04 December 2009
From the
Epoch Times:
It took 400 years, but an apology was made on Friday by the Collegiate Church community to the Lenape tribe for their suffering and dehumanization. “We consumed your resources, dehumanized your people, and disregarded your culture, along with your dreams, hopes and great love for this land … We the Collegiate Church recognize our part in your suffering,” said Reverend Robert Chase of the Collegiate Church at the reconciliation ceremony. The Collegiate Church was the first protestant church in New York, built in 1628 as part of the Dutch settlement located on the Southern tip of Manhattan called ‘New Amsterdam.’ Because at that time the church was the “conscience of the community,” Reverend Chase thought that the time had come for the church to acknowledge and apologize for the church's role. The long awaited apologies were made in front of the National Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan, where the Collegiate church once stood.
Historical records show that the relations between the Dutch and Native Americans were initially good, but over the years, tensions over territory, farming and hunting grounds, unfair trade by the Dutch, and Dutch involvement in intra-tribal conflicts, led to violent conflicts and massacres of the Native Americans. As a direct descendant of Sarah Rapelje, the first Dutch woman born in what was then known as the New Netherlands—the Dutch settlement in the greater New York region, this is very personal for Reverend Chase. “It was my ancestors who did this to other peoples' ancestors." The Dutch West India trading company, at that time thought they had purchased Manhattan Island for 60 guilders, equal to two months salary of an average craftsman in Holland. It is believed that the Lenape, who did not have the concept of private property, did not think the Dutch were buying the land — but thought instead the Dutch were thanking them for aid given to the settlers.
“It’s a step, in the right direction. It’s a step for healing and friendship. And hopefully it will lead to other things, bigger and better things. It has been a long time coming,” said Chester Shadow Walker Robinson, Red Chief Anitsalagi Onselagi from New Jersey. As a symbol of reconciliation, an American girl and Lenape boy exchanged necklaces, one made in the traditional Dutch style and the other made in the traditional Lenape style.
Read the full article
here
08 November 2009
5 Dutch Days NYC:
5 Dutch Days is a five day cultural event which takes place in New York City every November. It celebrates the continuous influence of Dutch arts and culture in New York City and brings together arts and cultural organizations from across the city. Programs include walking tours, lectures, concerts and contemporary art offerings. This year the 5 Dutch days take place from November 12-16, 2009.
As part of the event author Marc Resch delivers an informative and fun presentation on his book, Only in Holland, Only the Dutch. Using a combination of personal experiences and research, Marc will present a captivating portrayal of Dutch culture.
Date: Saturday, November 14, 2009
Time: 4:00pm
Free. RSVP recommended, as space is limited.
Location:
TRESPA DESIGN CENTRE
62 Greene Street
New York, NY 10012
212.334.7122
www.trespa.com
26 September 2009
Hudson River festival today
The city of Albany invites the public to a free Hudson River Fair from 12 to 6 p.m. on Saturday in Albany Riverfront Park. The festival is part of the state's ongoing celebration of the Hudson Quadricentennial and will include a Dutch encampment with tours of the Half Moon, a replica of Henry Hudson's ship, and blacksmiths, ship's crew and artisans; entertainment, including eba Dance Theatre's "Henry Hudson & His River," singers Nanna and Ankie from the Netherlands, Albany Pro Musica and the Skip Parsons Riverboat Band; members of the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe, who are direct Mohican descendants, will present costumed dancers and singers, drumming and oral history presentations by tribal elders.
More at
TimesUnion.com
From
Newsday:
More than a dozen sailing ships from the Netherlands are in Albany to help New York's capital commemorate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage of discovery. The vessels have joined the Half Moon, a replica of the ship Hudson sailed for the Dutch while exploring the river that would later bear his name. The ships are docked along the Albany waterfront for Saturday's festival celebrating the Hudson quadricentennial and the state's Dutch roots. The event will include music, arts and crafts exhibits and cultural demonstrations of 17th-century Dutch and American Indian life in the New World.
Read the article
here
23 September 2009
Bicycle freeway underneath existing elevated highways (BrightNYC/New York Times)
From the
New York Times:
It was Saturday night in the meatpacking district. The velvet ropes were out; a rumbling bass pulsed out of every club. Well, nearly every club. At Cielo, which says on its Web site that it is “purpose-built for dancing with a centrally located sunken dance floor,” no one was shaking it. Instead, a rapt crowd, many of them sitting on the purpose-built dance floor, watched two teams of Dutch and American designers make pleas for their plans to improve bicycle riding in New York City.
