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15 October 2009
New York Celebrates 400th Anniversary of Hudson’s Voyage

By Ralph Dannheisser
Special Correspondent

Washington — In September 1609, Henry Hudson and the crew of his ship, the Half Moon, tasked with finding a shortcut water passage from Europe to the Indies, sailed into the harbor destined to become the site of New York City, then explored the river later to be named in Hudson’s honor.

His journey blazed a trail for millions of immigrants, mainly from Europe, over the course of the next four centuries whose migration helped New York become a hub of finance and fashion, politics, advertising and the arts.

Indeed, the voyage of Hudson — an Englishman sailing for a Dutch company — and the less extensive earlier exploration of the area by Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian employed by the French, provide a metaphor for the diversity that assured New York’s emergence as one of the great world cities.

Now both the Netherlands and the United States are celebrating the 400th anniversary of Hudson’s arrival — an event that presaged some 50 years of Dutch control of the area until the New Amsterdam they established fell to the British and became New York City.

As part of the commemoration, for example, New Yorkers have enjoyed a special showing of Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, on loan from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. A replica of the Half Moon has plied the Hudson River. In the Netherlands, the Royal Dutch Mint in Utrecht issued a Half Moon commemorative coin.

A highlight in the festivities came on September 8, when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg welcomed Dutch Prince Willem-Alexander and his wife, Princess Maxima, to the city in a ceremony aboard the Intrepid, a World War II aircraft carrier converted into a museum docked at a Hudson River pier.

Clinton pronounced New York to be “not only the greatest city in the world … but still a beacon of freedom, of diversity, of excitement and dynamism.” And she celebrated the long-standing friendship and alliance between the United States and the Netherlands, two countries that “have been linked ever since the day that the Half Moon first appeared on the horizon.”

New York has always been the main entry point for immigration to the United States, said former City Councilman and Parks Commissioner Henry Stern. “This is really a country built by immigrants, and New York fills a special welcoming role. It’s here that they learn the language and acquire the aspects of Americanization that will allow them to succeed, wherever they settle.”

Stern’s father, Walter, a tentmaker, came to New York from Germany in 1926.

While the drive to find new opportunity has always motivated the new entrants, the mix of national origins has changed over time in line with conditions in their home countries and shifting modes of transportation.

The 19th century saw major waves of Italian, Irish and East European Jewish immigrants coming to the United States via New York; another large group of Jewish immigrants fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Overall, 60 percent of New York City residents are immigrants or children of immigrants, said New York Times reporter Joseph Berger, author of The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York. Berger was born in the Soviet Union and brought to New York by his immigrant parents.

New York’s Department of City Planning reports that the foreign-born portion of the city’s population doubled from 18.2 percent in 1970 to 36.6 percent by 2005.

Meanwhile, the source of immigration has changed dramatically. In 1970, the leading countries of origin were Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany, Ireland, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the United Kingdom, Australia and Jamaica. By 2000, the top 10 list comprised the Dominican Republic, China, Jamaica, Mexico, Guyana, Ecuador, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, India and Colombia. Some 170 languages now are spoken in the city.

Ellis Island in New York Harbor, now the site of a museum, served as the entry point for 12 million immigrants, beginning in 1892 and running mainly to 1924, when most new residents arrived by sea.

Many immigrants who passed through Ellis Island achieved success in America, including novelist Isaac Asimov from Russia, former New York City Mayor Abraham Beame from England, composer Irving Berlin from Belarus, actress Claudette Colbert from France, former San Francisco Mayor George Christopher from Greece, former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter from Austria, comedian Bob Hope from England, harpsichordist Wanda Landowska from Poland, former U.S. Congressman Dalip Singh Saund from India and painter Ben Shahn from Lithuania.

Less than a kilometer away, on Liberty Island, stands the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France that has welcomed newcomers to New York since its installation in 1886.

For more information, see Immigrants Joining the Mainstream and the photo timeline “Immigration: The Making of the American People.”

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