November 5, 2025 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, centuries before it was called “The Big Apple,” New York was a patch of wilderness at the edge of the Atlantic. Dutch settlers built their homes along the Hudson, the British renamed it New York, and over time, it grew into the beating heart of modern America. From the brownstones of Brooklyn to the lights of Times Square, every corner tells a story of growth and grit. Our American Stories’ regular contributor, Bill Bryk, shares how a collection of small settlements became the New York City we know today, home to millions, rich in history, and constantly changing.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American stories, and we love telling you
stories about our history because we think it's one of
the most important things we can share. Because of this,
we love people who love history. Today, one of our
regular contributors tells us about the history of New York
City in a way you've probably never heard.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Manhattan, Manahatta. The Algonquins Island of Hills is twelve and
a half miles long and two and a half miles
wide at its broadest point. Every day, one point five
million people ride its buses and three point five million
its subways. Each fair was two seventy five when my
wife and I left the city for New Hampshire, but
(00:52):
fifty nine thousand commuters now ride free on the Staten
Island Ferry. Ben Sweeney, a Staten Island historian, defines a
ferry as a function, rather than a boat, water borne
transportation regularly crossing some body of navigable water for the
convenience of persons, vehicles, and animals. The first Staten Island
(01:16):
ferry of which we know, started in seventeen oh eight.
It ran between William Street in Manhattan and the watering
place now Tompkinsville on the east shore of Staten Island,
oarsman powered the first ferries. Later, someone devised a horse
driven treadmill to propel the boats. In eighteen ten, Cornelius Vanderbilt,
(01:38):
a handsome, profane Staten Islander, borrowed one hundred dollars from
his mother to run a ferry from Stapleton, another east
shore town, and the foot of Whitehall Street. Seven years later,
he launched the first steam ferry, the Nautilus, and charged
an extortionate twenty five cent fare, children half price. By contrast,
(01:58):
the nickel fair was set jact were saying for most
of the twentieth century, rising to twenty five cents and
then fifty cents only under pressure of the city's fiscal crises.
Then on July fourth, nineteen ninety seven, Mayor Giuliani decreed
there would be no more fare, just in time for
that year's mayoral elections. For five years, five mornings a week,
(02:25):
I walked to the ferry terminal in Saint George, Staten
Island to catch a ferryboat from its bow. Manhattan's towers
gleamed on the horizon like the fabled city of El Dorado,
or like a vision of the city of God. The
boat grumbled from its slip past the great bronze statue
on Below's Island. My paternal grandfather saw the same statue
(02:47):
from an immigrant ship in nineteen oh six. He was
then an eighteen year old adventurer who had escaped Constription
into the armies of the Czar by crossing the border
to Austrian Poland beneath the load in a manure wagon.
He had thence made his way through Austria, Germany and Belgium,
where he quickly picked up a sound idiomatic French, which
(03:09):
he could speak well into his ninth decade, and then
to England, whence he sailed from Southampton. Within a century
of his arrival. His experience of a long sea passage
closing with the vision of a mighty woman her lamp,
the imprisoned lightning has become uncommon, if not unknown, men
and women no longer come here in steerage. They land
(03:32):
from airplanes, something of which my grandfather probably had no
knowledge in nineteen o six, a practical technology even now
barely a century old. So too, we have changed how
we carry freight across the seas. Now the great container
ships glide past Saint George to Elizabethport, and the Bay
(03:52):
of Newark, where the containers stand stacked for transfer to
train and truck. Of the hundreds of ships that once
daily line Manhattan shores with a forest of masts, only
a few cruise liners now swing at anchor at Whitehall
in Lower Manhattan. Swift currents and contrary winds bumped my
boat into its slip. Nearby, a piled driver alternated puffs
(04:15):
of steam with hammer blows as it drives a wooden
pile into the harbor floor. It was probably the last
working steam powered machine in Manhattan, if not the city.
