and preceded by a flotilla of smaller vessels: tugboats and fishing boats and small cargo ships. They passed the Statue of Liberty, and the roar of New York must have been heard in heaven. Thousands of those returning soldiers were surely the children or grandchildren of other brave people who had come across an ocean long ago, determined to become Americans. I like to think that some of the soldiers cheered those old immigrants too. As the harbor exploded with joy and celebration and triumph, I was four days short of my tenth birthday. I believed, as did those men and women on the Queen Mary, that all the wars were over. Few of us could have imagined the new monuments that would someday face that same harbor or the many places that young Americans would visit with guns and flags.
As the Dutch trading post became a Dutch settlement, the hamlet soon had quaint yellow-brick houses with steep gabled rooftops built out of the memory of Amsterdam. Some housed craftsmen and their apprentices and a few contained well-off burghers attended by African slaves. There were many rowdy taverns, much smoking of tobacco in clay pipes, plenty of naughtiness. The streets were mud. Pigs roamed freely. There were even a few windmills.
Most of us know that the Dutch built a wall across the top of their tiny settlement to keep out unfriendly natives, and when the threat was over and the wall was torn down, the place became Wall Street. We know that the Dutch, who loved canals, dug one along Broad Street that led to the sea, a canal later filled in by the conquering British. We know that on cold winter days they went ice skating on the Collect Pond, just above today’s Chambers Street, then in the open countryside. That vanished hamlet deserved a painter like Franz Hals, even more than Vermeer or Rembrandt. The Dutch in New Amsterdam never got the painter that would bring their outpost to life, full of laughter and defiant optimism.
Those Dutch settlers, and the people they persuaded to join them, must have possessed an extraordinary loneliness too, of the kind Ray Bradbury expresses in his chronicles of Mars. After all, the journey from Holland to New Amsterdam averaged four and a half months. Nothing was familiar except what they built. They were perched on a tiny sliver of an island on the edge of a totally unknown, uncharted continent. It was no wonder that they huddled for warmth through those first winters in the few churches and the many taverns.
But the physical evidence of their presence is gone, except for those streets laid out long ago. Fire was the great agent of erasure. The great fire at the beginning of the American Revolution destroyed 493 houses down here (along with the early version of Trinity Church). Most were British; many were Dutch. The Great Fire of 1835, which leveled 700 more houses, erased what was left. The remnants lie under the skyscrapers. Even Fort Amsterdam, much of it built by slave labor, the place where Peter Stuyvesant expressed his rage and his authority, was long ago reduced to rubble, and the spot is now partially occupied by the muscular marble solidity of the Custom House.
The one exception to the erasure of the Dutch town is the small triangular park called the Bowling Green. Nobody bowls there anymore, although the Dutch and English once did, but it stands as a green marker to the creation of the city, right down at the beginning of Broadway. The grass is protected by an iron fence, which itself has gone through as many mutations as the little park. This triangular spot was once much larger, serving as a produce market for the early settlers, as a cattle fair, and as a marching ground for inept amateur soldiers.
Occasionally, it was the scene of trading with visiting Indians. The street that became Broadway was adapted to an existing, much-traveled Indian trail. Right up to the arrival of the Europeans, and for twenty years afterward, the native Americans retained the old habit of visiting Manna-hata in summer from their home precincts high on the island or out on Long Island. They left no written records, of course, but all were under the general anthropological umbrella of the Lenape. Some were Canarsees from Long Island. Some were Weckquaesgecks whose home base was in present-day Westchester. Some were Mahicans from the west side of the river. For centuries they had feasted here on the bounty of the harbor: oysters and clams, lobster and terrapin, and every manner of fish. One study estimates that oyster beds covered 350 square miles of the bay and the North River. There were occasional dolphins in the harbor and a rare visiting whale who had taken a wrong turn at Sandy Hook. Before the eastern shore of the island’s tip was expanded by landfill, there were great mounds of oyster shells along the river edge, some washed ashore by the currents of the estuary, some left behind by the summering Lenape. They were smoothed out by early settlers to make a street, which some forgotten Dutchman with a sense of irony dubbed Pearl Street. The street lives on with that name. It is the street where Captain Kidd once lived and where Herman Melville was born.
There were few pearls to be discovered in early Dutch New York. The basic trade involved beaver pelts gathered in the forests up the North River, and there were never enough of them to create profit. The Dutch did not, as they had hoped, establish a major rivalry with the Russian fur traders who helped clothe wintry Europe. But in their North American settlement, certain practices became a founding component of all future New York generations. New Amsterdam’s basic mission was to make money for the West India Company, its directors, and its shareholders. The company (not any king) assigned the directors, calling them governors, and some of those early New Amsterdam governors had private missions. They were not there to proclaim the truth of any Christian sect. They were not there to create a modern civilization among people they saw as savages. They were there to get rich. Almost from the start, corruption was woven into the enterprise.
