New York City spent seven years under British military occupation during the Revolutionary War, and a new 7,000-square-foot exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York is built around the part of that story most people skip. “The Occupied City,” a collaboration between the museum and the Gotham Center for New York City, walks visitors through a timeline of the war as the city actually lived it, defeat and all, as first reported by AMNY.
The curators’ argument is that New York was not a footnote to the Revolution. It was the prize. Elisabeth Sherman, the museum’s Robert A. and Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe Chief Curator and Deputy Director, helped put the show together, and she lays out why the British Navy sailed here before anywhere else.
“If you can control New York, if you can control the Hudson, if you can divide the colonies in half and isolate the more revolutionary northern colonies from the south, presumably you can win the war, and that’s why we’re the first place that the British Navy comes to,” Sherman said. “That’s why Washington acknowledges that we are going to be a crucial site. The whole war, he’s pretty obsessed with New York and keeps coming back and wanting to return and recapture it. We are incredibly central to this story.”
The exhibition leans into the history that usually gets left out of the triumphant version. It tells the stories of enslaved people, Native people and women during the war, uses interactive pieces to let visitors help narrate the American Revolution in New York, and does not skip past the fact that New Yorkers lost, badly, for a long time.
“Most people don’t know this story of the city being occupied,” Sherman said. “I think it’s the one [aspect] that’s so important to take away, that we can lose and still create something great, and the path to winning always includes losses along the way. If we only tell the triumphant stories of our other northern neighbors, we don’t understand the complexity of what it took to get here.”
The show’s timing lands on the 250th anniversary of American independence, and it points beyond the museum walls to the actual ground where the war played out. One of the most important of those sites sits at the far southern tip of Staten Island, in the Tottenville neighborhood: the Conference House, where the Revolution came within a single meeting of ending before it fully began.
Philip Papas, a history professor at Union College and a board member of the Conference House Association, said the fighting around New York looked nothing like the tidy battlefield version in most textbooks.
“If you study the history and the Revolution, you really see how the Revolution was a civil war,” Papas said. “The war in this area, and in other areas of the colonies too, was not just a conventional war of battlefields. It was a lot of guerrilla warfare, a lot of internecine warfare.”
At the Conference House 250 years ago, three revolutionaries, including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, met with British Admiral Lord Richard Howe for a peace conference. It was the last reconciliation attempt from either side before all-out war, and it failed.
“A lot of people don’t realize that the American Revolution could have ended here,” Papas said. “What basically results from this conference is both sides realize that they’re gonna have to fight it out now. This is going to be a full-scale war. The Americans are not going to give up their independence. The British are not going to accept America as a new sovereign country, and so it’s going to have to be war to decide that.”
Brooklyn carries its own chapter of that same fight. Brooklyn Paper’s walking tour of the borough’s Revolutionary history traces the Battle of Brooklyn, the first clash between American and British soldiers after the Declaration of Independence was signed, from Fort Greene Park down to Gravesend Bay, where thousands of British troops landed in August 1776.
For Sherman, the loss is the point, not something to bury. New York, she notes, was occupied for seven years and left in ruins, then became one of the biggest cities in the country almost immediately after.
“New York was occupied for seven years, completely devastated and practically destroyed by the end of the war, but look at what happened just right after that,” Sherman said. “It can be an inspirational story for us today. Challenge and complexity and loss don’t have to be the end of the story.”
“This is New York’s history too, just as much as it is in Boston and Philadelphia, if not more so, and we as New Yorkers should remember the role that the city played in this important history,” Sherman said.
“The Occupied City” is on view at the Museum of the City of New York.
Featured image: Photo by Barbara Vasquez
