Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A Brief History of New York City

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Subscribe to the podcast!  https://podfollow.com/everythingeverywhere/ New York City has been called the city that never sleeps. It is the world center for finance, the location of the United Nations, and a center for fashion and entertainment.  But why did this city become so important, and why did such an important city get founded where it is? Was it chance, was it history, or was it geography?  Learn more about New York City, as much as is possible on a daily podcast, on this Episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. -------------------------------- Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New York City has been called the city that never sleeps, the big apple, and the city so nice they named it twice. It's the World Center for Finance, the location of the United Nations, and a center for fashion and entertainment. But why did this city become so important? And why did such an important city get founded where it was? Was it chance? Was it history? Or was it geography? Learn more about New York City, as much as is possible on a daily podcast on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Given the constraints of a podcast like this one, this episode's going to focus on the very big picture about how New York came to be what it is today. This means obviously won't be going through every event and its history or all the people that helped shaped it. What I can do is give a thousand foot overview of the city, how it came to be,

and how it came to be so important. The story of New York starts with the indigenous people who live there before the Europeans arrived, the Lenape. They lived in an area that included coastal Delaware, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and the area around the Hudson River Valley. The Lenape were a woodland people, and the area that is New York City was mostly woodland. The word Manhattan comes from the Lenape word meaning manahattan, which roughly translates to the place where we get bows. The first European to visit the area was the Italian explorer Giovanni de Verrazano in 1524. He sailed into New York Harbor, and today the entrance of the harbor is known as the Verrazano Narrows. He sailed into the harbor enough to see the Hudson River, and all he really reported back was that he found a large river.

It wasn't until over 80 years later in 1609, when the English explorer Henry Hudson, sailed back into the harbor and up the river which was named after him. He eventually sailed all the way up to Albany in Upper New York. Here I need to explain the geography of New York, and one made it so special and appealing for Europeans who were arriving in North America. Unlike the west coast of North America, the East Coast has plenty of good harbors. Halifax, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, and Charleston all have really good harbors for ships. However, New York had several things going for it. For starters, it had a very large deep harbor. However, what really set it apart is that it was connected to the Hudson, which allowed ships to travel far inland.

This was a very big deal, because transporting anything inland was very difficult and expensive. Transporting a piece of furniture from Europe by ship would cost as much as sending it just 30 miles overland once it arrived. New York was a well-protected harbor, which could be defended on a well-protected island, which was the gateway to the interior of the entire New York colony. The Dutch arrived in 1613 and established a trading post on the island that it named New Amsterdam. On May 24, 1626, the Dutch purchased the island of Manhattan from an unnamed group of Indians for the equivalent of 60 Dutch guilders worth of goods. There have been many rumors about the purchase of Manhattan which have spread over the years, mainly that it was purchased for the equivalent of $24 worth of beads and that they basically stole it from the unsuspecting natives. Well, first, there's no record of them trading beads or wampum.

They may have, but there's no record of that. Based on most trades that Dutch made with the natives of the area, it was probably some combination of guns, clothing, blankets, knives, or other supplies. Also, the $24 amount, which has always been repeated, has never been adjusted for inflation. 60 Dutch guilders from 1613 might have had a value of around $1,000 to $15,000 now, depending on how you price the goods that might have been traded. Second, there's no reason to believe that it wasn't a fair trade. Sure, hundreds of years later, Manhattan did become a really big deal and the land prices

exploded. However, for the entire time, whoever made the trade lived on Manhattan, it was just an outpost with a wooden stockade. The land wouldn't have necessarily been that special to the people who traded it. It was just woodland, like everything else around it. What made it valuable to the Dutch was its location on the harbor, and the Lenape didn't have huge ships, which required a harbor. Finally, while the Lenape did have a quasi-system of land ownership, there's no record that the people who made the trade with the Dutch had any rights to the land. It's very possible that it was the Dutch who were swindled.

Either way, a settlement was established on Manhattan. The Dutch influence can still be seen in the name of many of the places in New York, including Brooklyn, Harlem, Stuyvesant, and Coney Island. The boundary of the Dutch settlement where the rampart existed became known as DeWallstrot, which became known as Wall Street. In 1664, the British military took over the settlement without much difficulty, as the residents weren't very fond of their governor, Peter Stuyvesant. The British subsequently renamed the settlement New York.

The Dutch did briefly retake the city in 1773 and renamed it New Orange, but it was given back in 1674 by treaty. New York became a major center of British colonial America. In 1700, the population was approximately 5,000 people, and it had reached 25,000 by the start of the American Revolution, in 1776. Much of the focus of the war for the British was New York. They held it for the entirety of the conflict, and it was the location of one of the major battles of the war, the Battle of Brooklyn or the Battle of Long Island. After the war, New York began to grow rapidly, and it became

the first capital of a newly independent United States of America. The population reached 60,000 by the year 1800, and by this time it had surpassed Philadelphia as the largest city in the country. A title it would never relinquish. slavery was abolished in New York in 1817. Prior to this, the slave population of the city reached a peak of 20% of the population after the revolution. Here I should note that at this time, New York only consisted of the island of Manhattan. Brooklyn was a completely separate and growing city across the river from New York. Likewise, there were many other communities all based on or around the harbor and the river surrounding Manhattan.

New York grew rapidly during the 19th century. By 1820, it had become the first American city. to have a population of 100,000 people. By 1850, it had a population of half a million. In 1860, it had a population of 813,000, and Brooklyn had quickly become the third largest city in the country with a population of a quarter million. New York had a very contentious relationship with the Civil War.

On one hand, they had strong relationships with southern ports, and there were large draft riots in the city. But on the other hand, no city in the country provided more soldiers for the Union Army than New York did. As the city grew, people began moving further up the island. In the 1960s, it saw the opening of what is perhaps the most prominent feature on the island of Manhattan today, Central Park. I'll be doing a future episode on Central Park because its creation and continued existence is actually really interesting. The city kept growing after the war and became even more important as the center of finance as the country began growing west.

After the war, all of the cities around Manhattan slowly began to consolidate. In 1865, the New York and Brooklyn Fire Departments merged. In 1874, the area known as the Bronx was annexed to New York City, and it simply became known as the Annex District of the Bronx. Around this time, Brooklyn began to consolidate all of the communities which neighboring it as well. The big change, which created the modern city of New York, happened in 1898. That was the year that Brooklyn, Manhattan, the communities of Staten Island, and Queens County all merged to form the Greater New York. city. The new city was set up with a system of boroughs, with each borough acting in some respects as an independent city. The Bronx separated once again in 1914 to create a fifth borough. Likewise,

the counties were rearranged such that each borough became its own county with relations to the state of New York. New York has always been the primary entry point for immigrants coming to the United States from Europe. Beginning in 1892, Ellis Island opened up, which became the primary immigration process facility for the entire country. through 1954, it processed over 12 million immigrants coming to the United States. With the surge in immigration and the consolidation of the city, it grew even faster than before. By 2025, it had become the largest city in world history with a population of 7.7 million people. Just 11 years later in 1936, it became the first city in history to have a population of 10 million people.

And it also became home to some of the world's tallest buildings, with the construction of the Chrysler, Empire State, and Woolworth. buildings. New York had certainly become a major international city by this time. As the finance center of the United States, which now had the world's largest economy, it had become a first-tier world city. It was in the aftermath of the Second World War, however, that New York established itself in a position of predominance. In 1951, the United Nations established its headquarters in Manhattan at a location on the East River. It is the location of both the UN General Assembly and Security Council, and it also has embassies from every country in the world. Likewise, the Bretton Wood system, which established the post-war monetary framework, made the dollar the world's reserve currency,

and the largest store of gold in the world was and is located in the basement of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. When there are large transfers between countries, gold is moved from one pile to another. It is also one of, if not the most, diverse cities in the world. An estimated 800 languages are spoken in the city, a third of all residents were born outside of the United States, and with the UN, there are people living in the city from every nation on Earth. Today, New York has two of the world's largest museums, the world's largest subway system, two of the world's largest stock exchanges, two of the worst football teams in America, and three airports, none of which are connected to their subway system.

Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. If you'd like to support the show, you can do so over at patreon.com. Remember, if you leave a review or send in a question, you two can have it read on the show.