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Stuyvesant

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[Peter] Stuyvesant [1602-1672] had other ideas. He was family man now, and he wanted to put down his roots. Within the year ¹⁶⁵⁰ he would arrange to buy the farm, called Bouwereie Number One, outright from the company, and then purchase acreage on both sides of it, giving him a plantation stretching from the East River west to the center of the island and covering approximately three hundred acres. Here he built a manor and chapel. Here he would live out his life and be buried, and here, over the parade of centuries, flappers, shtetl refugees, hippies, and punks—an aggregate of local residents running from Trotsky to Auden to Charlie Parker to Joey Ramone—would shuffle past his tomb*

*As a nice metaphor for the way history has muddled Manhattan’s Dutch period, Stuyvesant’s tombstone, embedded in the foundation of the Church of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, manages to get both his age and title wrong.

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto, Vintage Books, 2005

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