"When Shall We Three Meet Again?

1st Witch - Macbeth

© 2010 David Minor / Eagles Byte

HIGHLY RECOMMENED READING

Joseph Mitchell

"My Ears Are Bent"

True stories of a 1930s NYC newspaperman

For one thing, you'll learn what 'hot squats' and 'dry dives' are.

ppb. (NY, Vintage Books, 2008)

Original publication – 1938

5/27/2010 Update -

Also add the author's "Up in the Old Hotel Room"

ppb. (NY, Vintage Books, 2008)

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1655-1659

1655

Former resident Adriaen van der Donk's A Description of New Netherland.

Apr 26

The Dutch West India Company rules that Jews be allowed to remain in

New Amsterdam.

Jun 28

Manhattan tavern keeper Wolfert Webber accuses neighbor Judith Verleth - and her sister Susan - of appearing at his business and beating him, as a result of their court case last year. The Verleths claim it was Webber that appeared at their place and attacked them. Both parties are told to return the next day with proof of their accusations.

Jun 29

Apparently Webber is found to be playing with the truth, as he’s ordered to pay a $12

stiver fine for fulminating lies in court.

September

The Dutch from New Amsterdam, under Peter Stuyvesant and a force of

600-some men oust the Swedish settlersin the Delaware River Valley,

capturing Fort Christina and Fort Casimir from New Sweden governor Rysingh.

Sep 15

Several thousand Hudson River area Indians go on a three-day rampage

in the city, as well as on Staten Island and in New Jersey (triggered by

the killing of a Wappinger Indian woman who took a peach from one

of the Dutch orchards) - the Peach War. Over a hundred Dutch settlers

are killed; more than 150 kidnapped. Many homes are ransacked.

City

The city is surveyed and its streets are straightened. ** Lady Deborah

Moody is allowed to vote in town meeting. ** Stuyvesant denies Jews

the right to serve in the military. ** Orphans and other poor children

arrive from the Netherlands, in an effort to boost population. **

The approximate date Nicholas Jansz Visscher publishes a map of New

Netherland, correcting the 1650 map (until 1988 assumed to be dated

1651) by Jan Jansson. Son Nicholas probably inserts an etched view of

New Amsterdam into his father's previously published map. ** The first

African slaves arrive in the city. ** The Burgomasters name Dick Van

Schelluyne the first High Constable. Ludowyck Post is named Captain

to the Burgher Provost, in charge of police rounds. ** Reformed Protestant

Dutch minister the Reverend Johannes Megapolensis writes to the Classis

congregations in Holland, expressing his fears that the recently-arrived

Jews might chose to remain in New Amsterdam. ** The citys' first Jewish

cemetery is established (site now unknown). ** Jewish immigrant Abraham

de Lucena, ancestor of the city’s Nathan family, arrives. ** Stone Street

is named as it becomes the city's first paved street, laid with

cobblestones.

Brooklyn

The local Canarsie Indians are wiped out by the Mohawks. ** The Dutch

East Indies Company grants a monopoly on salt manufacturing at Gravesend

to merchant Dick de Wolf. Local farmers destroy the saltworks and threaten

De Wolf and his foreman. Stuyvesant, ordered to send soldiers to restore the

salt works, delays several months. ** New Utrech founder Cornelius van

Werckhoven dies. His children’s tutor Jacques Cortelyou takes over the

colony, which now numbers 18 settlers.

1656

Jun 24

Lower Manhattan innkeeper Jan Vinje catches young Jacob Clasen and some friends

stomping around his pea patch. Vinje spanks the boy.

Jun 26

Vinje sues the boy’s father, schoolmaster Frans Clasen for damages. The court assigns

arbitrators to draw up a report.

Jul 10

When the arbitraor's report is read the court decides that since Vinje had already beaten the boy

he is owed no further recompense.

