Timeline of New York

Lenape settlement in the harbour region. Ancestors of the Lenape are established across the region they called Lenapehoking, which covers present-day New York City, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. They fish the estuaries, farm maize, beans and squash on the flats, and move seasonally between coastal and inland camps. Manhattan is Mannahatta, usually translated as the island of many hills. The trail running the length of the island becomes Broadway.

Verrazzano enters the Narrows. Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine navigator sailing for Francis I of France, becomes the first European known to enter New York Harbour. He anchors in the Narrows, exchanges greetings with Lenape who paddle out to meet him, and leaves without landing for long. The bridge across the Narrows carries his name.

Henry Hudson reaches the harbour. Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing the Halve Maen for the Dutch East India Company in search of a passage to Asia, enters the harbour and sails 150 miles up the river that will take his name. He finds no passage. What he reports instead is the quality of the fur, which is enough to bring the Dutch back.

The first Dutch settlers arrive. The Dutch West India Company lands about thirty families, mostly Walloon, and distributes them across the new province of New Netherland — some to Governors Island, some up the Hudson to Fort Orange, which becomes Albany.

New Amsterdam founded. The company concentrates its settlement on the southern tip of Manhattan and begins Fort Amsterdam. The settlement around it is named New Amsterdam. It is a trading post run for profit, not a colony.

Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan. Peter Minuit, the Dutch West India Company’s director, acquires Manhattan from a group of Lenape for trade goods valued at sixty guilders. The figure of twenty-four dollars comes from a loose nineteenth-century currency conversion. Whether the Lenape understood the transaction as a permanent transfer of land, a concept absent from their law, is doubtful — and the group involved may not even have been the people who used the island.

The first enslaved Africans arrive. Eleven enslaved African men are brought to New Amsterdam by the Dutch West India Company. Slavery in the settlement begins with them, and by the time the English take over it is a substantial part of the town’s economy. 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.

Eighteen languages in one town. The Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues visits and reports that eighteen languages are spoken in a settlement of a few hundred people. The same year, Director Willem Kieft’s attacks on the Lenape begin Kieft’s War, which kills over a thousand Indigenous people and nearly destroys the colony.

Peter Stuyvesant arrives. Stuyvesant takes over as director-general and finds a town with failing defences and a population that mostly ignores its governors. He builds, regulates, and repeatedly tries to restrict religious practice — and is repeatedly overruled from Amsterdam on commercial grounds.

The wall that gave Wall Street its name. Stuyvesant orders a twelve-foot timber palisade built across the northern edge of the settlement, river to river, against a feared English attack. It is never tested by an army. The English demolish it in 1699; the street keeps the name.

The first Jewish community. Twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrive from Recife in Brazil after the Portuguese retake it. Stuyvesant tries to expel them and is overruled by the company, several of whose shareholders are Jewish. Congregation Shearith Israel dates from this arrival and still exists.

The Flushing Remonstrance. Residents of Flushing, in what is now Queens, send Stuyvesant a written protest against his ban on Quaker worship, arguing for freedom of conscience. It is one of the earliest documents of religious tolerance in American history.

New Amsterdam becomes New York. Four English warships anchor in the Narrows and demand surrender. Stuyvesant wants to fight; the town’s leading citizens, including his own son, petition him not to. He signs the articles of capitulation without a shot fired. The town is renamed for James, Duke of York.

The Dutch briefly take it back. A Dutch fleet retakes the town and renames it New Orange. It lasts fifteen months. Under the Treaty of Westminster the Netherlands trades it back to England in exchange for Suriname, which at the time looks like the better deal.

The New York slave revolt. About two dozen enslaved Africans set fire to a building on Maiden Lane and attack those who come to put it out, killing nine. The reprisals are severe and the colony passes a far harsher slave code. New York holds the largest enslaved population of any city north of Charleston.

The Zenger trial. John Peter Zenger, printer of the New-York Weekly Journal, is acquitted of seditious libel after his lawyer argues that truth is a defence. The verdict establishes a principle that becomes central to American press freedom.

King’s College is founded. Chartered by George II and established near Trinity Church, King’s College is renamed Columbia after the Revolution. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and Gouverneur Morris all pass through it.

The Battle of Long Island. The largest battle of the Revolutionary War is fought across the ground that is now Brooklyn and Green-Wood Cemetery. Washington’s army is outflanked and routed, and escapes across the East River in fog on the night of 29 August.

The Great Fire. Six days into the British occupation, fire breaks out at the southern tip of Manhattan and destroys between 400 and 1,000 buildings — around a quarter of the city — including Trinity Church. Nobody has ever established who started it. St Paul’s Chapel survives because men stand on its roof putting out embers.

Evacuation Day. The last British troops leave New York after seven years of occupation, the longest of any American city. Washington rides down Broadway the same afternoon. Evacuation Day was a New York holiday for over a century.

Washington is inaugurated on Wall Street. George Washington takes the oath as first President of the United States on the balcony of Federal Hall at 26 Wall Street. New York is the national capital; it loses the seat of government to Philadelphia the following year.

Gradual emancipation begins. New York State passes an act for the gradual abolition of slavery. Children born to enslaved mothers after 4 July 1799 are freed, but only after decades of indenture. Slavery in the state ends completely on 4 July 1827.

The Commissioners’ Plan lays the grid. A grid of twelve avenues and 155 streets is drawn over the whole of Manhattan north of Houston Street, most of which is farmland, marsh and rock. It ignores topography and makes almost no provision for public open space, an omission that has to be corrected at enormous expense forty years later.

