Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Peter Stuyvesant
[Peter] Stuyvesant [1602-1672] had other ideas. He was family man now, and he wanted to put down his roots. Within the year [1650] he would arrange to buy the farm, called Bouwereie Number One, outright from the company, and then purchase acreage on both sides of it, giving him a plantation stretching from the East River west to the center of the island and covering approximately three hundred acres. Here he built a manor and chapel. Here he would live out his life and be buried, and here, over the parade of centuries, flappers, shtetl refugees, hippies, and punks--an aggregate of local residents running from Trotsky to Auden to Charlie Parker to Joey Ramone--would shuffle past his tomb*
*As a nice metaphor for the way history has muddled Manhattan's Dutch period, Stuyvesant's tombstone, embedded in the foundation of the Church of St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery, manages to get both his age and title wrong.
The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto, Vintage Books, 2005