Standing at the iron fence of today’s Bowling Green, I sometimes imagine Willem Verhulst nodding at friends or acquaintances gathered at this spot, his mind feverish with deals. He was the first director of the trading post, or governor, ruling in the name of the West India Company. His residence stood within the confines of the fort that he had ordered built. There is no surviving portrait of the man, but with Hals and Rembrandt in mind, I imagine him as thick necked and blustery, wearing his authority as a weapon. He was, by all surviving accounts, a bully and a drunk.
But more important to the New York tale, he was also a man with a passion for crookedness. He created the future city’s first known set of double books, one for the company, one for himself. He cut himself into various other deals (primarily in real estate) around his small but growing domain. The company directors finally got wise and recalled him, replacing him with Peter Minuit, a forty-year-old French-speaking Walloon born in Germany, who was to formalize the title to the island with the company’s “purchase” of Manna-hata for twenty-four dollars’ worth of beads and trinkets. This was almost certainly a double swindle, with visiting Canarsee Indians unloading an island to which they had no genuine claim. Minuit served for only thirteen months, but his name endures thanks to that land transaction, a fitting claim to fame, after all, in a city that would be driven so ruthlessly by the future brigands of real estate.
Those who soon followed Minuit were either crooked or stupid. None matched in flamboyance the British governor Lord Cornbury (1661-1723), who after 1702 loved strolling the ramparts of the fort dressed in drag and had himself painted as Queen Anne. Then, in 1647 arrived that extraordinary human bundle of flaws and virtues named Peter Stuyvesant: a brave soldier, a tough commander, his peg leg banded with silver, his mind filled with certainties and iron will and his share of nasty little bigotries. His frown seemed permanent. His rages about human weakness were legendary. Stuyvesant arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam in 1647, aged thirty-seven, expecting to stay for three years; he stayed for fifteen. Even when the British took the town in 1664, even after his own son had joined those citizens—a majority—who urged him not to resist the British forces, Stuyvesant stayed on. He retreated to his immense farm, or bouwerie, up the east side of the island, and is buried at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, parts of which served as the farm’s chapel. The church is at Second Avenue and East Tenth Street, and for years kids from the wrong side of town made failed raids on the cemetery hoping to steal Stuyvesant’s silver-banded leg. (One of them was Rocky Graziano, the middleweight boxing champion in the 1940s.) Stuyvesant surely would have seen such expeditions as additional proof of human iniquity. But after his death in 1672, he became one of those permanent New Yorkers, his bones staying on forever in the island that in some cranky, fierce way he loved more than the land where he was born.
Today, more than three centuries after his death, Stuyvesant’s name and image are welded to the alloy of Manhattan. His name adorns the finest public high school on the island. It is the name of an eighteen-square-block housing project on the East Side, built in 1943. Apartment houses carry the name, and at least one public square, one florist, and one oil burner company.
There are no public traces of his corrupt predecessors, and no memorials. In a way, there should be, for their legacies are part of the New York alloy too.
The Bowling Green is now a tranquil secret garden. It is difficult to imagine the Dutch here, grunting, smoking, and bowling. Outside its fence, at the northern tip of a traffic island that includes the tiny park, stands a bronze statue of an angry bull twisting its horned head north toward unseen Wall Street. The three-and-a-half-ton bull is the work of a sculptor named Arturo DiModica, cast by a man named Domenico Ranieri. The statue was not commissioned by anyone. It simply turned up, sixteen feet long, under a Christmas tree in front of the Stock Exchange in 1989. The parks department later arranged to move it to the present location, where it seems certain to remain, deep in the heart of the capital of capitalism. The reason is simple: New Yorkers and their guests love it. Every day of the week, platoons of visitors clamber around its head while posing in rain or sunshine for the cameras of their friends. At the rear of the statue, teenage girls pose beside the bull’s immense testicles, now polished by thousands of enthusiastic hands. At first, the posing girls always giggle. Then they laugh in a roguish way. And sometimes they erupt in gales of laughter. On one afternoon, I saw four French nuns behaving just like the teenage girls while a fifth nun immortalized them with a digital camera. Surely no statue in Manhattan has brought more joy to strangers.
