Six on History: NY - The Empire State
panaritisp
"Black History Month spurred us to investigate the institution of slavery in the Hudson Valley and, more specifically, Hillsdale. Like most Americans, we’ve been inclined to think of slavery as largely a Southern institution. But it was hugely important in the colonial North. From the earliest days of Dutch occupancy right up to the Civil War, much of New York State’s bustling economy benefited directly from traffic in enslaved humans.
In the 17th and 18th centuries New York was second only to the southern states in its number of enslaved people. In 1703, 42 percent of New York City’s households had slaves, much more than Philadelphia and Boston combined. Among the cities of the original 13 colonies, only Charleston, South Carolina, had more.
In the Hudson Valley, the first enslaved men were brought to Fort Orange (Albany) in 1626, only two years after it was settled, by the Dutch West Indies Company. By the mid 1600s Dutch ships were bringing thousands of men, women, and children in chains to New Amsterdam, many of whom were sold to upstate landowners to work on the vast farms and manor holdings of the Anglo-Dutch elite. Enslavement was not only a source of cheap labor (since settlers were hard to come by in the Hudson Valley) but also cheap capital.
In colonial Columbia County, the majority of enslaved people were concentrated in the older river towns of Kinderhook, Clermont and Claverack, held for the most part by the Dutch, the Germans, and Anglo-Dutch landholders. In Kinderhook, roughly a quarter of the white households owned slaves in 1790. Robert Livingston, the third lord of the Manor, ruled a literal plantation, with some of the forty-four slaves working at his ironworks at Ancram. In 1786 there were more than 1300 slaves in Kinderhook, Claverack, and Clermont, comprising 10 to 13 percent of those towns’ total population.
In sharp contrast, the Yankee-settled hill towns of Hillsdale and Canaan along the Massachusetts border had far fewer enslaved people. In the first Federal census of 1790, enslaved Africans counted for less than one percent of the population of Hillsdale and Canaan. It is tempting to imagine that the hill town Yankees – emigres from Massachusetts which had abolished slavery in 1784, and Connecticut, which had passed an act for Gradual Abolition in 1784 — were more high-minded than their riverfront neighbors. But more likely they were just poorer, working as tenant farmers on the Livingston or Van Rensselaer manors, a condition of servitude unlikely to enrich them to the point where they could afford to buy enslaved people. Those who weren’t tenant farmers were considered “squatters” by the Van Rensselaers and Livingstons and were in constant danger of being chased back over the border by British troops at the behest of the great landowners.
Americans won their freedom from Great Britain in 1785 but did not extend that freedom to people of color (or to women, for that matter). The first halting steps toward abolishing slavery in the state were being taken in New York as early as 1785 but were heatedly contested. Columbia County was split on emancipation. The anti-abolitionists were rooted in the riverfront Dutch/German communities where slavery was a fundamental part of the agricultural economy. The pro-abolitionists encompassed both the thriving city of Hudson, settled by Quaker whalers from New England, and the populist Baptist militants of the eastern hill towns of Canaan and Hillsdale, where slavery was much less entrenched.
That is not to say that there were no enslaved people in Hillsdale. The 1790 census shows a total of 66 enslaved people in Canaan and Hillsdale, compared to 978 in Kinderhook and Claverack, and 386 in the south-county Livingston towns. Charles McKinstry, a prominent Hillsdale figure and member of the NY State Legislature, held five, and Ambrose Spencer (of Spencertown) held three. But both men, conscious of evolving anti-slavery sentiment, voted against their financial interests to support the abolishment of slavery in New York. ... "
"With more residents than Dallas, more than Atlanta and San Francisco combined, the Bronx is a vast, vibrant megalopolis, which also happens to be New York City’s greenest borough. It’s home to the largest urban zoological garden in America, a park system nearly 10 times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park — and the city’s last remaining patch of old growth forest.
A few months ago, for a series of (edited and condensed) walks around town, Eric W. Sanderson and I toured Lower Manhattan, pretending it was circa 1609, the year Henry Hudson sailed through the Narrows into New York Harbor. Mr. Sanderson is a senior conservation ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo. He is also a longtime resident of the borough’s City Island. “My beloved Minnewits,” he calls it, using the Lenape name.
On Google Maps it’s called Third Avenue.
