Before New York was New York, it was New Amsterdam, and the closest thing Ridgewood has to a witness is a squat Dutch colonial farmhouse on the Brooklyn-Queens border. The Vander Ende-Onderdonk House, built in 1709 and one of the oldest structures in the city, is where the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society keeps the relics of the colony that gave the five boroughs their capitalist streak, their patchwork of nationalities and a surprising amount of their street map.
As the country rolls toward its 250th birthday, a group of city historians told amNewYork that New York’s early Dutch period shaped what the city became. The settlement of New Amsterdam, they argue, made the city a port built for trade, open to immigration and unusually tolerant of who you prayed to.
Vanessa Sellers, vice president of the New Amsterdam History Center, points to Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York Harbor in 1609 as the pivot. “He was really the one who went up the Hudson River and sought a shorter road to Asia in the East for better trading and found out it was a separate continent,” Sellers said. The Dutch had hired Hudson to scout land and profit. The harbor was worth keeping because of pure geography: a wide, protective bay perfectly placed for shipping along trade routes the Dutch already ran.
Monxo Lopez, the curator of community histories at the Museum of the City of New York, said European powers were racing each other to claim territory when Hudson, sailing for the Dutch Republic, stumbled onto the bay. “The main reason for New York being a major trading location was the river that was an entry point deep into the continent,” Lopez said. “They called it New Amsterdam because the organizer and main owner of stocks in the Dutch trading company was based in Amsterdam.”
Roger McCormack, director of education at the Bronx County Historical Society, traces the same path up the river. “Hudson’s ship sailed through New York Harbor and up the Hudson River before hitting Albany. They were looking for a really great port in the fur trade and they decided on Manhattan Island and New York Harbor because they had easy access to Albany and the interior of the country with other settlements in the northeast,” McCormack said.
New Amsterdam was founded in 1625, which made 2025 the city’s 400th year. According to McCormack, the Dutch shaped the local temperament permanently. “The Dutch were pragmatic and frugal with money. Historians view the Dutch as the reason behind the quintessential New York capitalistic gene with religious toleration, which certainly wasn’t true with New England and the puritans,” he said.
The colony was not peaceful. McCormack points to Kieft’s War, a series of bloody conflicts between the Dutch and Native people in the 1640s, named for the Dutch governor Willem Kieft.
The Dutch chapter closed in 1664, when the English took the colony and renamed it after the Duke of York. The takeover happened quietly. Sellers said New Amsterdam had almost no military presence, and after weeks of talks the Dutch surrendered but held onto their rights. “This was a very interesting moment in warfare, in the sense that no shots were fired and the Dutch could stay where they were and keep many of their rights,” Sellers said.
Lopez described it as one front in a long war between European powers attacking each other’s colonies. “The British decided they were going to attack and take over the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam,” Lopez said. “The New Amsterdam leader Peter Stuyvesant, although he originally wanted to fight, the Dutch population said that would be foolish. They were overwhelmed by the British military power. So the British took over peacefully.”
The handover cost some people plenty. Sellers said Dutch women lost ground under English rule: in Holland, where roughly half the men were at sea, women routinely ran businesses on their own, and that right disappeared once the English took over. The tolerance survived, she said. “The only thing that remained was the element of tolerance for religious conscience that the Dutch had and the English insisted should be kept. The way the Dutch described religious freedom became part of the Declaration of Independence,” Sellers said.
Sellers and McCormack point to a long list of Dutch names still on the map: Harlem, Brooklyn, Broadway, Dyckman, Van Cortlandt, Canal Street and especially Wall Street, which was built as an actual wall to protect the Dutch from the English and from Native people during the wars.
“It is often considered that New York still has that Dutch vibe in communication and collaboration,” Sellers said. “This idea of open trade is what became part of America.”
Linda Monte, a board member of the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society, wants New Yorkers to remember this. Her group runs the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House, the restored farmhouse near the Brooklyn-Queens line that residents rallied to save from demolition after a 1975 fire, forming the society in the process. It landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. “When you look at the multiculturalism of Dutch New York, that’s still the way we are,” Monte said. “The fabric of the Dutch is still with us.”
Featured image: Courtesy New Amsterdam History Center
