Off to the left, as the airplane turns, above Manhattan, is the Bronx. It is the only one of New York’s five boroughs that is on the mainland and from the air it does look oddly separate, a dark painting with a scumbled texture but no borders, no frame; its northern edge simply eases into the rest of America. You can see Yankee Stadium. You can see the narrowing Hudson. You can see the waters of Long Island Sound. But from the air, the Bronx seems different. It is not until you move through its streets and sense its emotional and psychic separation from the mainland that you realize that the Bronx too is one of the New York islands.

You are over Long Island now. It is shaped like an immense scaley fish with sharp humps that has come aground in flight from Europe. Queens and Brooklyn are its head. Queens is at the top of the head curving around behind Brooklyn to form a jaw. Brooklyn is its immense snout, pushing at the harbor. Shea Stadium is its tiny green eye. The immense fish seems poised to gnaw at Manhattan.

From the air, Queens and Brooklyn are flatter than Manhattan, more collage than bas-relief. Queens is brighter. The houses are newer, hundreds of thousands of them built after World War Two. They are painted white. They have shingled rooftops. They have backyards and in some you can glimpse the azure shimmer of tiny swimming pools. Brooklyn is darker, older, a place of brownstone or brick, of aging tenements and ugly housing projects. The street grids of both boroughs are less rigid than that of Manhattan; some go off at odd angles, a few form circles, others end abuptly. Boulevards, avenues and highways cut through them, going west to Manhattan or east to the suburbs of Nassau and Suffolk. At the southern edge, you can sometimes see the tiny islands of Jamaica Bay and the bright white beaches of Coney Island and the Rockaways, all of them washed by the endless Atlantic.

City of Islands. Shaped by geography and history, by the great harbor and the millions who entered it to build the city. Without the harbor and the rivers, the history would have been different. But it was that harbor and the emerging port that drew the millions. They lashed themselves together with TK bridges and TK miles of subway track. They built bridges and tunnels to connect them to the rest of the United States. And upon the five main islands, they evolved other islands, shaped by commerce or manufacturing, by ethnicity, by class. They can’t be seen from the air.



II.

The driving forces in the making of New York remain essential parts of its character: greed, energy, sex, tolerance.

Greed certainly brought the first Europeans into sight of the archipelago. A man named Giovanni da Verrazano arrived in 1524 in command of a huge warship. He was from Florence but had been commissioned by the king of France to find a passage to Asia, a short route to the lands of silk and spices. He sailed into the Narrows, near where the bridge now stands that bears his name, and could see the vast bay, which he thought was a huge lake, and the river beyond that was feeding the bay. There were indigenous people here, called Indians since the time of Columbus, and Verrazano and his crew grew recieved a friendly reception. “The people,” he would write later, “clothed with the feathers of various colors, came toward us joyfully, shouting with admiration, showing us where we could land the boat more safely...”

One of Verrazano’s sailors was smashed by the surf, and rescued by the Indians, who marveled at his white skin, helped him recover, embraced him, and sent him back to his boat. But there was no sustained contact. A hard wind suddenly rose, and the cautious Verrazano turned and departed and never returned. If he had planted the French flag in that harbor, and claimed the river, much of American history would have been different. The following year, another explorer arrived. He was a black Portuguese named Esteban Gomez and he was commanding a ship for Spain. He took a look, saw no cities, and sailed away. For more than eighty years, no other white men made landfall in the great harbor.

During those years, as in countless years before the strange, abrupt appearances of white men, the rhythms of life continued in the wooded islands. They were roamed by Indians: the Algonquian clans called the Mahicans, who lived in the present Bronx and lower Westchester, the Canarsee, from Long Island, the Delaware, from New Jersey. There was fresh water, abundant game, rivers thick with shellfish but few settled permanently in the island they called Manahatta, “the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.” As generations of later visitors would learn, it could be a place of fierce winters and brutal summers. But in good weather, and usually in summer, Indians of different clans came to Manahatta to consume clams and oysters and mussels, leaving behind mounds of shells, to fish in the clear waters, to hunt deer and rabbit. (GET MORE) It was a nice place to visit; they just didn’t want to live there.

The white men of the 16th century had little interest in such small pleasures. Verrazano had arrived. Esteban Gomez had arrived. Both swiftly departed. Such men were not attracted by the beauties of Nature, or anthropological curiosity, or plans for long-term settlement. They were driven by two goals: that fabled passage to Asia, or loot. The Europeans knew about the great hoard of gold and silver plundered from Mexico and Peru by Spain; that nation was still living on the proceeds, using its treasury to finance even greater imperial expansion and ultimately, calamity. There were legends of still undiscovered American empires, mountains of gold and silver, the seven cities of Cibola. They lured bands of European adventurers and explorers into violence and madness. But the passage to Asia, the short route to fabled Cathay, promised even greater riches. It seemed less and less likely that any additional golden cities existed in America but the gaudy vision of the Northwest Passage was never fully extinguished.

In 1609, an Englishman named Henry Hudson appeared in the harbor in command of a small Dutch ship called the Half Moon. He, too, was searching for the Northwest Passage. He, too, was greeted warmly by the Indians. But then Hudson made a very special contribution to New York history: he pulled off the first kidnapping. He grabbed two young Mahicans, intending to bring them back to the Netherlands either for scrutiny and as evidence of his own great exploits. (From the point of view of the Mahicans, of course, this was also the first, and probably last, alien abduction in New York history). But instead of turning towards Europe, Hudson sailed north in the river that now bears his name. Perhaps the river led to another, which branched west, towards Asia.

As he moved up river, the two kidnapped Indians made a break for freedom. One drowned in the river. But the other made it to shore and eventually made his way back to his tribe. He carried a tale of the perfidy and danger of the white man. Hudson sailed on, going as far as the present city of Albany, before deciding that this was not the route to Cathay. On his way back, the Indians were waiting. Hiding in ambush in the marshy weeds at the top of Manhattan that later would be called Spuyten Duyvil Creek, they attacked in six long boats, racing at the small, 74-foot-long Half Moon. Only the primitive European technology -- Hudson had a small cannon on boarde -- prevented a massacre. The Indians dispersed. No records have been left behind by these indigenous people, but they must have sensed that an enormous change was about to happen in their world.