As a part of New York’s all things Dutch celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival, the Bike Slam, a four-day conference that was part infrastructure symposium and part reality television show competition, was held Sept. 9-12. New York City’s Transportation Alternatives, the pedestrian and cyclist advocacy group, and Amsterdam’s Velo Mondial were the hosts. After days of touring the city on bikes and brainstorming to create a vision to spur a million more cyclists onto New York’s streets, the two teams were coming into the final stretch and pitching their plans. Anything — cost, infrastructure and political battles be damned — seemed fair game.
Both teams were appalled by the lack of safety at the off ramp from the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. Team New York called for a Budnick Bikeway style lane, raised and separated from traffic, that might connect all the way to Lafayette Street. But Team Amsterdam had more tricks up its sleeves. How about bicycle freeways? asked Carmen Trudell, a New York architect and City University professor. Imagine a bicycle speedway running under the shadow of Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, a rain-free place for athletic cyclists out on training rides or those who just are not going to go at a “Dutch pace.” The idea helped cinch the victory for Team Amsterdam in impressing the judges.
Read the article
here
21 September 2009
The
Huffington Post has a slideshow of Princess Maxima in New York for the 400th anniversary celebrations.
15 September 2009
From the
New York Times:
The celebration riveted the nation. The government spent years in planning, the news media tracked every development, and residents flocked to the events in droves. The reason for all the hoopla was the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York Harbor, which was marked with a week of events around the city that concluded in Lower Manhattan on Sunday. But the place where this anniversary is being celebrated so fiercely is the Netherlands, the small, waterlogged European nation of 17 million people 3,650 miles away. The Dutch organized and paid for the week’s events, running up a tab of about $10 million. The Dutch media dispatched about 50 reporters to New York, with a major television station running nightly half-hour updates on the proceedings during prime time. And thousands of Dutch citizens crossed the Atlantic to take part, including Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, who declared New York the greatest city in the world.
But aside from perhaps hearing cannon fire, spotting the stately profiles of the Dutch sailing vessels shipped across the Atlantic for the occasion, or bumping into a gang of blond, blue-eyed sailors in Brooklyn Heights, New Yorkers, a busy bunch and long accustomed to spectacle, basically went about life as usual. “It’s bigger there than over here,” said Babette Bullens, 38, who lives near Holland’s border with Belgium and was making her first trip to New York. “If you talk to New Yorkers, they don’t know what’s happening. It’s very disappointing,” she said in Battery Park on Sunday. The reason for the Dutch interest, of course, is that the arrival of Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, led to the founding of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Hudson was British, but his financial backer was the Dutch East India Company. (“Who paid for the voyage,” the crown prince said, “really counts.”)
“It’s just another event,” said Ralph Montuoro, 67, of Queens, getting off his bicycle to negotiate the mostly Dutch crowd in Battery Park on Sunday. “We didn’t even know about it.” And even if some Dutch were disappointed by the level of interest, most went out of their way to say they understood. “New Yorkers have a lot going on here,” said Vivi van Leeuwen, 34, of Breda. “New York is the capital of the world, and the Dutch are proud of their history here and don’t mind sharing that pride.”
Read the article
here
13 September 2009
From the
New York Times:
Beginning Sunday, not far from where the saltwater of the sea and the freshwater of the river bearing Henry Hudson’s name intermingle in an estuary that nestles along the island of Manhattan, the documents that began it all will be on display: meticulously preserved ledgers with ornate scripts, delicately colored maps and drawings, an official government pronouncements that gave birth to New Amsterdam and led ultimately to the creation of the City of New York. A new exhibition at the South Street Seaport Museum, “New Amsterdam: The Island at the Center of the World,” is being mounted in conjunction with the Dutch curator Martine Gosselink and the National Archives of the Netherlands, which lent the museum some extraordinarily well-preserved artifacts as part of the 400th anniversary celebrations of Hudson’s arrival.
From 1626 there is a letter that was once folded to form its own envelope; it is now torn and stained by the fingers that must have handled it, addressed to “High and Mighty Lords.” It is a dispatch from Pieter Schaghen to the directors of the recently formed Dutch West India Company, whose title implicitly recognized that the way east lay elsewhere. The letter disclosed the latest news about New Amsterdam from a Dutch ship that had arrived home: reports that “our people are in good spirits and live in peace,” that they have sowed and reaped their grain, that the cargo contained 7,246 beaver skins and 48 mink skins. And that, oh yes, the settlers had “purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders.” That casual pronouncement is one of the sources of the Dutch claim to the colony and has been referred to as New York City’s “birth certificate.”
If the short-lived Dutch venture in North American colonialism would not have been judged an unambiguous success at the time, it still shaped a different culture than those created by the British immigration to colonial outposts like Plymouth and Jamestown. New Amsterdam was marked not just by the diversity of its inhabitants, but by the shifting layers of experience over this brief period, encompassing free-market bustle and controlled trade, Dutch rule and misrule (followed by British versions of the same). There were even distinctive aspects to African enslavement. Dutch cruelty elsewhere was answered, perhaps, by a different approach here, the catalog suggests, one in which slaves had ownership rights, and slave testimonies had legal standing. The complexity of this short history and its lasting impact on the character of New York suggest that the way we analyze more recent colonial and imperial ventures by various nations tends to be somewhat crude. Between the pages of these documents, and even between their lines, are intricacies worthy of deeper understanding.
Read the entire article
here
“New Amsterdam: The Island at the Center of the World” opens Sunday and runs through Jan. 3 at the South Street Seaport Museum, 12 Fulton Street, Lower Manhattan; (212) 748-8600.
10 September 2009
From the
New York Times:
All of this could have been his. But when Crown Prince Willem-Alexander of Orange, the presumptive next king of the Netherlands, strode the warship deck on Tuesday to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival at New York Harbor and the subsequent founding of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, he was about 345 years too late to stake a territorial claim. The cross-Atlantic relationship formally ended in 1664 when the island was handed over to the British. Yet Willem-Alexander’s brief comments delivered on the deck of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum to kick off the weeklong celebration betrayed no grievances.
Speaking briefly in a black suit and striped tie and standing next to his wife, Máxima, an Argentine who spent five years working in banking in New York, his comments were straightforward. He discussed the similarities between New Yorkers and the Dutch (diverse, tolerant, hard workers), he made the obligatory wish of 400 years more of friendship, and was generous with his praise: “The better you know the Big Apple, the more you love this great city,” he said.
The ceremony, which will be followed by a week of activities, was full of pomp. The 75-piece Royal Netherlands Navy Band belted out tunes. Sailboats and military vessel slid by in the background, including the Half Moon, a replica of Henry Hudson’s vessel. A 21-gun salute echoed down the river. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton thanked the Dutch for their “investment” of 24 dollars to purchase the island of Manhattan and for their later support for the independence of the United States of America. A playful Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg offered his “warmest velcome” — drawing out the v — to the royal family and gave the royal couple a custom bowl from Tiffany & Company inscribed with scenes of the city. (Princess Máxima called it “a lovely, lovely bowl” and promised to put it in a “very, very special place in our house.”)
Read the article
here
08 September 2009
From
AFP:
Prince Willem-Alexander and Princess Maxima of the Netherlands joined celebrations Tuesday in New York to mark the 400th anniversary of explorer Henry Hudson's arrival in Manhattan aboard a Dutch ship. Six days of events, starting with a parade of NATO warships, Dutch barges, yachts and a replica of Hudson's ship "Half Moon," were planned in New York harbor. "Princess Maxima and I are overwhelmed with this tremendous welcoming to New York," the crown prince said. "It is wonderful to still be able to see the Dutch influences across the city, from transportation and art to music and food."
In 1626, the Dutch bought Manhattan from the indigenous Lenapes people for the equivalent of 24 dollars. The settlement was known first as New Amsterdam and then, under British rule from 1664, as New York. The river sweeping along the city is called the Hudson. "Henry Hudson arrived on these shores 400 years ago and helped lay the foundation for what would later become New York City," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at the ceremony.
Read the article
here
Dutch royals visit NY 400 years after Henry Hudson
Dutch Prince Willem-Alexander and his wife, Princess Maxima, got a rousing welcome from West Point cadets as they visited the U.S. Military Academy for the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage. The royal couple headed up the Hudson River after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mayor Michael Bloomberg welcomed them to Manhattan. Tuesday's festivities included NATO vessels, Dutch barges and a replica of Hudson's ship, the Half Moon. A Dutch naval ship offered a 21-gun salute.
The prince says New York was built on the values of Dutch-American pioneers, including a passion for liberty.
From
Associated Press
07 September 2009
From
Gothamist.com:
Yesterday, New Amsterdam Village, the miniature Dutch village, opened up in Bowling Green Park as part of the ongoing festivities surrounding the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's arrival. Dutch ambassador to the United States Renée Jones-Bos and Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe made the village's opening formal by cutting a Gouda cheese! Through Monday 14th, between 11am and 7pm, the public is able to sample and purchase sample and purchase Dutch agricultural products and foods, including stroopwafels, cheeses, herring sandwiches, dollar pancakes, cut flowers, flower bulbs and more. And authentic Dutch people are making wooden shoes, blowing glass, and holding floral and culinary workshops.
Lots of pictures
here.
See also:
New Amsterdam village popping up at Bowling Green
03 September 2009
From
Gothamist:
Those likable Dutch, to celebrate the quadricentennial of Hudson's arrival in New York harbor in 1609, are busy right now building a replica colonial village at Bowling Green. It's part of the NY400 Week celebration, which officially kicks off Tuesday September 8th, and includes a massive Dutch music, art, and dance festival on Governors Island (The New Island Festival), tours of the replica of Hudson's ship The Half Moon , sailing races, the unveiling of the New Amsterdam Pavilion (a gift from the Netherlands at Peter Minuit Plaza, Battery Park), an historic walking tour co-hosted by Russell Shorto, author of the stellar book The Island at the Center of the World; and a boatload more activities!
But the New Amsterdam Village opens this week, on Friday, and consists of 12 traditional Dutch canal houses, a windmill, and a demonstration model of a contemporary Dutch greenhouse. Open to the public, this is where you can sample and purchase Dutch agricultural products and foods, including stroopwafels (YES!), cheeses, herring, dollar pancakes, cut flowers, flower bulbs and green roofs. Authentic Dutch people will also be making wooden shoes, blowing glass, and holding floral and culinary workshops; and this is where you can borrow those orange Dutch bikes for free. (BYO Old Amsterdam weed.)
Read the article
here.
20 August 2009
From
Dexigner.com:
Pioneers of Change highlights a more responsible and sustainable approach to living by celebrating the blurring of low- and high-brow, establishing new collaborations, encouraging involvement, emphasizing sustainability and valuing handcraft and the local context. Over the course of two long weekends from September 11 through September 20, Pioneers of Change will showcase a modern interpretation on Dutch art and design.
The exhibit will utilize several former officers' houses in Nolan Park on Governors Island, where visitors can listen and debate, watch and participate, relax and think, eat and drink, play music, be inspired, connect and, simply, enjoy.
"I am honored to share my vision of what I see as a new movement in design and architecture, a different design based on a more critical attitude toward global mass consumption and with an open eye to participation from the public," says Renny Ramakers, curator of the exhibit and co-founder and director of Droog.
Read the entire article
here.
10 July 2009
Only in Holland.com is off on a two week vacation, but leaves you with a preview of the cover of the upcoming 3rd edition of the book and an extract from the book.
Nieuw Amsterdam – the Big Orange?
New York City, the most famous metropolis on the planet and the self-proclaimed “Capital City of the World” was originally overwhelmingly Dutch in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Early
Dutch settlers and merchants established villages and trading posts throughout the entire New York metropolitan area beginning in the early 1600s in order to profit from the vast resources within the region. The Dutch are credited with negotiating the “Deal of the Millennium” with the purchase of the island of Manhattan from the Indians for, ostensibly, $24. The borders of the Dutch territory claimed by the West India Company stretched as far from southern Delaware through New Jersey and east-central Pennsylvania, and into eastern and central New York, including Long Island. This Dutch region was originally called Nieuw Nederland and New York City was originally called Nieuw Amsterdam, both names paying homage to the Dutch motherland in Europe.
(more)
05 July 2009
From
Art Daily:
As part of the celebration of the 2009 Hudson-Champlain Quadricentennial celebration, the New York State Office of Cultural Education (OCE) will present at the New York State Museum the exhibition “1609,” which will re-examine Henry Hudson’s voyage, the myths that surround it, and explore the legacies of Hudson’s unexpected discovery. The State Museum, State Archives, State Library and State Office of Educational Broadcasting, which make up OCE, are collaborating on the “1609” exhibition. It is scheduled to be open July 3, 2009 until March 7, 2010 in the Museum’s Exhibition Hall.
The “1609” exhibition is presented in four parts. The first section focuses on what life was like for both the Dutch and Native Peoples of New York before 1609 and the events of that year. The visitor will then look at the myths that Hudson planned to come here, and that Native Americans greeted him and his crew with joy and awe. The exhibition will attempt to dispel those myths and explore with the visitor what is known about Hudson and the 1609 voyage and the Native American response. The third section confronts the myths relating to the short-term impact of the voyage – the consequences for the Dutch and the Native Americans. Finally, the visitor will be able to examine the long-term legacy of the Native Americans and Dutch, and how they affected subsequent historical events and American culture today.
There will be many touchable objects and a reading area to engage the youngest visitors. Artifacts on display will include an elaborately decorated c. 1700 “Armada Chest” or strongbox, a classic type of chest or portable safe similar to what Henry Hudson most likely had in his quarters on the Half Moon; a dugout canoe recovered from Glass Lake in Rensselaer County similar to those used by Native Americans in the 17th century; a bronze cannon cast for the Dutch West India Company (1604-1661) used at or near Fort Orange and a stained glass window bearing the Coat of Arms of “Jan Baptist van Renssilaer,” patron of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck in the 1650s. A large 1611 etching of the Port of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, courtesy of the Amsterdam Municipal Archives, also will hang in the gallery.
Many of the maps and other 17th-century Dutch colonial documents in the exhibition are from the collections of the New York State Library and the State Archives and will be located in a separate room where lighting is carefully controlled. The New Netherland Project, a program of the State Library, has been working since 1974 to translate and publish these archival records.
Read the entire article
here.
28 June 2009
From the
New York Times
Of all things, historical and cultural, that link Amsterdam to New York, there is a particular bond that strikes a personal chord with Carolien Gehrels. Mrs. Gehrels, the deputy mayor of Amsterdam, will be among a delegation of officials from the Netherlands who are flying to New York this weekend to attend gay pride celebrations and to embrace efforts to legalize same-sex marriage in New York State. “We talk about the shared DNA of the two cities, the legacy of tolerance, the openness and the international orientation,” Mrs. Gehrels said in an interview, “and that’s exactly what we celebrate this year.” Mrs. Gehrels brings a personal perspective to the issue: she is married to a woman. She said that while the approval of gay marriage in the Netherlands that took effect in 2001 was “a milestone in equal rights,” even eight years later “equality and freedom are never self-evident.” Same-sex partnerships were legalized in 1998.
She said the legislation pending in Albany deserved a full debate. “This is exactly what happened in the Netherlands before the legalization of same-sex marriage,” she said. “The debate as well as the legal recognition meant an enormous step forward in the acceptance of homosexuality in Dutch society.” On Friday, she is expected to join advocates for gays and lesbians at New York University to mark the Stonewall uprising, which helped inspire the gay rights movement, and to endorse equality for gays and lesbians, including the same-sex marriage legislation.
Her visit this weekend reflects a broader collaboration between the two cities as they celebrate the 400th anniversary of the arrival in New York in September 1609 of Henry Hudson, an English explorer commissioned by the Dutch East India Company. “Amsterdam, like New York, is more progressive than the rest of the country,” Mrs. Gehrels said, “and Amsterdam, like New York, is a gay capital. It’s a key part of the policy of the city, though not every citizen likes it. There’s always a struggle when you are a minority, but Amsterdam has a history as a city of minorities and in Amsterdam almost everyone is a minority.”
Read the entire article
here.
21 June 2009
From
LoHud.com:
From Rip Van Winkle to the Roosevelts, America has had a long relationship with its Dutch heritage. That relationship is examined in a brilliant new show at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers that marks the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's exploration of the river and region that now bears his name."Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture" is a terrific art show, with eggplant, emerald and slate-gray galleries offsetting the richness of more than 250 paintings, maps, photographs, posters, drawings and decorative art objects. Text panels in blue and white evoke one of the Netherlands' greatest exports - Delftware pottery.
(...) History suggests our mixed feelings about our Dutch legacy. That ambivalence is suggested by the show's first work, "Henrik Hudson Entering New York Harbor, September 11, 1609," an 1892 oil painting by Edward Moran. Unlike other works on this subject, which give us waving American Indians and smiling Europeans, Moran's painting offers no sentimental perspective. Instead, a lone brave gazes out at Hudson's distant ship, the Half Moon, under a pink and gold sky.
"The American self-image that we revere is more closely tied to the open, entrepreneurial, self-reliant, tolerant, immigrant-driven colony that was New Netherland than to any of the other mythic forebearer colonies from Massachusetts Bay to Jamestown," Michael Botwinick, Hudson River Museum director, writes in the companion book (Fordham University Press). At the same time, Dutch tolerance - particularly when race, slavery and immigration were concerned - was always tempered by commercial interests. If in the early days of New Netherland all people were welcome, it was because the Dutch West India Company, which managed the colony, required all hands on deck. The idea that what you do is who you are would drive New York.
"The Dutch had been forgotten by 1809 so that (Washington Irving) had a blank slate to re-create them," curator Bland says. In "A History of New York From the Beginnings of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty" and in subsequent tales like "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" Washington cast a backward glance at the Dutch that was both amused and affectionate. "There's a kind of country-bumpkin quality about Irving's Dutch," Bland says.
Americans came to appreciate this as they celebrated the centennial of American independence in 1876 with a period of Colonial revivalism. These in turn foreshadowed the Holland Mania of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the passion raged for Dutch ideals as well as Delftware, fruit-embellished Kasts (armoires), solidly carved cradles and chairs and refined silverwork. Holland Mania reached a high point with the exuberant Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, a two-week show that had crowds thronging to such gathering spots as flag-festooned Getty Square in Yonkers. Meanwhile, descendants of the Dutch first families - the Van Cortlandts, Philipses, Vanderbilts and Roosevelts - had become as blue-blooded as those whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
Read the entire article
here.
07 June 2009
From the
Associated Press:
The Dutch are coming — again — and they're bringing more than the $24 they supposedly paid for Manhattan. The Netherlands government this year is spending $8 million promoting and staging events and exhibits in New York and elsewhere to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage on the river that would later bear his name. That's twice as much as New York state is splitting three ways to pay for quadricentennial events commemorating Hudson and French explorer Samuel de Champlain's voyages as well as belated bicentennial recognition of Robert Fulton's steamboat trip in 1807.
Some of that foreign funding can be seen in action Saturday, when a fleet led by a pair of 17th-century Dutch ship replicas lifts anchor in New York City and sails up the Hudson River for Albany. The Dutch government's funding includes support for the Half Moon, a 20-year-old replica of Hudson's ship, and the Onrust, a newly built 50-foot yacht built by volunteers at an upstate historic site.
Although the yearlong commemoration of the Hudson voyage began in January with exhibits in New York and the Netherlands, this weekend's start of River Day essentially kicks off a three-month series of events aimed at boosting tourism in Manhattan and Albany and points in between. One of the biggest is River Day, which started Friday evening with a ceremonial blessing of the fleet near the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Gov. David Paterson joined state and Dutch officials, many of them clad in yellow raincoats, under a tent at Battery Park as clergy members from various religions blessed the fleet. Other Hudson "quad" events include the Macy's Fourth of July fireworks display, which is being moved from the East River to the Hudson River in honor of the explorer's 1609 voyage.
More large-scale events are planned for September, including another gathering of ships in New York Harbor and an arts festival on Governor's Island off the southern tip of Manhattan. Organizers said plans are in the works for Holland's Prince Willem-Alexander to visit New York City in September, when the Half Moon, Dutch naval vessels and other ships gather to mark Hudson's voyage exactly 400 years earlier.
Read the entire article
here.
21 May 2009
From
Mid Hudson News.com:
The Dutch East India Company ship that explorer Henry Hudson steered around the world 400 years ago may be long gone, but a replica of that vessel is now sailing up the very river that he explored so many centuries ago. The Half Moon docked at Waryas Park in the City of Poughkeepsie Wednesday. The ship is a traveling museum that conducts historical programs about the Dutch colony, New Netherland (now New York).
A ribbon cutting ceremony commemorating the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage was held dockside by representatives of the City of Poughkeepsie, The Dutchess County Regional Chamber of Commerce, and Dutchess County Tourism. The ship and Waryas Park will host a variety of activities this Memorial Day weekend. “This ship was like the Internet of yesterday since it brought goods from around the world here to the Dutch colony,” said Chip Reynolds, captain of the Half Moon. He added that the ship and many of its components were almost identical to Henry Hudson’s 1609 vessel.
Read the entire article
here.
More on the celebrations surrounding New York and the Hudson regions 400th anniversary in
archives.
11 May 2009
From the
New York Times:
A lot has changed in the century since New York celebrated the tricentennial of Henry Hudson’s pioneering 1609 voyage up the river that bears his name. A half-million visitors came to New York in 1909 to watch a spectacular naval parade that included a model of Hudson’s boat, de Halve Maen (the Half Moon), along with a flotilla of floats portraying an encyclopedic array of Americana, from the Statue of Liberty to Rip Van Winkle, from precolonial Indian ceremonies to the Dutch purchase of Manhattan for a reported 60 guilders. With the quadricentennial upon us, though, the planned festivities are far more modest. Who today, after all, recalls much about Hudson, apart from his river, which now seems just a part of New York geography?
But we must take our celebrations as they come, and a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York — “Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: The Worlds of Henry Hudson” — may not offer the sensations of earlier commemorations, but it is so rich in texts and rare objects from the Netherlands and local museums, and so ambitious in its explanatory material, that it restores Henry Hudson’s place in the American hall of origins.
The exhibition makes the case that Dutch rule, which ended in 1674 as the British solidified their hold, was far more important than we generally acknowledge. The show’s main section is a finely detailed examination of New Netherland’s culture (including objects linked to Indian relations and slavery in the colony), cataloging its customs and conflicts (even noting objections to a practice known as “pulling the goose,” in which “a live goose was hung upside down, while riders on horseback tried to pull off its greased head”). And it ends with an account of the 1909 revels and the lasting influence of Dutch rule.
In recent decades the primary foundational experiences of the United States have tended to be identified with Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, where religious freedom and pioneering enterprise have been highlighted, one growing out of English dissent, the other out of English opportunity. Also emerging into fuller view have been American Indians and enslaved Africans, whose experiences required a modification of traditional idealizations. But this exhibition demonstrates that the Dutch heritage needs to be dealt with in constructing the pantheon of our past. That heritage neither promised inalienable rights nor threatened their complete elimination. Instead of high ideals, it held out another powerful possibility: the diverse pursuit of commerce and contentment.
Read the entire article
here.
13 April 2009
From
Radio Netherlands:
Four hundred years after the English explorer Henry Hudson discovered 'by chance' what is now known as Manhattan, the Dutch are returning. Henry Hudson was actually trying to find the shortest route to India, but in 2009 the Dutch have a very different mission. They want to protect the island of Manhattan, and the city of New York, from the rising sea water. New York's sea defences need major reconstruction to bring them up to the present-day standards of those in the Netherlands. So Rotterdam City Council, the Arcadis engineering firm and Amsterdam's VU University are going to help improve matters. They have decided on a combination of a dam and a flood barrier already in use in the Netherlands. The plans for the new sea defences in New York's Verrazano Narrows were presented last week and are expected to cost 6.5 billion dollars.
New York's present sea defences allow for major flooding once every 100 years, but defences in the Netherlands allow for such floods only once every 10,000 years. In the few hundred years since New York became a metropolis, it has narrowly escaped disaster a number of times. Rising sea levels make the situation more dangerous, as do the fiercer storms which will result from climate change. If a major storm hits such a big and economically important city, the damage will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Read the entire article
here.
08 April 2009
From
NY400:
400 wheels representing 400 years of friendship between New York City and the Netherlands. 400 wheels, 200 orange NY400 Batavus bicycles, will be leaving the Netherlands this week and are on their way to New York as a special gift, celebrating 400 years of friendship. Exactly 400 years after Henry Hudson set sail from Amsterdam, the bright orange NY400 bicycles will undertake the same journey across the Atlantic to New York City.
On April 30, Dutch Queen's Day, the bikes make their official arrival on NYC’s soil in a very festive way. Later that day, the bikes will be part of a special NY400 Queens Day bike tour cycling uptown to the Riverside Church, where Lou Reed will be attending a one-hour special “Perfect Day” Queensday concert on the Carillion. Later on this year the bikes will be part of NYC!s Summer Streets event and they will be used in a big bike-sharing event during NY400 week in September.
05 April 2009
From the
Associated Press:
To see some of the most important documents in the early history of New York, you need to go to Amsterdam.
The Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands' national museum, put those documents on display Friday, including early maps and the only report of the purchase of Manhattan by Europeans. The exhibit marks the 400th anniversary of the departure of Henry Hudson in April 1609 on the expedition that would lead to colonization of the New York area.
Hudson sailed up the river that would one day bear his name that September, working for the Netherlands' Far East Indies Company. Hudson was looking for a new route to Asia, which he never found. But news of his other discoveries set off a spate of further expeditions by the Dutch, who were eager to capitalize on trading fur with indigenous tribes.
