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PERFORMING COMMUNITY
New York, 2010 The city that became New York was born as an afterthought embedded in an obsessive drive to colonize the world. European sailors dispatched by various monarchs to beat other rulers to Asia found themselves bumping up against various corners of the Americas ever since Columbus sailed in 1492 (earlier arrivals, such as probable Viking incursions in North America, predate the Age of Discovery). In the 1520s, Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian explorer in the service of the French crown, and Esteban Gomez, a Portuguese captain commissioned by Charles I of Spain, both visited the estuary that would become New York Harbor. But it wasn’t until September 3, 1609, that the Europeans came to stay, when Henry Hudson, a British sea captain looking for a western route to Asia for the Dutch East India Company, sailed into the estuary and eventually up what is now the Hudson River, almost as far as today’s state capital of Albany.
Two essential elements in this foundational tale of New York have continued to be central throughout the city’s existence: New York remains an urban enterprise predicated, first and foremost, on commerce; and, to succeed, the city must draw participants of unknowable diversity from wherever they can be lured. In other words, New York has always been a place rooted in a capacity to derive benefit from contacts among individuals or groups that otherwise consider each other personally loathsome. This is no less true today than four hundred years ago even as the cast of characters running through the New York story has changed constantly.
In 1987, two very different reviews of the state of the city appeared almost simultaneously. The first was a report issued by an ad hoc commission on New York in 2000 chaired by Robert F. Wagner Jr., who was the son and grandson of beloved New York politicians and was himself deeply involved in city affairs. The second review was a special issue of the Early Dutch visitors recorded a fecund distinguished Leftist journal Dissent edited landscape overflowing with bounty. by the author and journalist Jim Sleeper. Humans already had found the area a Although both presented a portrait of congenial place to live for several millennia, what was recognizably the same city, with a number of Native American nations, their differences pointed them in opposite primarily the Lanapes, thriving when directions. Wagner’s report was titled New Hudson first cast his anchor off what York Ascendant, but Sleeper’s journal seems to have been known as Mannaissue bore the title, In Search of New York. hata, for “hilly island.”
