The area now known as New York City had been occupied by Native Americans for more than 11,000 years before Giovanni da Verrazano, a Florentine hired by the French to explore the northeastern coast, arrived at New York Bay in 1524. The area lay unmolested until English explorer Henry Hudson stumbled on it while searching for the Northwest Passage in 1609. 'It is as beautiful a land as one can hope to tread upon,' reported Hudson, who claimed the place for the Dutch East India Company.
By 1625, the Dutch settlers had established a fur trade with the natives and were augmented by a group that established a post they eventually called New Amsterdam, the seat of a much larger colony called New Netherland. Advertisements in Europe lured settlers to New Amsterdam with promises of a temperate climate and bountiful land, but the harsh winters claimed many lives. Historians agree that Peter Minuit, the director of the Dutch West India Company, purchased the island from local tribes for goods worth a pittance. But the goods were worth a bit more than the US$24.00 commonly recorded - probably closer to US$600.00 (still a bargain).
After some to-ing and fro-ing between Britain and the Netherlands, New Amsterdam became the British colony of New York in the 1670s. Though colonists began cultivating farms in New Jersey and on Long Island, the port town remained geographically tiny - the area that today runs from Wall St south to the tip of Manhattan. Anti-British zeal caught on as early as the 1730s. Thirty years later, New York's Commons - where City Hall stands today - was the centre of many anti-British protests. Despite the intensity of New Yorkers' sentiments, King George III's troops controlled New York for most of the war, finally withdrawing in 1783, a full two years after the fighting stopped.
By the time George Washington was sworn in as president of the new republic on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall St in 1789, New York was a bustling seaport of 33,000 people, but it lagged behind Philadelphia as a cultural capital. The new Congress abandoned the city for the District of Columbia the following year - Thomas Jefferson later remarked that New York was a 'cloacina (sewer) of all the depravities of human nature.'
New York boomed in the early 19th century. Its population swelled from 65,000 in 1800 to 250,000 in 1820. During the Civil War, the city provided many volunteers for the Union cause. But as the war dragged on, many of the city's poorest citizens turned against the effort, especially after mandatory conscription was introduced. In the summer of 1863, Irish immigrants launched the 'draft riots' protesting the provision that allowed wealthy men to pay US$300.00 in order to avoid fighting. Within days the rioters turned their anger on black citizens, as they were considered the real reason for the war and their main competition for work. More than 11 men were lynched in the streets and a black orphans' home was burned to the ground.
The remainder of the century in New York was a boom time for the city's population, which grew thanks to European immigration, and for businessmen, who took advantage of lax oversight of industry and stock trading during the so-called 'Gilded Age'. These men built grand mansions along 'millionaires row' on lower Fifth Ave. Along Broadway from City Hall to Union Square, multi-storey buildings - the first 'skyscrapers' - were built to house corporate headquarters.
As the city's population more than doubled from 500,000 in 1850 to over 1.1 million in 1880, a tenement culture developed. The burgeoning of New York's population beyond the city limits led to the consolidation movement, as the city and its neighbouring districts struggled to service the growing numbers. Residents of the independent districts of Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx and financially-strapped Brooklyn voted to become 'boroughs' of New York City in 1898.
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