"Lil Ol' New York”

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 19 June 1926, Page 11

"Lil Ol' New York”

N EW York celebrates its 300th birthday this year (writes a special correspondent in the London Observer). Manhattan was discovered in 1609, when Henry Hudson, searching in the Half Moon for a western passage to the Pacific, came and saw the waters pouring between the Palisades, and exclaimed:A very good land to fall in with, and a pleasant for to see.” It was christened New York in 1664, when Charles 11., with a flourish of the pen granted all Dutch territory to his brother James, Duke of York. In 1613 the merchants of Amsterdam and Hoorn sent an expedition under Adrian Block, and that winter four crude huts —the first European dwellings in Manhattan —were built right at the tip of the Indian trail that was to become Broadway. In 1626 real houses began to appear round the fortress that had been erected on the site of the present Custom House. Peter Minuit arrived with more settlers, and the same year, acting for the Dutch West India Company, he purchased the island from the Indians for £5 worth of baubles. Hence the tercentenary. • Wampum—polished beads—formed the “devil’s currency,” at which the settlers shuddered. So dependent, on it had they become that when, some 20 years later, Peter Stuyvesant. passed an edict that broken and unstrung wampum could not be counted as legal tender, he nearly forced a financial crisis. A mill soon arose which was worked on week-days by a horse, and on Sunday by pious citizens, who used the upper storey as a church, and saw nothing incongruous in installing bells that were the fruits of a filibustering expedition to Porfp Rico. Stuyvesant, stumping about on the wooden peg that did duty for a

When Wampum was Currency And Pirates Dwelt in Wall Street

leg lost in battle, directed the building of a logpalisade at the northern limit of the town. From this palisade Wall Street took its name. The settlers, however, chafed at his military rule, and when, in 1664, the Duke of York sent an expedition to make good his claim, New Amsterdam, in the temporary absence of “Old Silver Leg,” capitulated without a blow, and the growing town was named after its royal patron. Peter Stuyvesant retired to his farm, or “bouwerie,” in the north countryside up Bouwerie Lane, which now lies buried under the Bowery, in the purlieus of which the modern thug and gunman has his haunts. So ended the Dutch or Knickerbocker period. Under English rule this city still grew and prospered. During this period the first pirate to settle in Wall Street, was the notorious Captain Kidd. Fifty years after Kidd’s death there were still Wall Streeters who lived fashionably on the honorable practice of “privateering.” Piracy bad by this time gained recognition under a highersounding title. English Parliamentary rule, however, did not suit the independent tempers of the settlers, and in the second half of the 18th century feelipg became acute. In those days every ship might be carrying a potential bomb in some new Act of Parliament, and eventually came the time when the angry people tore down the statue of George 111. from its pedestal and melted him into leaden bullets to fight his own soldiers. Then came America’s great day. On April 30, 1789, Wall Street, throbbed with excitement when George Washington stepped on the balcony of the Federal Hall and the Chancellor proclaimed, “Long Live George Washington, the President of the United States!”