Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan Read Free Page A

skyscrapers developed so readily on this spit of earth is that its bedrock, composed of Fordham schist, Inwood marble, and White Mountain gneiss,was strong enough to withstand any amount of drilling. You can still bruise your ego against Manhattan's rough cheek. Like other island or aqueous cities—Istanbul, Venice, Hong Kong—it has a brash, arrogant energy far disproportionate to its size, and an uneasiness about domination by larger forces which it always tries to conceal.
    The island of Manhattan extends about thirteen miles in length, and two miles across at its widest point. It rests in the arms of the Hudson (whose lower branch, alongside Manhattan, used to be called the North River) and the East River. Properly speaking, the East River is not a river but a saltwater estuary or strait, a leg of the sea. It connects with the Harlem River (also a tidal strait), which flows between the Bronx and the northern tip of Manhattan.
    Seventy-five thousand years ago the glaciers began descending into the New York area, crushing the land, scooping out valleys and depositing boulders. The Ice Age was a period that, we know of a certainty, was extremely cold. Twenty thousand years later it was still rather cold; twenty thousand years after that, not quite so cold; twenty thousand years from that point, fairly chilly but approaching a tolerable coolness, suitable for human habitation. A mere eleven thousand years ago, as the glaciers were retreating and the seas rising, the first inhabitants arrived. In the final centuries of the Ice Age, these Paleoindians, as archaeologists call them, hunted mastodons with spears. Then they disappeared. In the Early Archaic period (10,000–8,000 B . P.), the Hudson River was still a fjord, the city's harbor had yet to be formed; in the Middle Archaic (8,000–6,000 B . P.), Native Americans began settling in, making tools and harvesting oysters; this was followed by the Late Archaic (6,000–3,700 B . P.), by which time the harbor had been formed and the sea levels were close to their current position. Following hard on the Late Archaic was the transitional period (3,700–2,700 B . P.), during which nothing very exciting happened, and then the Early and Middle Woodland (2,700–1,000 B . P.), a period of considerable pottery-making, hunting, fishing, and trading by the Munsees (a branch of the Lenape), but not much agriculture, surprisingly. This brings us to the arrival of the first Europeans.
    The name “Manhattan,” a Munsee tribe word, has been variously ascribed by linguists to mean “island,” “place of general inebriation,” or “place where timber is procured for bows and arrows.” Washington Irvinggave a more partial, tongue-in-cheek explanation in his A History of New York: “MANNA-HATA—that is to say, the island of Manna; or in other words—‘a land flowing with milk and honey.’”
    When Henry Hudson first sailed into the Upper Bay in 1609, searching for a westerly passage to China, he and the crew of the Half Moon, a Dutch ship, found a fair approximation to an isle of milk and honey. The natives met them in canoes with oysters the size of trays. (Later he was murdered by hostile Indians, but that's another story.) In 1624 the Dutch established an outpost at the southeastern tip of the island. Adriaen van der Donck, an early settler, described a place of streams and waterfalls and running brooks; copious wild turkeys that slept in the trees; a multitude of trout, striped bass, shellfish, and weakfish; natives “all properly formed and well-proportioned,” who, despite their “particular aversion” to “heavy slavish labor,” managed to grow maize, squash, and watermelon; an air “so dry, sweet and healthy that we need not wish that it were otherwise”; and, most important of all, beavers.
    New York was founded on animal skins and oysters. *
    The Dutch West India Company, granted a monopoly by the Netherlands government, ran New Amsterdam as a trading post,