Or why it could have been called San Antonio. Or New Paris. From being buried under miles of ice, to the Native Americans, the Dutch, the English and up to the Revolution, this is an overview of the history and geography of New York City.

1. The History and Maps of
NEW YORK CITY
Up To The Revolution

2. The image on the previous page shows a
computer rendering of what Manhattan Island
looked like before it was developed.
The New York area was at the edge of a large
ice sheet during the last ice age, between
75,000 to 11,000 years ago. This shaped the
land.
When the ice sheet withdrew it scraped the
surface, leaving bedrock, which is what gives
Manhattan Island the solid rock base upon
which the skyscrapers are built.
It also separated Long Island and Staten Island
from the mainland.

3. Note that the shoreline of southern
Manhattan is quite different. We’ll cover that
in a bit.
NEW YORK MINUTE

4. Geology has shaped the current Manhattan
skyline.
300 million years ago when most land masses
were a supercontinent called Pangaea, New York
was close to the center.
The Manhattan schist was buried under 8 miles of
mountains, higher than Everest.
This tremendous pressure formed the bedrock of
the current island.
The two places where the schist is closest to the
surface are in Midtown Manhattan and Downtown.
Thus, you can see two clusters of skyscrapers in
those two areas.

5. MAPS OF NEW YORK CITY

6. The Algonquian Native Americans,
particularly the Lenape,
inhabited the area.

7. NEW YORK MINUTE

8. The first documented visit by a
European was an Italian, Giovanni da
Verrazzano,
in 1524.
However, he was sailing for the King of
France.
Which foreshadows the city’s
multicultural flavor.

9. Verrazzano claimed the
area for France.
Just think: New York
City could have been
New Paris City.
No one knows
Verrazzano’s fate.
There is some
speculation
he was captured and
eaten on a later
voyage.

10. The next year,
1525, a Spanish
expedition led by a
Portuguese
Captain, Estevao
Gomes, charted
the mouth of the
Hudson.
Thus the first map
to show the east
coast of North
America, the
Padron Real of
1527, has the area
named: Tierra de
Esteban Gomez.

11. Gomez named the Hudson River
the Rio de San Antonio.
So New York could also have been called
San Antonio.
NEW YORK MINUTE

12. In 1609, Henry Hudson, while searching
for the mythical Northwest Passage to the
Far East, entered New York Harbor.
He sailed up the Hudson past Albany in
search of a through route.
He claimed the area for the Dutch East
India Company.
And thus begins the colonized history of
the area.

13. Two years later, while searching for the Northwest
Passage in the large bay that would later be
named for him in Canada, his crew mutinied,
casting Hudson, his son, and seven others adrift
in the bay.
They have never been found.

14. MAPS OF NEW YORK CITY
NEW YORK MINUTE

15. While the English settled Jamestown in
1607 and Plymouth in 1620, the Dutch
established a trading post, Fort Orange, in
the vicinity of Albany in 1614.
It was five miles south of where the
Mohawk joins the Hudson River.
In May, 1624, 30 families landed at
Governor’s Island in New York harbor.
This was the beginning of New Amsterdam.

16. 1660 Map of New
Amsterdam
NEW YORK MINUTE
Note the wall, which later becomes Wall Street.

17. New Amsterdam became New York in 1664.
The city’s population was around 2,000.
There was no centralized plan and the city
grew organically.
On the southern end of the island many of
the original Dutch streets remain and the
ones that came after tended to be short and
narrow.
The rest of the island of Manhattan was
mostly meadows, farms, ponds and marshes.
Roads tended to follow the easiest terrain.

18. NEW YORK MINUTE

19. New York was named after the Duke of
York, who later became King James II.
He was deposed in the Glorious Revolution
of 1688.
When he died his body was apportioned
with the heart going to a convent, the brain
to a college, his entrails split and given to a
church and a college and the flesh from his
right arm to an order of nuns.
That’s just weird. But interesting.

20. In 1673 during the Third Anglo-Dutch
War, a Dutch captain captured the city
and named it New Orange after William
III, the Prince of Orange.
So the city could have been called New
Orange.
Nope.
The city was returned to the English the
following year.

21. In 1702 a yellow fever epidemic wiped out
10% of the population.
The native population of Lenape was now
down to less than 200 members.

22. In the early 1700s, New York became a
center for the slave trade. Outside of
Charleston, SC, NYC had the highest
percentage of households with slaves
(42%).
The African Burial Ground National
Memorial was dedicated in 2007 on
Broadway in lower Manhattan.
A separate slideshow on that is HERE.

23. The African Burial
Ground National
Memorial
290 Broadway

24. In 1754 Kings College was founded. It would later
become Columbia University. It was originally
located in lower Manhattan, next to Trinity Church.
A member of the Class of 1777, Alexander
Hamilton, was known for arguing with his
professors.

25. The largest battle of the Revolution took
place in New York: The Battle of Long Island
in August 1776. We lost.
I touch on this tangentially in two books:
Nine Eleven (the Staten Island Peace
Conference) and Equinox (Nathan Hale’s
execution).

26. The Revolution almost ended on 11
September 1776 during the Staten Island
Peace Conference.
John Adams and Benjamin Franklin met with
Admiral Howe.
However, none of them really had authority to
make peace so . . .
This is one of the missions in my book, Nine
Eleven (Time Patrol) which posits what might
have happened.

27. NEW YORK MINUTE
For a slideshow on this event, click on the image.

28. New York City was
the center of British
forces during the
Revolution.
This is a British
map
from 1781 of the
area.

29. More American
soldiers and sailors
died in prison ships
(primarily Wallabout
Bay in the East River,
now Fort Greene
Park) than in all the
battles of the
Revolution: over
11,500.

30. New York City was occupied by the
British for the entire war.
Evacuation Day, 25 November 1783, was
the date the last British troops departed.
It was celebrated by New Yorkers for
many years until it was superseded by
Thanksgiving.

31. The statue of George Washington in
Union Square Park commemorates
Washington’s return to the city on that
date.
It is also in a scene in New York Minute.
NEW YORK MINUTE

32. New York City. 1970s.
Jack Reacher meets the Equalizer
by NY Times Bestselling Author,
West Point graduate
and former Green Beret
One of the top five new series of the year.
http://bobmayer.com/fiction/

33. New York Times bestselling author, is a graduate of West Point and
former Green Beret. He’s had over 80 books published, including the
#1 bestselling series Green Berets, Time Patrol, Area 51, and Atlantis.
He’s sold over 5 million books. He was born in the Bronx and has
traveled the world. He’s lived on an island off the east coast, an island
off the west coast, in the Rocky Mountains, the Smoky Mountains and
other places, including time in East Asia studying martial arts.
He now lives peacefully with his wife and dogs.
www.bobmayer.com