City

Governor Pieter Stuyvesant has the first map of the city made and sent

to the Netherlands. He grants the future Jamaica land on Long Island to

the English. The West India Trading Company complains that the

streets are too broad. The first census is also made. It shows 120 houses

and about 1,000 inhabitants. ** Brewer Michiel Jansen sinks a well in

Bevers Graacht and opens a tavern, after his previous business in

Pavonia (today’s Jersey City, New Jersey) was burned by Indians last year.

** A market stand is built at Broadway and Battery Place near the northeast

corner of the fort. ** Thirty-year-old Sarah Rapalje declares

herself, correctly, the "first born christian daughter of New Netherland.

** A bell is hung on top of city hall to be used as a fire alarm, for summoning

magistrates and announcing proclamations. ** Rhode Island Baptist cobbler

William Wickendam arrives to preach the gospel. Sheriff William Haslett puts

his own home at Wickendam’s disposal, all of which enrages Peter Stuyvesant,

who orders the preacher and Willet banished.

Brooklyn

Dutch sea captain Jan Martense Schenck builds a brick-and-lumber house in

Amersfoort (Flatlands, after 1664), from materials imported from Holland,

for himself and his young bride.

1657

Feb 20

New Amsterdam passes an ordinance against depositing trash anywhere other

than near the gallows, near City Hall, or near Hendrick the Baker’s. Violators

will be fined three florins for a first offense, with increasing fines for repeat

offenders. The orders are mostly ignored until fines are levied for dumping in

the canal ditch.

October

A petition, signed by 24 parishioners (including 16 Germans) - to have

Lutheran pastor Johannes Ernestus Gütwasser remain in New Amsterdam

- is circulated. Among the signers is cobbler Jochem Beeckman.

December

After Quaker missionaries arrive from England and Henry Townshend of

Flushing is fined by the Dutch under a new law, for entertaining Quakers,

his neighbors rally, sign the Flushing Remonstrance, declaring for freedom

of religion. They will soon bow to pressure and withdraw their support

for Townshend.

City

The approximate date of construction of Peter Stuyvesant's mansion,

Whitehall, in lower Manhattan. ** Thatched roofs are prohibited, as a

fire safety measure. ** The approximate year Stone Street is built,

between Broad Street and Hanover Square. ** Following the mother

country's much earlier example, the right of the burgher class

(Burgher-recht) to engage in professions or crafts, is introduced in the city.

** The West India Company sends Stuyvesant silkworm egss but they have

rotted during the voyage. He's later instructed to borrow worms from

the English but ignores the order, saying the trees will be difficult to

cultivate. ** Stuyvesant grants Jacques Cortelyou and other settlers

permission to found New Utrecht, in Brooklyn’s future Fort Hamilton area.

1658

Jan 25

Stuyvesant bans tennis during church service hours and also prohibits

“pulling the goose.”

March

Stuyvesant establishes the town of Nieuw Harrlem, in the northern half

of Manhattan, on land first developed by brothers Isaac and Henry DeForrest.

Aug 12

New Amsterdam gets its first police force — the eight-man Ratelwacht

(Burgher Guard, or rattle watch), using rattles rather than whistles.

City

The council bans kolven, a forerunner of golf. ** The council outlaws

privies with street level outlets. The order is pretty much ignored.

** Failing to sustain a ban on loose pigs in the street the council orders

them at least ringed through the nose, to make them easier to catch.

** The city considers digging a public well north of the wall; nothing

is done. ** Dutch immigrant Gerritt Remmersen arrives in Amersfoort

(Gravesend, Brooklyn) Long Island. ** A new schoolhouse is built.

1659

City

Alexander Carolus Curtius (Cursier) opens a Latin School, the first

in the city. ** The city orders 100,000 bricks and 12,000 tiles from

Holland. ** More orphans and other poor children arrive from the

Netherlands. ** Merchant-poet Jacob Steendam describes Manhattan’s

waters. ** Willem Gerritsen, his wife Mary, and two sons, Willem, 8, and

Cornelius, 3, arrive in Amersfoort (Flatlands, Brooklyn) Long Island,

from Bermuda. **

City

The approximate year London-born Deborah Dunch (later Lady Moody), the first female landowner in the New World, dies, possibly at Gravesend, Brooklyn, in her early seventies. She may be buried in the old (now landmarked) cemetery there in an unmarked grave.