Michael Kimmelman Eric, I assume geologically speaking this walk is different from the one we took through Lower Manhattan.
Eric Sanderson You know what geologists say.
No, I don’t.
The Bronx is gneiss, Manhattan is schist.
I’m sorry to hear that.
The Bronx is the only part of New York City that’s actually attached to the rest of North America. Manhattan and Staten Island are islands, Brooklyn and Queens are part of Long Island — meaning the city is basically an archipelago in an estuary except for the Bronx, where you can walk to Connecticut and further north. The borough’s geology has had a tremendous influence on its ecology and development.
How so?
Well, we’re starting at Yankee Stadium. Imagine we’re standing in center field.
The closest I’ll get to being Aaron Judge.
Hundreds of years ago center field was the mouth of what was called Mentipathe or Cromwell’s Creek. Mentipathe is the Lenape name. The creek started in the headwaters of Jerome Avenue, at around 180th Street, then flowed down a valley to where the stadium is now, which used to be a salt marsh that opened into the Harlem River.
For fellow pedants: center field in the current Yankee Stadium or the original one?
The original Yankee Stadium was on the edge of the marsh; the new one, a little farther upstream. Mickey Mantle used to complain about the old center field getting mysteriously wet. It was wet because of all the groundwater from the ancient stream. The bedrock underlying the field runs downhill, and you can try to cover up bedrock all you want with concrete or whatever, but water will follow gravity.
In the 1920s the Yankees moved from the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, just across the Harlem River.
Which they shared with the New York Giants. Then the Giants kicked the Yankees out and the Giants manager, John McGraw, famously taunted them about relocating to what he called Goatville. The Bronx was the hinterlands back then.
The site of the Polo Grounds was Coogan’s Bluff. It’s now a public housing development.
During pre-Colonial days, it was a rocky forest on an escarpment with spectacular views down the river valley. Once upon a time, the Hudson River may have flowed down this valley, not along the west side of Manhattan, where it is now. The river has changed course several times. It used to cut across New Jersey at the Sparkill Gap, then through the Newark basin. According to a paper I recently read, at an earlier point it followed the path of what’s now the Harlem River — past the future Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium — through Flushing Meadows, carving out the ancient valley that underlies Jamaica Bay.
When are we talking about?
The paper suggested the Pleistocene era before the Wisconsin glaciation, so perhaps 1.5 million years ago. It’s hard to know for sure about early glaciations because later glaciers rearranged everything, but traces remain. If you dig down in Long Island, for example, layers of sands and silts connect to geologic formations discovered in New Jersey, which suggest that, maybe 3.5 million years ago, a still earlier proto-Hudson River flowed west and then south into the Delaware basin. It carved out the Kill Van Kull strait that now separates Staten Island from Bayonne, N.J.
Your point is that, like millions of New Yorkers, the city’s rivers have moved around, changed neighborhoods, assumed new identities?
And that the site where the Yankees settled in the Bronx, at the edge of what used to be Mentipathe or Cromwell’s Creek, went through its own transformations. So if this were 1609, and we were where the stadium is today, we would be near a wide tidal creek, possibly sitting in a dugout canoe, surrounded by swirling, yellow-green Spartina grass and wild geese.
Oliver Cromwell, the English ruler after they chopped off Charles I’s head?
No, John Cromwell, a nephew of Oliver’s. John came to America in the 1680s. One of his descendants built a water mill on the creek during the 1700s, hence the name. The creek fed an ice pond where people used to go skating during the 19th century. By the 1920s, what became Yankee Stadium had turned into a lumber mill. There’s a description of the lumber yard surrounded by boulders — glacial erratics, they’re called. They are all over New York City. There’s a monster example at Heckscher Playground in Central Park and a number of erratics in the Bronx like Glover’s Rock in Pelham Bay Park. Boulders were part of the “till” a glacier would leave behind.
Glacial sediment.
Exactly, which the ice moved sometimes hundreds of miles from where the boulders and other rocks started
Eric, you and I haven’t moved an inch.
Let’s push on. I thought from Yankee Stadium we’d duck under the No. 4’s elevated subway tracks and trudge east, uphill, on 161st Street toward the Bronx County Courthouse.
I assume in 1609 nearly all of it was dense forest.
