In 1837, construction began on the Croton Aqueduct, which provided clean water for the city’s growing population. In 1811, the “Commissioner’s Plan” established an orderly grid of streets and avenues for the undeveloped parts of Manhattan north of Houston Street.
At last, New York City was the trading capital of the nation.Īs the city grew, it made other infrastructural improvements. Then, textile manufacturers shipped their finished goods back to New York.īut there was no easy way to carry goods back and forth from the growing agricultural hinterlands to the north and west until 1817, when work began on a 363-mile canal from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. It played a particularly significant role in the cotton economy: Southern planters sent their crop to the East River docks, where it was shipped to the mills of Manchester and other English industrial cities. The city recovered quickly from the war, and by 1810 it was one of the nation’s most important ports. It served as a British military base until 1783. In August 1776, despite the best efforts of George Washington’s Continental Army in Brooklyn and Harlem Heights, New York City fell to the British. However, the city was also strategically important, and the British tried to seize it almost as soon as the Revolutionary War began.
For the next century, the population of New York City grew larger and more diverse: It included immigrants from the Netherlands, England, France and Germany indentured servants and African slaves.ĭid you know? New York City served as the capital of the United States from 1785 to 1790.ĭuring the 1760s and 1770s, the city was a center of anti-British activity–for instance, after the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, New Yorkers closed their businesses in protest and burned the royal governor in effigy. In 1664, the British seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch and gave it a new name: New York City. Today, more than 8 million people live in the city’s five boroughs. Fifty years later, with a population 202,589, it became the largest city in the Western hemisphere. But it grew quickly, and in 1760 the city (now called New York City population 18,000) surpassed Boston to become the second-largest city in the American colonies. Fewer than 300 people lived in New Amsterdam when the settlement moved to Manhattan. In 1626, the settlement’s governor general, Peter Minuit, purchased the much larger Manhattan Island from the natives for 60 guilders in trade goods such as tools, farming equipment, cloth and wampum (shell beads). That year, the Dutch West India Company sent some 30 families to live and work in a tiny settlement on “Nutten Island” (today’s Governors Island) that they called New Amsterdam. Europeans began to explore the region at the beginning of the 16th century–among the first was Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian who sailed up and down the Atlantic coast in search of a route to Asia–but none settled there until 1624. The first native New Yorkers were the Lenape, an Algonquin people who hunted, fished and farmed in the area between the Delaware and Hudson rivers.