State

Under 500 Metoac Indians remain on Long Island.

England

Howell's English Proverbs refers to the wisdom of the men of “Gotham”.

© 2011 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Script 66 - STAR'S EVENING

© 1998 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Not to be too morbid, but death, as ever, was at the center of many stories in 1922. One, dating back a few millennia, was confirmed in November as archaeologists discovered the tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

Some deaths would remain shrouded in mystery, even into to our own time. In Hollywood, film director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered. And closer to home, in Linden, in western New York, 72-year-old Frances Kimball was battered to death in her home. Two years later, in 1924, three other people were murdered in the same small hamlet. None of the four crimes was ever solved.

Giovanni Martini had cheated death once, by not being in the wrong place at the right time. But Martini, George Armstrong Custer's orderly at the Little Bighorn forty-six years previously, died in Brooklyn this year.

There were other, relatively serene deaths. The literary world lost several leading figures. In Paris the semi-invalid Marcel Proust passed away at the age of 51. William Henry Hudson, born in Argentina, also died this year. Most of the public would remember him not as the naturalist he was by profession, but by his one novel and its central character, Rima, the Bird Girl, of Green Mansions .

One of the most mourned of those dying in 1922 was Mrs. Alexander P. Moore. She was winding down from a long and varied career when she died on June 6th. Her husband, her fourth actually, a Pittsburgh newspaper publisher and Republican stalwart, had just helped put Warren G. Harding in the White House. Mrs. M. had worked tirelessly on the campaign as well, and Harding did not forget. Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had recently arrested 6,000 U. S. citizens on the grounds of Bolshevik sympathies and deported close to a thousand, including Emma Goldman and Wobbly labor leader “Big Bill” Haywood. Anti-immigrant feelings were also running high in these post-war years. Harding decided to send Mrs. Moore to Europe to try and discover what compelled thousands to flee their homeland and sail to American shores. She labored mightily and came up with the unfortunate and simplistic conclusion that “Alien infiltration wrecked Rome.” Immigration should be curbed. Continuing to lecture even though weakened by a fall suffered on board ship while returning home, she soon wore herself out and was dead a few weeks later. It was in this rather bizarre scenario that the world lost one of its most colorful characters, a woman who had sent male hearts racing in a series of operettas, made audiences laugh in Weber and Fields vaudeville skits, and turned Come Down My Evening Star into the favorite song of thousands. To all of those thousands of fans Mrs. Moore, born Helen Louise Leonard sixty years earlier, was far better known as Lillian Russell.

Script 29 - Oh, Their Aching Feet !

© 1997 David Minor / Eagles Byte

We’re going to have a pop quiz today (No, it’s not because Father’s Day is coming later this spring).

Of the following items, which one does not belong in the series:

Poet John Milton, General Philip Schuyler, Henry VIII, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Tyrannosaurus Rex, painter Winslow Homer.

Is this a trick question? Would I do that? Of course I would.

I’ll explain. We’ve all seen him. Wealthy, likes his food exceedingly well, uses a cane or walking stick on the few occasions he stands. He has a huge bandage on one foot which everyone manages to either hit, trip over, or drop things on. The sufferer of the gout has been familiar to us in cartoons and silent comedies and stage farces for hundreds of years. Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff cries out, “A pox of this gout! or, a gout of this pox! for the one or the other plays the rogue with my great toe.”

We hear the word gout and some of us immediately think of Henry VIII. Other famous people have suffered from this disease, including English clinician Thomas Sycamore Sydenham, who was the first to differentiate between acute rheumatism and gout, back in the 17th Century. The condition is caused by deposits of crystals of uric acid in body tissues, especially in bone joints, causing extremely painful inflammations. It was probably a contributing factor in the death of John Milton. Philip Schuyler, New York State general of the American Revolution had it.

