We have a very good idea what things look like today. Thanks to smart phones, we all walk around with a camera all the time, so everything gets photographed. We have a good idea of what things looked like from 1980; a slightly less good idea from 1960, when a lot of people were still using black & white film; a less good idea from 1940, before the instant camera was invented, and so on. Before the mid-1800s, there are no photographs, so we’re relying on paintings, drawings, and engravings of various types. Illustrations were less frequently made before cameras as well: it may skill to take a great photo, but it takes almost none to simply push the shutter, while drawing something accurately is a skill that takes a long time to master. Photos can be faked, of course, but if used without intentional dishonesty have some degree of objectivity. Artists’ work represents everything through the creators’ perception. In short, we simply don’t know how much of the past looked.
The picture above is a nineteenth-century reworking of a woodcut from around 1640. Here’s an older version of most of it:
The big building is the new church, which the colonists were apparently quite proud of. It’s inside the fort that stood more or less where the Customs House is today. While Manhattan was quite hilly before the street grid was built, the hill on the right is probably exaggerated. The overall sense is that of a bunch of small houses huddled together around the fort and the East River. Oh, and three men were hung in the foreground and a fourth is apparently being tortured at the end of a crane.
This particular train of thought started with a question I had about Fort Amsterdam. It was an “earth” fort, which could mean it was constructed of anything from soil to boulders. It was built by the Dutch West India Company colonists, who were famously bad at following orders or doing anything in a communal fashion that didn’t involve personal profit. So it’s likely that the fort was built in a slapdash manner. The picture above, or the one below from a 1651 book, show a star fort with flat walls and sharp corners.
The oldest map of Manhattan, the Castello Plan of 1660, shows a four-sided star fort with corner bastions, which agrees with the written descriptions:
(The Castello Plan also shows the wood palisade that gave Wall Street its name, the East River waterfront at its pre-landfill location at Pearl Street, and the canal running down Broad Street and with a brand on beaver Street.)
But I look at the acute angles of the fort in the drawings and the map and wonder how you’d make them out of earthen construction. Surviving earth forts – Fort Jay on Governors Island is partly earth – typically have low-slope walls and rounded corners. Maybe Fort Amsterdam had earth walls faced with stones, either cut to ashlar or simply laid as rubble. Maybe the earth was reinforced by a wood palisade buried within it. Maybe the illustrations are all wishful thinking, and show the fort that the Dutch would have built if they had held the colony longer. What is certain is that any physical evidence is long gone. Every building site near the fort has been rebuilt at least three times since the seventeenth century, and the streets adjacent to the fort site have been dug up for subway construction.
A photo would be nice.
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