The exhibition shows the first map of Manhattan as an island, dating from 1614. The only record of the Dutch purchase, which is usually stored in the Netherlands national archives, is also on display. It is the so-called "Schaghen Letter," sometimes referred to as New York's "birth certificate." It is a 1626 report by Dutch bureaucrat Pieter Schaghen, who interviewed a ship captain returning from the colony for government records. The captain told Schaghen colonists had purchased an island called "Manna Hatta" for 60 guilders worth of goods. Curator Martine Gosselink said native Americans would have viewed the trade as more of a rental contract — but the rest is history.
A detailed 1665 painting by Johannes Vingboons is also on display, portraying the early city like a small Dutch village of the period. A windmill stands out in the background, and the town's gallows are prominently on the coast in plain view of arriving ships. The documents are on display through June. They will move to New York's South Street Seaport Museum as part of a larger exhibition in September.
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28 March 2009
From the
New York Times:
On April 4, 1609, 400 years ago next Saturday, Henry Hudson left Amsterdam Harbor to search for a northern passage over Russia to the Far East. Hudson was supposed to sail east, as he had on two earlier unsuccessful voyages. Both were aborted by arctic ice. Instead, this time he obstinately steered his triple-masted yacht named the Half Moon toward the New World and a Northwest Passage to Asia. Like Corrigan, Hudson deliberately crossed the Atlantic, but went the other way. Both adventurers discovered the enduring power of publicity. But while Corrigan’s name is irrevocably associated with a geographic blunder, Hudson’s is linked to the majestic river he was apparently the first European to explore. You can choose from any number of dates, but arguably this April is the beginning of the birthday of New York. The 400th anniversary of Hudson’s voyage will be celebrated this week in Amsterdam and also in Manhattan, where the Museum of the City of New York opens “Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: The Worlds of Henry Hudson.”
While Hudson and his crew received a decidedly mixed reception from the natives, consider what’s happened since: Today, New York’s population includes more American Indians and more people who identify their ancestry as Dutch than any other big city in the nation. And that is precisely the point of the museum’s exhibition: New York is different from other places in America, and always has been, because it was founded by the Dutch. “The Dutch were the first to overthrow a king and create a republic,” says Sarah Henry, chief curator of the Museum of the City of New York. “Nobody was celebrating tolerance, but the Dutch had a pragmatic approach to diversity.”
The collection validates the enduring Dutch legacy and the shared economic heritage of Amsterdam and New Amsterdam, including the birth of, dare we say it, Wall Street, figuratively and literally, where stock trading and multinational companies were incubated and where a barricade was built as protection from both the Indians and the British. In September, the museum will publish “New York 400: A Visual History of America’s Greatest City with Images from The Museum of the City of New York,” a stunning collection of paintings and photographs, many of them never displayed publicly before.
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21 March 2009
From the
New York Times:
A huge Statue of Liberty designed out of 36,000 tulips bulbs was unveiled this week at the famed
Keukenhof Gardens near Amsterdam as part of a series of cultural exchanges to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s journey from Amsterdam to what is now New York. “This year, the theme of the parks will be New York,” said Gajus Scheltema, the consul general of the Netherlands. (The tulips have evidently been downsized, as the original plan was for 51,000 bulbs.) The tulip design is a celebration of the ties between the Netherlands and New York City. But of course, Lady Liberty — which has become a global symbol for New York City — herself was a tribute to the friendship between France and the United States.
More
here.
18 February 2009
From
InteriorDesign.net:
The Netherlands and New York are going Dutch on a dramatic public hub to be built for this year's
NY400 celebration, which will commemorate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's arrival in New York Harbor. UNStudio principal Ben van Berkel, one of Holland's most prominent architects. will design the 5,000-square-foot New Amsterdam Plein & Pavilion. It will be located on the Battery, the 25-acre park overlooking New York Harbor that was the arrival site for Dutch settlers when they arrived at the tip of Manhattan Island in 1626 to form New Amsterdam.
Van Berkel's design calls for a flower-shaped pavilion within the Battery's Peter Minuit Plaza, named for the Dutch director-general who consolidated early settlements at the tip of Manhattan in 1626. A carved stone map of Castello's New Amsterdam will be placed at the entrance to the Plein, while its open space will feature UNStudio-designed tables and chairs. The structure will also be equipped with an electronic LED façade that will project a constantly changing nocturnal light show.
"It is our hope that New Amsterdam Plein & Pavilion will become a permanent Dutch legacy in New York City, and a nod to the future as well as our shared history," says Gajus Schitema, consul general of the Netherlands in New York. "It marks the celebration of 400 years of friendship between our nation and this great American metropolis."
More at
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More about New York's 400th anniversary in the
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