In the religious wars in Germany during the 1540s, Charles V, suffering from the condition, hobbled all over Europe for several months, from Regensburg to Landshut to Ingolstadt to Ulm. Warming his aching limbs in a movable wooden room heated by a stove, he made his tortured way from Nordlingen back to Regensburg, then to Eger then, spending 21 straight hours in the saddle, to Muehlberg, where he finally accepted the surrender of the Landgrave Philip.

So how about our quiz?

Recently [1997] the Democrat & Chronicle carried an item from Youngstown, Ohio’s Arthritis Center of Northeast Ohio, where Bruce Rothschild reported finding evidence that Tyrannosaurus Rex suffered from the gout. He did eat a lot of red meat.

As far as we know, Winslow Homer did not suffer from gout. So he’s our odd man out.

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS

Click on Photo to Enlarge

© 2010 David Minor / Eagles Byte

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1650-1654

1650

City

Immigrant Jan Aertsen Vanderbilt arrives from der Bilt, Holland. ** The

Jan Jansson map of New Amsterdamn, originally dated at 1655, will be

redated to this year in the late 1990s, by Jan van Bracht and Günter Schilder.

Queens

Burger Jorissen builds a gristmill at he future site of Queens Plaza.

1651

Peter Stuyvesant receives the deed for a bouwerie (farm) previously belonging

to Wouter Von Twiller. ** The approximate date Jan Jansson’s manuscript

map of Belgii Novi (New Netherlands) is created. It has since disappeared.

Mar 21

The directors of the Dutch West India Company complain of the extravagant

land grants made to Wouter van Twiller and direct Stuyvesant not to make

any more grants unless the grantee acknowledged the authority of the company

and gave proof of their own ability to properly cultivate the granted lands.

1652

Jun 30

England declares war against the Netherlands, the First Anglo-Dutch War.

City

Governor Peter Stuyvesant charters Flatbush, on Long Island, and issues a

patent for the Long Island village of Newtown (later Elmhurst), previously

known as Middleburgh. ** Englishman William Hallet, buys 1,500 acres

on Long Island along the East River from Stuyvesant. The Indians are

appeased with a blanket, beads, 7 coats, and 4 kettles. The community

becomes Hallets Cove (later Astoria). ** In an attempt to stimulate

colonization the West India Company reduces the fare from eight stuivers

a day to seven. ** The Dutch erect a timber and earthwork wall across

Manhattan at the settlement's northern boundary, for military protection.

It will provide the name of the future Wall Street.

Brooklyn

The Dutch West India Company’s Cornelius Van Werckhoven, a magistrate

of Utrecht in the Netherlands, purchases land from the Nayack Indians,

agreeing to compensate the tribe with clothing and tools., establishes the town

of New Utrecht, with permission by Stuyvesant. ** Stuyvesant grants a town

patent to Midwout (the future Flatbush). ** The approximate date Pieter

Stuyvesant estate superintenent Pieter Claesen Wykoff builds a house in the future

Flatbush section. It will one day become the oldest surviving house in the state.

Netherlands

The Lords Directors of the Dutch West Indies Company in Amsterdam learn that

New Amsterdam has an abundance of mulberry trees, begin planning for a silk industry.

1653

Peter Stuyvesant incorporates the city of Nieuw Amsterdam (New Amsterdam).

January

Manhattan resident Joost Goderis, son of a Dutch painter, is accosted while returning from

a fishing trip to Oyster (later Ellis) Island by Isaack Bedloo (Bedloe), Guliam (Gukyam) d’Wys,

Gyshert van der Donck, Jan Vinje, Pieter Werckhoen Harmanus Hartoogh, Cornelius Melyn

and Jacob Buys and taunted with being cuckolded by Allard Antony, supposedly loud enough

to be hard back on the Battery. Subsequently Goderis shows up at Bedloo’s house and slaps him.

