On Friday, I visited the Museum of the City of New York, a modestly-sized museum on the eastern side of Central Park. It’s in a beautiful old building and has a permanent exhibit on the city through the ages.
I really like to try to imagine New York before all the insanity of skyscrapers and subways and millions of inhabitants, but it’s pretty hard to do. There’s none of the old countryside or swampy bits that the Dutch saw when they founded New Amsterdam. And there’s no remaining evidence of the Lenape people, which is really sad. I thought the museum was my best bet for understanding the trajectory of the city as best I could.
I learned that after the “purchase” of Manhattan in 1626 (which is misleading, as the Native people likely thought it was an agreement to share the land), there was Kieft’s War in 1643, in which Dutch soldiers killed Natives all over the northeast. By 1664, the Lenape population was down from 2000 to a few hundred.
This is a drawing of Jacques, whom the Dutch took prisoner back to the Netherlands and put on public display.
This reminds me very much of Sarah Baartman, the woman taken from South Africa and put on display for her “exotic” body in Paris.
There was also info about public sanitation and disease in the city, which are super interesting topics to me. I love learning about how city infrastructure contributes to public health. And did you know that fires were so feared that every household had to have an official water bucket?
Here is a picture of a “watchman’s rattle,” from the early 18th century, which was used to alert people that a fire had broken out.
There were some old maps and pictures of New York, especially of downtown, as that was more populated than the rural uptown. Best of all, here is Harper’s Weekly, directed by the same Harper brothers who made Harper’s Magazine!