Who can talk about anything else? Yes, I believe Viele was a surveyor and engineer for Central and Prospect Parks, then became commissioner of parks in the 1880s.
I have read that the Bronx back then was especially big in the frozen water trade, harvesting ice from ponds fed by the Bronx River — which was prized for being pure.
This was one of those kinds of ponds. We know from an 1891 map that it was eventually filled in to make a rail yard.
Speaking of the Bronx River, if we continue east on 161st Street, across a couple more ridges, past a few more ancient streams, we can catch the BX21 bus, which passes the site of Pudding Rock, another glacial erratic, gone now.
Apparently its shape and purplish color put English colonists in mind of a plum pudding.
There are descriptions of views from the top of Pudding Rock, toward the Palisades in New Jersey and down to the East River and Long Island Sound. Four hundred years ago, if we were at Pudding Rock we’d be looking over hills covered with dark green trees descending to salt marshes, threaded with streams and rivers and grassy plains. The old accounts can seem overwrought and almost unbelievable to us today, because we’ve lost the capacity to imagine the city could ever be so different. But it wasn’t that long ago, in the greater scheme of things, that the Bronx was an ecological wonderland.
Today it’s possible not even to notice the hills and valleys because they’re overlaid by a man-made topography.
That’s why the forest at the New York Botanical Garden is revelatory. It’s the only old growth forest left in the city. There were poems written in the 19th century about it. People would make excursions from the city and describe sitting under the cool boughs of the hemlock. My wife works at the Botanical Garden. She runs horticulture for a Saturday morning program that lets kids plant gardens and grow vegetables. When our son was little, we would sometimes arrive early so we could take him for a walk in the forest. We were so lucky, we had the place to ourselves. It was transformative. I remember the first day our son could walk all the way across the forest by himself, he was maybe three or four. He was so proud.
How old is he now?
Nineteen. He’s doing a degree in environmental science and applied economics.
The bus lets us off at the southern end of the Bronx Zoo, where boats used to sail up the Bronx River, collecting agricultural goods for the city.
The river is a saga in itself. It used to be notorious as one of the filthiest waterways in America, a poster child for urban decline and environmental ruin. A community group called the Bronx River Alliance has helped turn it around, making its rejuvenation a tool for community revitalization as well. I’ve gone kayaking with kids from a local youth development organization, Rocking the Boat
, that teaches teens about wetland ecology and boat building. The transformation of the river is mind-boggling. Wildlife is back. Oysters. Alewife. Egrets.Colleagues of mine have found American Eels also returning to the river. The Bronx River is proof that given half a chance, nature finds a way back. You know the story of José.
No. Who is José?
Oh, well.
Back in 2007 I was in my office at the zoo one afternoon when some colleagues came by and said that on their lunch break, walking along the Bronx River, they saw a beaver. I said, “No, guys, you didn’t see a beaver, you saw a muskrat. There haven’t been beavers on the Bronx River for 200 years.”
They were, like, “We know what a beaver is, Eric.”
So the next day, I go with them to look, and sure enough, there were markings on a tree that were not made by a muskrat. They resembled the carvings of beaver teeth. A few days later a photographer got pictures of the beaver. Nobody knew what sex it was — probably a male because males disperse a lot farther. It was named after José E. Serrano, the United States Congressman from the Bronx who directed federal money to help clean up the river.
Everybody had thought the closest beaver population was up in northern Westchester or Putnam County, which meant that José must have traveled all the way downriver, through Scarsdale, through Bronxville, through these really lovely, ritzy neighborhoods in Westchester — and decided to live in the Bronx!
The beaver built a couple of lodges and knocked down a couple of big trees.
José knocked trees down?
Well, the wind did, with an assist from the beaver. At the zoo everybody was like, OK, all right, that’s what beavers do.
But the Botanical Garden was less happy about the whole situation. They put some metal guards around some of the trees. Then a few years ago another beaver showed up. So, now there were two of them. The Bronx River Alliance had the idea to ask schoolchildren in the neighborhood what they should call the new beaver. And the kids decided on Justin.
Justin Beaver.
So now José and Justin live in the Bronx?
I haven’t seen either one of them in a while.
Hmm. Eric, do you think maybe they’ve moved back to the suburbs?
Yes. Maybe."