Bedloo cuts Goderis on the neck.

Feb 10

The new government meets in Fort Amsterdam. Joost Goderis appears and accuses Bedloo

of last month’s taunting and wounding. A number of witnesses – including Antony - brought

in, refuse to testify against Bedloe.

March

Those who Goderis has accused are ordered to remain under house arrest and report back on

March 8th. The case will drag out for weeks, finally dropped by Goderis for insufficient evidence.

July

Word arrives in the colonies that England and Holland have signed a peace treaty.

Dec 10

Representatives from four Dutch and four English towns meet in New Amsterdam, to protest

against New Netherland's arbitrary government.

Dec 14

Stuyvesant convenes the colony’s first representative assembly, defies the opinions of “a few

ignorant subjects”.

City

The city acquires a city council and a town government, in protest to Stuyvesant's rule. **

The Dutch West Indies Company's tavern at Pearl Street and Coentes Alley is ceded to

the city for a city hall. The colony builds a wall across the island to the north, as a protection

against English colonies and Indians, from that direction. ** Merchant Jacob Krip is

appointed first city clerk of New Amsterdam. ** Immigrant builder Frederick

Philipse arrives. ** Politician and poet Nicasius de Sille arrives from Holland after his ship

battles with English vessels three times. ** Carpenter Claes Hendricksen exchanges his

homestead just to the north of the new wall, with Polish-born tavern keeper Daniel Litsche.

It will later be condemned by authorities as being too near the fortifications.

Brooklyn

This year or next the New Utrecht Reformed Dutch Church Cemetery is begun. A church will

not be built on the site until 1700.

1654

May 18

The directors of the East India Company write to governor Pieter Stuyvesant, informing him of a

New Amsterdam city seal to be forwarded.

Jun 8

New Amsterdam settler Teunis Tomasen sues Michael Paulisen for payment on a chimney Tomasen

had built for Paulisen. Tomasen wins his suit.

Jun 20

New England recruits setting out to attack New Amsterdam learn that the English and the Dutch have

made peace.

Jul 4

Manhattan's Dominies Hook, on the North (Hudson) River between Duane and Canal streets, is acquired

by ground brief from Peter Stuyvesant.

Jul 17

The approximate date (possibly the 18th) the Dutch ship Peartree sails from Holland with the

New Amsterdam city seal.

Aug 22

Jacob Barsimon becomes one of the first Jews to settle in New Amsterdam, having arrived on the

Peartree. Solomon Pietersen may have come in the same vessel.

Sep 7

23 Sephardic Jews, including Moses Ambrosius (Lumbroso), Judicq de Mereda, Abraham Israel,

David Israel and Rycke Nounes, refugees from Brazil, arrive in New Amsterdam aboard the French

armed vessel St. Charles (the Jewish Mayflower). The ship’s captain claims he’s owed 1600 guilders

for the trip.

Oct 5

Manhattan tavern keeper Wolfert Webber is called before the Magistrates’ Court on charges his

dogs attacked several pigs – owned by Judith Verleth and a Mrs Stillen - that wandered on his

lands. Webber claims the hogs were damaging his seeds, but did not harm the pigs. He also

claims he’s been threatened with a beating by Mrs. Verleth. The court tells him to mend his

ways and make a complaint of his own if he’s threatened again.

Nov 14

English physicist Thomas Pell purchases over 9,000 acres in the Bronx from the local

Siwanoy Indians.

Dec 8

Stuyvesant presents the city seal and accompanying signet to burgomeister Martin Crigier.

Bronx

The Dutch settle Oostdorp (East Village), the future Parkchester neighborhood.

Brooklyn

A wooden structure, the town’s first Dutch Reformed Church, is built in Flatbush,

under the direction of Peter Stuyvesant.

© 2011 David Minor / Eagles Byte