DiModica’s bull has its back to the secret garden of the Bowling Green. Inside the fence, there are smooth-topped tables with slatted chairs, and benches where solitary visitors read books or watch the platoons of tourists following leaders carrying yellow bats or furled American flags. At one summery table not long ago, three homeless men argued loudly over a chessboard, their words a slurred yawp. A man in a business suit licked a Dairy Freeze ice-cream cone in isolated pleasure. Another stood silently beside a gurgling fountain, staring into the water.
“I come here,” said an older man named Richard Hewitt, “because nothing ever happens when I’m here. That’s exactly why I come here.”
A sign on the fence now explains that the green was leased under British rule in 1733 as the official bowling green (for a rent of one peppercorn a year), with the fence itself erected in 1771. Originally each picket of the fence wore a replica of a British crown. But on July 9, 1776, when the Sons of Liberty and other young Americans heard a reading in what is now City Hall Park of the Declaration of Independence (signed five days earlier in Philadelphia), a mob descended upon the park. They did a bit of damage. The prime object of their patriotic exuberance was a huge, gilded, seven-year-old equestrian statue of George III, the mad king of England. The design was based on the famous statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. The mob ignored all noble antecedents. They toppled the metal George III from his marble pedestal, assaulted him with clubs and axes, beheaded him. Witnesses remarked that there were no shouts of triumph or singing of revolutionary songs. The dismantling was manual labor. According to historian Rodman Gilbert, some patriots then took the various pieces by cart off to distant hideouts (almost certainly in Connecticut) and melted down the statue’s four thousand pounds of lead into 42,088 bullets (in his 1936 account, The Battery, Gilbert did not explain who did the counting). We do know that the battered head came to a tavern in Kingsbridge, where it was soon captured by British soldiers, then briefly buried for safekeeping, dug up, and sent off to England, where it was shown to some citizens as proof of the savagery of the Americans. The tail of the horse and three other fragments were found on a Connecticut farm in 1871 and are now at the New-York Historical Society.
The mob also wrenched the crowns off each picket in the Bowling Green fence. The fence itself has survived, but after more than two centuries, nobody has ever found those missing crowns.
From the entrance to the little park, a visitor can look south toward the harbor and see, a few hundred feet away, the splendid pile whose official name is the Alexander Hamilton US Custom House. Since the 1990s, it has housed the George Gustave Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian, which contains many fine things, and a good bookstore. Most New Yorkers simply call it the Custom House.
The designer was Cass Gilbert, a midwesterner who became one of the finest of all New York architects (his masterpiece is the 1913 Woolworth Building). The building is only seven stories high, in a neighborhood of giant structures, but the Gilbert design, in the French beaux arts style, has an enduring, muscular power. Gilbert has been called a “modern traditionalist,” adhering to the surface styles of traditional European architecture but drawing on advances in technology, including the use of steel frames and, later, the elevator. Unlike the modern Bauhaus-inspired blankness that was to dominate mid-twentieth-century New York, this was a building to be looked upon, studied, even read. Gilbert wanted to please his client, and himself, and the New Yorker who strolled by on a summer afternoon. He pleased all three.
The exterior stone is a dark gray Maine granite, with forty-four Corinthian columns spaced around the entire building. Out front, too, stand four white limestone sculptures by Daniel Chester French, in striking contrast to the darker building itself, the groups of figures representing Asia, America, Europe, and Africa. High above the main entrance are smaller statues dedicated to the world’s greatest mercantile nations, as perceived in those confident early years of the twe
ntieth century: Greece, Rome, Phoenicia, Genoa, Venice, Spain, Holland, Portugal, Denmark, Germany, England, and France. Clearly this is a building designed to be used (one of Gilbert’s tasks was to find storage space for the growing bulk of bureaucratic documents). But it also was imagined as a monument to trade. That is, as a monument that expressed the triumphant spirit of the booming port of New York.
Today, a visitor can climb the same wide stairway that existed when the building opened in 1907 and inhale the salt air of the harbor or gaze north along Broadway. Inside is the elliptical rotunda, 135 feet long, with a dome that rises almost 85 feet above the floor. The marble columns and marble mosaic floors add a sumptuous, even sensual flavor to the room and an echo that is almost ghostly. The fresco murals here were painted by Reginald Marsh in 1937. In the early 1920s, Marsh was a sketch artist for the tabloid New York Daily News, but he had moved on from journalism to become the visual poet of the city’s subways, dance halls, and burlesque palaces. Faced with those high unadorned walls—eight horizontal spaces, eight vertical—he must have understood what most New Yorkers come to understand: the harbor is everything. The art historian Lloyd Goodrich described his solution: