Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

in our streets; and dark-eyed Gipsies wander unnoticed in the midst of us, though they speak a dialect of the Sanscrit, believe in the transmigration of souls, and retain in their shadowy faith traces of the ancient Fire Worship.

[merged small][graphic][subsumed][merged small]

To a foreigner New-York is a standing, or rather, an ever-varying wonder, that has risen like a phoenix from the waves. Change is stamped on every thing. 'Let us pull down our ware-houses and build greater,' is the motto of her princely merchants. Boasting of the best government in the world, we have scarcely any; jealous of our republican equality, the off-scouring of European nobility finds

ready acceptance in our society; proud of our material achievements and our industry, the names at least of many articles in common use with us are manufactured abroad. 'Enterprise hath here an everlasting carnival; fashion is often rampant; financial crises sweep away fortunes; reputations are made and lost with magical facility; friends come and go; life and death, toil and amusement, worth and folly, truth and error, poetry and matter of fact, alternate with more than dramatic celerity.'

More remarkable and not less interesting are the changes which New-York constantly exhibits to her own citizens, especially when taken in connection with her past history. For our pictorial illustrations of this subject, and for many of our facts, we are indebted to a large and elegant volume just published, which, for its careful and conscientious preparation, completeness, and admirable execution cannot but please the reader.* London, Paris, all the great cities of Europe, in fact, boast of plethoric and splendid volumes recording their origin, growth, and whatever about them may interest the world; and it is somewhat singular that New-York, which has undergone so many and such marvellously rapid changes, which from an obscure Dutch trading-port has so soon grown into the metropolis of the western continent, whose shores, now lined with more ships than enter any other harbor, so recently swarmed with Indian canoes, and whose recent cow-paths have been converted into the most magnificent streets in the world; it is somewhat singular, we say, that up to the present time this great city has had no historian to collect and collate into a complete and connected volume, her abundant archives; and by no means complimentary to our Knickerbocker writers that the task has been undertaken by a lady, and we are glad to say, performed with industry and singular fidelity.

It was on the morning of September the eighth, 1664, that Peter Stuyvesant, the last of the Dutch Governors, marched his soldiers out of Fort Amsterdam, and the English marched in triumph into the city and ran up their flag upon the old fort, which they christened in honor of King James. To the men, women, and children who besought him to desist from a useless resistance and surrender, he replied that he would rather be carried out dead. The ashes of the redoubtable Governor rest in the family vault within the church, erected by himself on his own extensive bowery - now the Church of St. Markbut save our Knickerbocker names and Knickerbocker spirit, there remains only a single vestige of those good old Dutch times. On the corner of Thirteenth-street and Third Avenue still flourishes, bearing

* HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW-YORK: from its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. By MARY L. BOOTH. Illustrated with one hundred engravings. Royal octavo: pp. 850. New-York: W. R. C. CLARK AND MEEKER, 49 Walker-street.

both foliage and fruit, though in the two hundred and twenty-first year of its age, the pear-tree of Peter Stuyvesant, brought by him,

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small]

it is said, from Holland, and replanted where it now stands by his own hands, after having grown for a time within the walls of the old fort.

Had Hendrik Hudson ascended Incleuberg (now Murray) Hill two hundred and fifty years ago, his eye glancing over the southern part of Manhattan, would have rested on a number of wood-crowned hills and grassy valleys, a chain of swamps extending across the island from the present James-street on the south-east to Canal-street at the north-west, a lake deep enough to float the largest ship in our navy where the Tombs now stands, and various ponds, marshes and sandhills. Nor need we go so far back. Fifty years ago the main features of the island had undergone scarcely any alteration. The Park was then considered outside the city. People travelling up Broadway crossed Canal-street on a stone bridge over a canal, forty feet wide, that ran from the Collect, or fresh-water lake, where anglers still sported, and strange sea-monsters were thought by the vulgar to live, through the

[graphic]

OLD STADT HUYS AT THE HEAD OF COENTIES SLIP

Lispenard Meadows to the North River. The venerable Isaac Bell, Sen., a resident of New-York, in the ninety-second year of his age, yet hale and hearty, who saw the Revolution with his own eyes, skated with Prince William Henry, the future William the Fourth, then an awkward sailor-boy on his first cruise, where now stands the St. Nicholas Hotel- the Collect being regarded as too dangerous a place for the scion of royalty.

In 1625 the first white child was born in the colony of New-Amsterdam. When Nicolls took the town from old Peter Stuyvesant it contained only about fifteen hundred inhabitants. At the time of the Revolution, the city had a population of less than twenty thousand, and in 1800 sixty thousand, while in this year of our LORD it contains over

seven hundred thousand souls, and at the present rate of increase, will have in 1900 not less than five millions.

[graphic][merged small][merged small][subsumed][ocr errors][ocr errors]

In the year 1626, Peter Minuit purchased the whole Island of Manhattan of the Indians for twenty-four dollars' worth of cheap trinkets and utensils. In the earliest deed on record in the city, (about 1635,)

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »