The natural riches of the East River sustained thriving Native American cultures for eleven millennia. Local longhouse villages
traded through a network reaching as far as the Caribbean. The first Europeans to settle in New York Harbor also relied
on the natural bounty of their new home, but in just a few generations extended the East River’s commercial reach to the entire
globe.
The Native American cultures of this region worked mostly with wood, from their longhouses to their dugout canoes. As
a result, they left few archeological remains. Instead, some of the strongest traces of prior inhabitation are linguistic. The most
famous example is Lenni Lenape’s “hilly land,” Mannahatta. A more ancient echo can be heard at Astoria’s Sunswick Beach.
That name comes down 3,000 years to us from the proto-Mohican word Sunqisq, or “high woman’s place.” Whether she
was a sachem’s wife, a sachem in her own right, or a priestess, she probably belonged to the so-called Orient Point people
who gathered wetland herbs for medicine, ceremonies, and food. Also critical to the local economy was the fashioning of
wampum from seashells. Roosevelt Island was, essentially, the region’s great mint.
While some believe the Vikings may have ventured as far south as New York Harbor, it’s safe to say that the first significant European settlement was that of the Dutch in 1623. A windmill was erected on that island’s gustier Hudson River shore, but along the east bank of the East River it was tidal power that ground grain into flour. Sometimes slave labor was used to sow and reap crops, but natural marsh grasses fed cattle. By 1642 there was a ferry service plying the waters between Manhattan and Brooklyn and five years later the Dutch built the first East River pier at Pearl and Broad Street. The little boomtown of New Amsterdam attracted entrepreneurs, but also smugglers, pirates, and religious outcasts. The elders of the little outlying town of Flushing became unlikely heroes of religious freedom when they harbored Quakers in defiance of Gov. Stuyvesant’s decree that all
colonists adhere to the Dutch Reformed Church.
When the British took over, turning New Amsterdam into New York, they spurred waterfront development by permitting personal private land ownership in exchange for investment in wharf development. By the close of the 17th century, the British had built a Great Dock at Corlears Hook,
spawned a powerful local merchant class, and began using landfill to produce more shoreline.
A shipbuilding industry was born when the Bolting Act of 1678 permitted New York to export
flour.
One key indicator of early New York’s preeminence
is how fortified it was, starting with New Amsterdam’s famous wall. The rebellious colonies tasted suffering and death at war on the East River. General Washington crossed it in a hasty retreat, and prisoners died from disease and starvation aboard prison ships moored in it. The United States later held the East River with forts from Manhattan’s Battery to Fort Totten, even placing a blockhouse watchtower on Mill Rock Island in the already hazardous Hell Gate.
