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.