The Erie Canal opens. The canal connects the Hudson to the Great Lakes and makes New York the outlet for the entire American interior. Freight costs from Buffalo fall by around ninety per cent. The city’s commercial dominance over Boston and Philadelphia is settled permanently.

The Great Fire of 1835. In a temperature of minus seventeen Celsius, with the East River and the hydrants frozen, fire destroys almost the entire business district — between 600 and 700 buildings across seventeen blocks. Nearly every fire insurance company in the city is bankrupted.

Croton water reaches the city. The Croton Aqueduct brings fresh water forty-one miles from Westchester into a distributing reservoir on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, where the New York Public Library now stands. It gives the city drinking water and, for the first time, working fire hydrants.

The famine migration begins. The Irish potato blight begins a migration that brings over a million people to the United States, most of them landing in New York. By 1855 roughly a quarter of the city’s population is Irish-born.

Central Park begins, and Seneca Village is cleared. The Greensward Plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux wins the design competition. Construction requires clearing Seneca Village, a settlement of around 225 people, most of them Black landowners, by eminent domain.

The Draft Riots. Four days of the worst civil disorder in American history. A mob attacks the conscription office and then turns on the city’s Black population, burning the Colored Orphan Asylum and killing at least 119 people. Troops are brought from Gettysburg to end it.

The Brooklyn Bridge opens. Fourteen years in the building, at the cost of John Roebling’s life and his son Washington’s health. Emily Warren Roebling carries her husband’s instructions to the site for years and effectively runs the project. Six days after opening, a crush on the stairs kills twelve people.

The Statue of Liberty is dedicated. A gift from France, shipped in 214 crates in 1885 and left unassembled while fundraising for the pedestal stalled. Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper campaign, printing the name of every donor, finally pays for it.

The Great Blizzard. Forty inches of snow and hurricane-force winds bury the city for days, bringing down every telegraph and telephone wire and stopping all surface transport. The disaster wins the long-running argument for putting the railways underground and the wires below street level.

Ellis Island opens. The federal immigration station replaces state-run Castle Garden at the Battery. Over the next sixty-two years around twelve million people pass through it. The peak year is 1907, with more than a million.

The five boroughs consolidate. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island merge into one city of 3.4 million people, second in the world only to London. Brooklyn, then the third-largest city in the United States, approves the merger by about 300 votes out of 130,000.

The subway opens. Mayor George McClellan drives the first train from City Hall and enjoys it so much he refuses to hand over the controls. More than 100,000 people ride it that day. The system has essentially never stopped since.

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire. A fire on the eighth floor of a garment factory off Washington Square kills 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women, in about eighteen minutes. The exit doors were locked. The investigation that follows produces most of the workplace safety law in the United States.

The zoning law that shaped the skyline. After the Equitable Building rises forty storeys straight from the pavement and puts seven acres into shadow, the city passes the first comprehensive zoning ordinance in the United States. It requires buildings to step back as they rise, producing the wedge-shaped silhouette of every tower built over the next forty-five years.

The Harlem Renaissance. Through the 1920s Harlem becomes the largest Black community in the United States and the centre of American Black culture, producing Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Countee Cullen and Aaron Douglas.

The Chrysler Building’s secret spire. A 185-foot stainless steel spire, assembled in secret inside the building’s fire shaft, is raised through the roof in about ninety minutes, making the Chrysler Building the tallest in the world. It holds the title for eleven months. Six days later the stock market crashes.

The Empire State Building opens. Built in 410 days, and so poorly let through the Depression that New Yorkers call it the Empty State Building. It does not turn a profit until 1950, and holds the height record for forty years.

Robert Moses takes control. Appointed parks commissioner under Fiorello La Guardia, Moses accumulates authority over parks, bridges, highways and housing across four decades without ever holding elected office, and reshapes the city — clearing whole neighbourhoods in the process.

The Stonewall uprising. A police raid on the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street sets off several nights of resistance. The first Pride marches are held on the anniversary the following year. The site is now a National Monument, the first in the United States dedicated to LGBTQ history.

The Lower Manhattan Expressway is defeated. Robert Moses’s plan for a ten-lane elevated motorway through SoHo and Little Italy is killed after years of opposition led by Jane Jacobs. It is the moment American city planning stops assuming that neighbourhoods lose to roads.

The World Trade Center opens. The twin towers are dedicated, briefly the tallest buildings in the world. Their structural tube design, with the exterior wall carrying the load, allows enormous column-free floors.

Ford to City: Drop Dead. With the city days from bankruptcy, President Ford refuses a federal bailout. The Daily News headline becomes the defining image of New York’s fiscal collapse. The federal government relents six weeks later, and the city spends two decades recovering.

The attacks on the World Trade Center. Two hijacked aircraft are flown into the twin towers, which collapse within two hours. 2,753 people are killed in New York. The site is rebuilt around two voids in the towers’ footprints; the tower that replaces them reaches 1,776 feet.

Hurricane Sandy. A storm surge of nearly fourteen feet floods Lower Manhattan, nine subway tunnels under the East River, and large parts of the outer-borough waterfront. Repairs to the tunnels take a decade.

The Second Avenue Subway finally opens. First proposed in 1929, started and abandoned in the 1970s, the first three stations open eighty-eight years after the original plan. The extension north into Harlem follows.

Covid-19 reaches New York. The first confirmed case in the city is announced. Over the following months New York becomes the worst-affected city in the United States, with more than 40,000 deaths, and empties for the first time in its history. It refills within two years.