IV.

History

The New York Bay area had been inhabited for centuries by Native Americans of the Algonquian and Iroquois groups. The first European to visit the area was Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian navigator in the service of France, who landed here in 1524. Henry Hudson, whose expedition sailed under the Dutch flag, explored the Hudson River in 1609, and in 1613 Adriaen Block, also sailing for the Dutch, was forced to winter on Manhattan Island after his boat caught fire. In 1624 the Dutch West India Company established the colony of New Netherlands (later New York). A Dutch trading post called New Amsterdam was established on Manhattan's southern tip in 1625, but a permanent white settlement was not established until the following year. During the mid-17th century, further colonization of Manhattan Island took place, and other settlements were begun in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. In 1664 Peter Stuyvesant, then governor, surrendered the colony to the English. It was retaken by the Dutch a few years later but was finally ceded to the English in 1674 by the Treaty of Westminster. The impetus to the city's growth was mercantile, with coast, river, and ocean trade all contributing. By now renamed, New York played an important role in events leading to the American War of Independence (1775-1783): in 1735 the printer John Peter Zenger, jailed for criticizing his British rulers, won his case and established the principle of a free press; and in 1765 the Stamp Act Congress met in the city. After the Battle of Long Island (1776), New York was occupied by British troops until the end of the War of Independence, and was devastated by fires in 1776 and 1778. The American Congress met in New York in 1785-1790, and George Washington was inaugurated as the first United States president here in 1789.

The community continued to grow, but its great expansion occurred after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825. The canal opened the great markets of the west, and New York became a major centre of commodity exchange, banking, marine insurance, and manufacturing. Immigrants, particularly Irish, German, Jewish, and Italian, began to arrive in large numbers. Between 1820 and 1840, the city's population more than doubled; by 1850 it had doubled again. From the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century, the city government was under control of a Democratic party machine, known as the Tammany Society. The machine controlled politicians of both parties, the police, the courts, state and local governments, and newspapers.

By the late 19th century the population was swelled by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as from China. Growth was further enhanced by the great age of bridge construction that was initiated by the achievement of John A. Roebling and Washington A. Roebling: the beautiful, wire-enlaced Brooklyn Bridge (1883). Other bridges soon followed, setting the stage for the consolidation that, in 1898, created the five-borough city. In 1904 construction of the complex underground transport system linking the boroughs was begun and integrated the boroughs into the pattern recognizable today. In the period during and after World War II, the city received numerous black immigrants, largely from the southern states. Immigration from Puerto Rico and from other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America followed in the 1950s.

Under a new city charter, effective January 1, 1963, a mayor was elected for a four-year term to head a centralized city government. The city sought an end to its chronic fiscal problems in the mid-1970s, when special financial entities (such as the Municipal Assistance Corporation) were created to keep the city from defaulting on its loans. The financial picture improved in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in part because outlays for city services were closely regulated. New York's financial affairs continued to improve for most of the 1990s under the Republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani, elected for the maximum two terms in 1993 and 1997, although towards the end of his tenure the threat of recession had begun to resurface. Among the achievements of Giuliani’s administration were the introduction of wide-ranging measures to reduce the city's once notorious crime rate, and the transformation of Times Square in the late 1990s. However possibly his most memorable achievement, according to many New Yorkers, was his handling of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Giuliani became a stable, reassuring presence—in person and in the media—as he rallied the city’s population after the destruction of the World Trade Center, during the anthrax scares that followed, and in the wake of the airliner crash in November in Queens. He handed over his mayorship in November to Michael Bloomberg, another Republican, who pledged to focus on reviving the city’s economy.