Stand beside the round sandstone walls of Castle Clinton at the Battery and you are standing on what used to be water. The army built this fort on rocks offshore. Manhattan grew out to meet it. The history of New York City is written into that moving shoreline. From here a canoe could reach a fishing ground, a ship could sail for Amsterdam, and a ferry could take an immigrant from a steamship to an inspector. The same stretch of water offered quite different prospects depending on who you were and who controlled the landing.
The Lenape homeland at the harbour
Long before Europeans crossed the Atlantic, the island of Manahatta lay within Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland. Waterways linked communities across what are now state lines. Families travelled by dugout canoe to visit relatives, hunt and trade. Fishing, gathering shellfish and growing crops supported settlements around the estuary. To imagine an empty island awaiting a port is to miss the traffic already moving between its shores.
When Dutch traders arrived in the early seventeenth century, they entered an existing system of exchange. European demand for beaver pelts drew Dutch traders upriver. Lenape and Mahican traders had uses of their own for the goods that came back. A copper kettle could cook a meal, but its metal could also be cut and shaped into tools. The Smithsonian’s account of these exchanges follows objects in both directions.
Dutch settlement, warfare and successive dispossessions drove many Lenape people from their homeland. Lenape communities today include nations in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario. In New York, the Lenape Center has worked with growers to return ancestral seeds to cultivation and with Brooklyn Public Library to exhibit beadwork and seed tapestries. At the Greenpoint library, visitors could see beaded bags alongside tapestries fashioned from dried pods in the Lenapehoking exhibition.
When did New Amsterdam become New York?
The Dutch West India Company established New Amsterdam at Manhattan’s southern tip in the 1620s. Its fort guarded access to the Hudson and the fur trade. Ships needed timber, food, places to unload and people to do the lifting. In 1626 the company brought eleven enslaved African men to the colony. Enslaved workers cleared ground, laid roads and built defences, including the wall commemorated in the name Wall Street.
In 1664 an English fleet secured the town’s surrender. New Amsterdam became New York, named for the Duke of York. The Dutch briefly retook it in 1673 and called it New Orange. English rule resumed in 1674. For an enslaved worker on the waterfront, those changes of government offered no general release. In 1711 the city designated a place near the Wall Street pier where enslavers could hire out workers. The ordinance survives among the Municipal Archives’ records of slavery.
Leaving the city at the end of the Revolution
During the American Revolution, British forces held New York from 1776 until 1783. For people who escaped slavery behind British lines, the prospect of an American victory raised an urgent question. Would the departing British take them away, or would former enslavers recover them? In 1783 officials recorded the names of Black passengers boarding evacuation ships. Among those leaving were Mary Perth and Boston King. Their names survive in the evacuation records described by the US National Archives.
Six years later, on 30 April 1789, George Washington took the presidential oath on the balcony of the original Federal Hall on Wall Street. New York briefly served as the national capital. Slavery remained legal there. The state began gradual abolition in 1799, and the final emancipation of people still enslaved under New York law came in 1827.
How the Erie Canal changed the port
In 1825 Governor DeWitt Clinton brought a barrel of water from Lake Erie to pour into the Atlantic. His ceremony marked the opening of the Erie Canal, which linked Buffalo to Albany. From Albany the Hudson already ran to Manhattan. Farmers could now send wheat and flour east by water far more cheaply than by wagon. That put the merchants, warehouse workers and dock crews of Lower Manhattan at the Atlantic end of a trade stretching into the Great Lakes.
Castle Garden and Ellis Island
Before Ellis Island opened, New York State received immigrants at Castle Garden, the old fort at the Battery. Between 1855 and 1890 about eight million people passed through it. Anyone looking for an ancestor who arrived in the 1870s should begin with that distinction. A passenger could have come ashore in New York decades before the federal immigration station on Ellis Island admitted its first arrival in January 1892.
The Barge Office at the Battery handled arrivals in the interval. Even after the island station opened, a ticket helped determine the route ashore. Officials generally examined first and second class passengers aboard ship. Those travelling in steerage usually transferred to a ferry or barge for closer inspection on Ellis Island. Families on the same Atlantic crossing could have quite different memories of their first hours in America. The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Foundation describes the two routes.
When did New York become five boroughs?
The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883 between two independent cities. Pedestrians could walk across the East River more than a decade before Brooklyn and Manhattan shared a city government. With Brooklyn’s growing population putting pressure on its drinking water supply, access to Manhattan’s Croton system gave the proposed union a practical appeal. Brooklyn voters narrowly backed consolidation in 1894. On 1 January 1898 Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island became the five boroughs of Greater New York. Counting Brooklyn among them meant absorbing a city with its own government and loyalties, as the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s account makes clear.
Where the waterfront jobs went
The working harbour extended well beyond the city limits. In April 1956 the tanker Ideal X left Port Newark for Houston carrying fifty-eight freight containers. A crane could lift a sealed box straight onto a lorry chassis. Loading the ship had once meant handling the contents sack by sack or crate by crate. Container terminals needed space for cranes, stacks of boxes and roads. New Jersey had room to build them. Trade through the harbour could grow even as the Manhattan piers where dockers had looked for work fell quiet.
Rediscovering Manhattan’s African Burial Ground
One of Lower Manhattan’s most consequential discoveries came during construction of a federal office building at 290 Broadway in 1991. Workers encountered graves in a burial ground used by free and enslaved Africans and their descendants. Once outside the colonial town, it had disappeared beneath the growing city. Excavations brought the remains of 419 people to light, including children. Black New Yorkers pressed federal officials for a say in how the dead would be studied, commemorated and returned.
Among the objects researchers found was a silver pendant buried with a small child. It lay near the jaw, perhaps worn as an earring or around the neck. In October 2003 the objects were reburied with the remains. Today the memorial on Duane Street stands near the office tower. Visitors can see reproductions, while the original pendant rests with the child at the African Burial Ground National Monument.