The NYC Society
What exactly is “NYC society”? Is it the hyper-wealthy who live in lavish townhouses in mid-town Manhattan who live a life full of expensive parties, nights out attending the Broadway theatre being driven in chauffeured limousines, dining at restaurants where dinner for two can run into the low four-figures, and spending more on a suit or a dress than most people earn in six months? Or is NYC society something else?
In truth, NYC society is that which is described in the above paragraph – at least in part. But to narrow one’s definition of NYC society to that is to do this city an injustice.
From its earliest days – and even before its recorded history – NYC society has been incredibly diverse, and given its location where a major river meets the Atlantic Ocean in a relatively sheltered port, this should not be surprising.
The first members of NYC society – long before the area was called “New York” – were the Lenape People, an Indian nation whose Algonquian language was related to those of many other Indian peoples from the Atlantic coast to present-day Northern California. These early members of pre- NYC society were unusual for Native American peoples in that they practiced agriculture to supplement their hunting and gathering. Even before the arrival of the first European to arrive in New York Harbor in 1524, the area that would one day become NYC was densely populated – home to perhaps as many as 15,000 at a time when London was barely ten times that – the size of a modestly-sized American city of today.
Despite this early contact, it was another 90 years before the founding of “Nieuw Amsterdam” when Pieter Minuit purchased the Island of Manhattan for the sum of 60 Dutch guilders (which contrary to the popular legend, is actually equivalent to about $1200 U.S. dollars at today’s value).
New York City changed hands at least two more times over the subsequent 180 years, and NYC society changed as well. Many people forget that New York City was briefly the capitol of the U.S. and might have remained so; how different would NYC society be today were this still the case?
New York City has the dubious distinction of being the first American city to have been subject to martial law and occupied by the U.S. military; this was a result of the Draft Riots of 1863, brought on in part by a law that allowed the wealthy elite of NYC society to buy their way out of conscription for $300 during th American Civil War; most ordinary working people, poor by today’s standards, would have found it difficult, if not impossible to raise that much.
NYC society has changed a great deal since those days and the decades that followed. It continues to be shaped however by its location and its status as an international port and cultural and economic hub.
By: Anne Harvester
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Filed under Arts And Entertainment by on Jun 30th, 2010. 