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Amidst the hustle and bustle of the city, an observant eye can observe a treasure trove of German-American influences in "The Big Apple."
German tourists sometimes complain that American tour guides make no mention of German achievements or of a German presence in New York City. Let's face it: German traces are not particularly obvious in the Big Apple. There is no recognizable German quarter like Little Italy or Chinatown or Harlem. What once was Little Germany or Kleindeutschlanil can hardly be identified today. To find out more about German traces in New York, we have to engage in a kind of urban archeology.
It may be noteworthy that the early history of the Germans in New York is closely interwoven with the history of the Dutch colonists in the New World - for the simple reason that the Dutch Republic founded Nieuw Amsterdam in 1625. The name of the settlement was changed to New York in 1664, when the Dutch ceded their colony to England. Since Holland is a neighboring country of Germany, it is not surprising to find Germans in Dutch services. The most famous German immigrant ofthat period is Peter Minuit from Wesel who, as the Dutch colonial Director-General, bought Manhattan from the Native Americans. Under British rule, Jakob Leisler from Frankfurt/Main became Lieutenant Governor of New York, was executed in 1691 under controversial circumstances and had his name cleared by the Parliament in London in 1695. In 1735, Johann Peter Zenger, an immigrant from the Palatinate and a printer and publisher by trade, won an important trial that made him an early proponent of freedom of the press.
Probably the most prominent New Yorker and certainly the richest American by the end of his life (1848) was John Jacob Astor, born in Walldorf near Heidelberg in 1763. He made his fortune in the fur trade and in real estate. After his retirement, Astor supported the arts and left $400,000 in his will for establishing a library accessible to the public. The building of the Astor Library is still in existence today at 425 Lafayette Street (between East Fourth Street and Astor Place) and houses the Joseph Papp Public Theater. This early library held about two hundred thousand books and was...