New York’s history is unusually legible on the ground. The wall is Wall Street, the canal is Canal Street, the grid stops where the old village won its argument, and the two clusters of tall buildings mark where the money was in 1910 and where it went afterwards. This is the narrative; the dated version is in the timeline.
Before 1609
The Lenape had lived in the region for several thousand years, in the area they called Lenapehoking. Manhattan was Mannahatta, and the name is usually translated as the island of many hills. They fished the estuaries, farmed maize, beans and squash on the flats, and moved seasonally. The main north–south trail along the spine of the island is the reason Broadway cuts diagonally across the grid.
Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing for France, entered the Narrows in 1524 and did not stay. Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Dutch, arrived in 1609 looking for a passage to Asia and reported back on the fur.
New Amsterdam, 1624–1664
The Dutch West India Company established a trading post on the southern tip of the island in 1625. In 1626 Peter Minuit made the famous purchase from a group of Lenape for goods valued at sixty guilders — a transaction the Lenape almost certainly did not understand as a permanent transfer, since the concept did not exist in their law.
It was a company town rather than a colony, run for profit and chronically underfunded. What distinguished it was its mixture: a Jesuit visitor in 1643 counted eighteen languages in a settlement of a few hundred people, including Walloons, Germans, Scandinavians, English, enslaved Africans and, from 1654, Sephardic Jews arriving from Brazil.
Peter Stuyvesant, director-general from 1647, built the wall that gave Wall Street its name and tried repeatedly to restrict who could worship how. He was overruled from Amsterdam each time, on commercial grounds.
English New York, 1664–1783
Four English warships arrived in 1664 and Stuyvesant’s own citizens refused to fight. The town surrendered without a shot and was renamed for the Duke of York.
The English kept the Dutch commercial character and added slavery on a scale the Dutch had not. By the mid-eighteenth century New York had the largest enslaved population of any city north of Charleston, and the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan — rediscovered in 1991 during construction and now a National Monument — holds the remains of some 15,000 people.
The Revolution went badly here. Washington lost the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, withdrew, and a fire days after the British occupation burned a quarter of the city. New York was held by the British for seven years, the longest occupation of any American city, and was the last place they left, in November 1783.
It was briefly the national capital. Washington was inaugurated at Federal Hall on Wall Street in 1789.
The century of growth
Three decisions made the nineteenth-century city.
The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 laid a grid of twelve avenues and 155 streets over farmland, marsh and rock, with almost no provision for public space. It was criticised as brutal and has proved extraordinarily durable.
The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, connected the Hudson to the Great Lakes and made New York the outlet for the entire American interior. The port’s traffic multiplied and the city’s commercial dominance over Boston and Philadelphia was settled permanently.
Central Park, begun in 1857, was the correction to the grid’s omission — and required clearing Seneca Village, a community of about 225 people, most of them Black landowners.
Immigration transformed the population. The Irish famine and the German revolutions of 1848 brought the first mass waves in the 1840s and 50s. The Draft Riots of July 1863, the worst civil disorder in American history, were four days of violence in which a mob attacked the draft office and then turned on the city’s Black population, burning an orphanage and killing at least 119 people.
The Gilded Age and consolidation
The last decades of the century produced the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, the Statue of Liberty in 1886, the first elevated railways, the Tammany Hall political machine and the fortunes that built Fifth Avenue.
Ellis Island opened in 1892 and processed twelve million people over the next sixty years, mostly from southern and eastern Europe. They crowded into the Lower East Side, which by 1900 was the most densely populated place on earth.
The Consolidation of 1898 merged Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island into one city of 3.4 million people, second in the world only to London.
The subway opened in 1904.
The twentieth century
The Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 killed 146 workers and produced most of the workplace safety law in the United States.
The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s made Harlem the centre of Black American culture, on the back of the Great Migration north.
The skyscraper race of 1929–31 produced the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, both of which opened into a Depression that left them half empty.
Robert Moses, who never held elected office, reshaped the city between the 1930s and 1960s with parkways, bridges, housing projects and expressways, clearing whole neighbourhoods in the process. His plan to drive a motorway through SoHo was defeated by Jane Jacobs and the local opposition in 1969, which changed how American cities thought about planning.
The 1970s nearly finished the city. Manufacturing collapsed, the middle class left, crime rose sharply and the city came within a day of bankruptcy in 1975 — the Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” is the moment everyone remembers.
The recovery took two decades. Crime fell sharply through the 1990s and 2000s, the population reached a record high, and the arguments now are about affordability rather than survival.
11 September 2001 killed 2,753 people in New York. The site is the 9/11 Memorial; the tower that replaced the twin towers reaches 1,776 feet.
Hurricane Sandy in 2012 flooded Lower Manhattan and nine subway tunnels. Covid-19 hit New York first and hardest in the United States in the spring of 2020, killing more than 40,000 people in the city and emptying it for months.
It refilled.