Plan Versus Execution: The “Ideal City” of New Amsterdam. Seventeenth-Century Netherlandic Town Planning in North America

Abstract

New York History Summer / Fall 2015© 2015 by The New York State Historical Association 265 Plan Versus Execution: The “Ideal City” of New Amsterdam. Seventeenth-Century Netherlandic Town Planning in North America Jeroen van den Hurk Had Willem Verhulst executed the plans conveyed to him by the Dutch West India Company for New Amsterdam in 1625, it would have been one of the first planned cities in North America.1 Verhulst’s instructions retained principles of town planning that were then common in the Dutch Republic, based on the latest Italian theories. But for unknown reasons , he never fully executed them. Instead of becoming a well-planned, fortified settlement, New Amsterdam became a town reminiscent of old world cities like its namesake Amsterdam. The directors of the West India Company (WIC) did not show as much interest in their North American colony as they did in privateering and conquering Iberian forts and settlements in the South Atlantic. The WIC had obtained broad powers and authority in West Africa and America in its 1621 charter from the Dutch States General, following in the footsteps of the highly successful Dutch East India Company, which had received its own charter for the Asian sphere long before (1602). Because of an old, ongoing war with Spain (1568–1648), both organizations resorted quickly to violence, seizing many of their early colonial possessions from Spanish and Portuguese enemies. Still, the WIC’s charter did allow peaceful colonization as well, and in 1624 the company agreed to send the first permanent settlers to the territory known as New Netherland. Working with Native American counterparts, Dutch fur traders had been the only occasional visitors before then. Now with the first settlers New Netherland would begin the transition from fur trading outpost to genuine colony.2 1. The Spanish and the French began settling in North America by the second half of the sixteenth century, but none of their efforts seem as well documented as that of the Dutch West India Company. See John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), chaps. 2–3. 2. For the WIC, see Henk den Heijer, De Geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2002). 266 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY Willem Verhulst was “provisional director” of New Netherland (i.e., governor) from 1625 to 1626. The first colonists had disembarked on Noten Eylant (now called Governor’s Island) before he arrived, and some had even moved as far south as the Delaware River and as far north as presentday Albany, where the most intensive fur trading occurred. Though few in number, the colonists were scattered over hundreds of miles. Verhulst came with a second wave of people and livestock in 1625 and probably oversaw the original Dutch planting and construction on the southern shores of Manhattan Island.3 The written records that gradually emerged from these developments form a vast, rich source of information on colonial North America, shedding light on early New Netherland society and the colony’s material culture. The WIC’s instructions to Verhulst cover a wide range of issues. Of interest for this article are the specific guidelines for establishing a permanent settlement.4 The town planning approach and procedures found in Verhulst’s instructions were not unique to the WIC; they stemmed from fifteenthcentury Italian innovations that the Dutch had since adopted and developed for their own ends. More specifically, the company seems to have drawn on Spain’s Laws of the Indies and the work of a Flemish mathematician and engineer named Simon Stevin (1548–1620). Established by the Spanish crown in 1573, the Laws of the Indies created uniform standards and procedures for planning colonial towns and their surrounding lands (among other purposes).5 Stevin’s work was not as narrowly “colonial” in scope, but one could in theory apply his ideas anywhere, including America. He envisioned the ideal city along the orthogonal lines of the Roman castrum (fort or encampment), combining defensive, commercial, and social elements. The WIC did not adopt the rectangular shape and orthogonal lines of Stevin’s plan for New Amsterdam. However, he did impact how the town...