Nothing more surely measures progress than the obsolescence of steam,
the driving force of the Industrial Revolution. The city's last
(04:35):
steam locomotives, the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal's oil burning switchers
serving the waterfront north of the Navy Yard, dropped their
fires in nineteen sixty two. The last steam ferryboat, the Verrazano,
stopped all engines in nineteen eighty one. New York is
(04:55):
older than Philadelphia or Boston, yet only a handful of
pre revolutionary buildings have survived. Saint Paul's Chapel on Lower
Broadway is the only one in Manhattan. Walking uptown, I
often unfairly contrasted the city with John D. Rockefeller's colonial Williamsburg.
Manhattan's past exists side by side with the present, and,
(05:19):
though fragmented, often remains oddly alive. Williamsburg was barely a
ghost town when Rockefeller began restoring what had been Virginia's
colonial capital. Today, the hamlet is beautifully restored and maintained.
It presents a careful, corporate, and inoffensive vision of colonial history.
(05:39):
Downtown's tortuous, irregular streets are those laid out by the
Dutch and the English, except Broadway, which was an Indian
trail running north from the battery before the white men came.
Some street names have changed, usually for political reasons. Crown
Street was renamed Liberty, but most remained the same. The
(06:02):
indispensable A I A Guide to New York City, notes
that Pearl Street was once the edge of the island,
where mother of pearl oyster shells littered the beach. Wall Street,
the most famous, was the site of the northern boundary
of New Amsterdam, where a wall was erected against the
English and the Indians. Of course, there have been no
(06:22):
beavers on Beaver Street for nearly three hundred years. In
seventeen seventy one, the royal government erected a gilt bronze
equestrian statue of King George the Third and a black
iron fence with ornamental crowns. After the first reading of
the Declaration of Independence on July ninth, seventeen seventy six,
(06:43):
up at the Commons just south of to day's City Hall,
a mob of patriots came down town, toppled the statue
and broke off the crowns. The statue was broken up
and carried away and melted for shot. A fountain has
taken its place. The fence remains. Downtown's tangled streets contrast
(07:05):
with the grid of right angles and straight lines imposed
on most of Manhattan by a board of street commissioners
in eighteen o seven. Their plan was memorialized on the
Randall Map, named after John Randall Junior, the engineer and
surveyor who created it and drew it by hand. Nearly
twenty five years ago, Harry Kleiderman pulled me into the
(07:28):
Manhattan Borough President's Topographical Bureau. Harry worked there. He was tough, brofane,
and worldly, and I liked him a lot. His romanticism
escaped only in kindness to his friends, love of history,
and fidelity to the memory of Tammany Hall. The Hall
had gotten him as jobs. He had been a pick
and shovel man for the Borough Department of Works now
(07:50):
part of the Department of Transportation, a confidential secretary to
a municipal court justice, and then a clerk in the
Topographical Bureau. We gossiped about policy. Then Harry asked whether
I wanted to see the Randall map. He opened the
cabinet with the reverence one might reserve for the ark
(08:10):
of the Covenant. The map had been made in several
parts and was mounted on rollers so cracks wouldn't form
along fold lines. Harry unrolled part of it. Randall had
drawn and named the streets with India ink and watercolored
the land forms. There was the collect Pond, and Minetta Brook,
and Kipps Bay, and the rolling hills of Chelsea that
(08:33):
would all soon vanish beneath the pavements and landfills of
the city. The map was perfect and exquisite. Topographical Bureau
and its predecessors maintained it as if it were the
Holy of holies, because in a worldly way it is.
It's the root of all land use in Manhattan. I
lightly touched its edge for a moment. It's made of
(08:55):
a heavy parchment to endure for the ages. The Randall
map is one of the few objects I've touched that
is so rare and unusual as to be literally priceless.
Then Harry rolled it up again and closed the drawer.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
And you've been listening to Bill Brake give a short
history lesson of New York his own personal history lesson
of New York. And it is a city with many bridges,
many tunnels, and a whole lot of interesting dimensions. And
we want your stories about your town and send them
to our American Stories dot com. Bill Brake Short history
(09:40):
lesson of New York City here on our American Story
This is our American stories, and we love telling you
stories about our history because we think it's one of
the most important things we can share. Because of this,
we love people who love history. Today, one of our
regular contributors tells us about the history of New York
City in a way you've probably never heard.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Manhattan, Manahatta. The Algonquins Island of Hills is twelve and
a half miles long and two and a half miles
wide at its broadest point. Every day, one point five
million people ride its buses and three point five million
its subways. Each fair was two seventy five when my
wife and I left the city for New Hampshire, but
(00:52):
fifty nine thousand commuters now ride free on the Staten
Island Ferry. Ben Sweeney, a Staten Island historian, defines a
ferry as a function, rather than a boat, water borne
transportation regularly crossing some body of navigable water for the
convenience of persons, vehicles, and animals. The first Staten Island
(01:16):
ferry of which we know, started in seventeen oh eight.
It ran between William Street in Manhattan and the watering
place now Tompkinsville on the east shore of Staten Island,
oarsman powered the first ferries. Later, someone devised a horse
driven treadmill to propel the boats. In eighteen ten, Cornelius Vanderbilt,
(01:38):
a handsome, profane Staten Islander, borrowed one hundred dollars from
his mother to run a ferry from Stapleton, another east
shore town, and the foot of Whitehall Street. Seven years later,
he launched the first steam ferry, the Nautilus, and charged
an extortionate twenty five cent fare, children half price. By contrast,
(01:58):
the nickel fair was set jact were saying for most
of the twentieth century, rising to twenty five cents and
then fifty cents only under pressure of the city's fiscal crises.
Then on July fourth, nineteen ninety seven, Mayor Giuliani decreed
there would be no more fare, just in time for
that year's mayoral elections. For five years, five mornings a week,
(02:25):
I walked to the ferry terminal in Saint George, Staten
Island to catch a ferryboat from its bow. Manhattan's towers
gleamed on the horizon like the fabled city of El Dorado,
or like a vision of the city of God. The
boat grumbled from its slip past the great bronze statue
on Below's Island. My paternal grandfather saw the same statue
(02:47):
from an immigrant ship in nineteen oh six. He was
then an eighteen year old adventurer who had escaped Constription
into the armies of the Czar by crossing the border
to Austrian Poland beneath the load in a manure wagon.
He had thence made his way through Austria, Germany and Belgium,
where he quickly picked up a sound idiomatic French, which
(03:09):
he could speak well into his ninth decade, and then
to England, whence he sailed from Southampton. Within a century
of his arrival. His experience of a long sea passage
closing with the vision of a mighty woman her lamp,
the imprisoned lightning has become uncommon, if not unknown, men
and women no longer come here in steerage. They land
(03:32):
from airplanes, something of which my grandfather probably had no
knowledge in nineteen o six, a practical technology even now
barely a century old. So too, we have changed how
we carry freight across the seas. Now the great container
ships glide past Saint George to Elizabethport, and the Bay
(03:52):
of Newark, where the containers stand stacked for transfer to
train and truck. Of the hundreds of ships that once
daily line Manhattan shores with a forest of masts, only
a few cruise liners now swing at anchor at Whitehall
in Lower Manhattan. Swift currents and contrary winds bumped my
boat into its slip. Nearby, a piled driver alternated puffs
(04:15):
of steam with hammer blows as it drives a wooden
pile into the harbor floor. It was probably the last
working steam powered machine in Manhattan, if not the city.
Nothing more surely measures progress than the obsolescence of steam,
the driving force of the Industrial Revolution. The city's last
(04:35):
steam locomotives, the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal's oil burning switchers
serving the waterfront north of the Navy Yard, dropped their
fires in nineteen sixty two. The last steam ferryboat, the Verrazano,
stopped all engines in nineteen eighty one. New York is
(04:55):
older than Philadelphia or Boston, yet only a handful of
pre revolutionary buildings have survived. Saint Paul's Chapel on Lower
Broadway is the only one in Manhattan. Walking uptown, I
often unfairly contrasted the city with John D. Rockefeller's colonial Williamsburg.
Manhattan's past exists side by side with the present, and,
(05:19):
though fragmented, often remains oddly alive. Williamsburg was barely a
ghost town when Rockefeller began restoring what had been Virginia's
colonial capital. Today, the hamlet is beautifully restored and maintained.
It presents a careful, corporate, and inoffensive vision of colonial history.
(05:39):
Downtown's tortuous, irregular streets are those laid out by the
Dutch and the English, except Broadway, which was an Indian
trail running north from the battery before the white men came.
Some street names have changed, usually for political reasons. Crown
Street was renamed Liberty, but most remained the same. The
(06:02):
indispensable A I A Guide to New York City, notes
that Pearl Street was once the edge of the island,
where mother of pearl oyster shells littered the beach. Wall Street,
the most famous, was the site of the northern boundary
of New Amsterdam, where a wall was erected against the
English and the Indians. Of course, there have been no
(06:22):
beavers on Beaver Street for nearly three hundred years. In
seventeen seventy one, the royal government erected a gilt bronze
equestrian statue of King George the Third and a black
iron fence with ornamental crowns. After the first reading of
the Declaration of Independence on July ninth, seventeen seventy six,
(06:43):
up at the Commons just south of to day's City Hall,
a mob of patriots came down town, toppled the statue
and broke off the crowns. The statue was broken up
and carried away and melted for shot. A fountain has
taken its place. The fence remains. Downtown's tangled streets contrast
(07:05):
with the grid of right angles and straight lines imposed
on most of Manhattan by a board of street commissioners
in eighteen o seven. Their plan was memorialized on the
Randall Map, named after John Randall Junior, the engineer and
surveyor who created it and drew it by hand. Nearly
twenty five years ago, Harry Kleiderman pulled me into the
(07:28):
Manhattan Borough President's Topographical Bureau. Harry worked there. He was tough, brofane,
and worldly, and I liked him a lot. His romanticism
escaped only in kindness to his friends, love of history,
and fidelity to the memory of Tammany Hall. The Hall
had gotten him as jobs. He had been a pick
and shovel man for the Borough Department of Works now
(07:50):
part of the Department of Transportation, a confidential secretary to
a municipal court justice, and then a clerk in the
Topographical Bureau. We gossiped about policy. Then Harry asked whether
I wanted to see the Randall map. He opened the
cabinet with the reverence one might reserve for the ark
(08:10):
of the Covenant. The map had been made in several
parts and was mounted on rollers so cracks wouldn't form
along fold lines. Harry unrolled part of it. Randall had
drawn and named the streets with India ink and watercolored
the land forms. There was the collect Pond, and Minetta Brook,
and Kipps Bay, and the rolling hills of Chelsea that
(08:33):
would all soon vanish beneath the pavements and landfills of
the city. The map was perfect and exquisite. Topographical Bureau
and its predecessors maintained it as if it were the
Holy of holies, because in a worldly way it is.
It's the root of all land use in Manhattan. I
lightly touched its edge for a moment. It's made of
(08:55):
a heavy parchment to endure for the ages. The Randall
map is one of the few objects I've touched that
is so rare and unusual as to be literally priceless.
Then Harry rolled it up again and closed the drawer.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
And you've been listening to Bill Brake give a short
history lesson of New York his own personal history lesson
of New York. And it is a city with many bridges,
many tunnels, and a whole lot of interesting dimensions. And
we want your stories about your town and send them
to our American Stories dot com. Bill Brake Short history
(09:40):
lesson of New York City here on our American Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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