Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
Patient Reader,I regret to report this is the last edition of the Valley Village View. I have hit the limit of the “storage space” allowed by WordPress for a non-monetized blog. That is, if I wish to continue adding to it, I’d have to pay them a monthly rent. Google’s gate-fee is not cheap; their idea is, it should be a privilege to put the View into competition with all their other products for the world’s eyeballs — and for me to hustle for ever-more readers eager to click-through their ads on my blog.
The View began as a way to share pictures with family and friends about the local and natural history of the place I call home. Very quickly I realized that I knew nothing about it, myself! And I could see that many of the most interesting things about Los Angeles, and especially the Valley, weren’t ‘covered’ online: events weren’t presented with accurate facts, landmarks weren’t honored with clear informative pictures, history and natural wonders were ignored. As my own ‘sense of place’ grew, I realized that I had to work hard to find facts, or forgotten but important names. I tried to tie each blog entry into the important themes and trends I’d discerned.
I am especially proud of the View’s multi-part explorations:
First, the Views of “Beautiful Valley Village” itself, its middle-class history, its walkable scale and unpretentiously homey Mid-Century architecture. I think the photo essay of the once innovative, now abandoned Valley Plaza may be the best visual record there is or was, of the sad fate one of America’s first modern shopping centers; another lost moment in LA conservation history. The low-slung, rock-faced, steel-and-glass rows of shops, booths, and showrooms now are falling, burning, or being allowed to be torn down, for the lack of an adaptive-reuse plan for the site.
“The Theatre of Conversion” series is the most comprehensive general account online of the religious and cultural interface that began in 1769 between the Tongva, Tataviam and Chumash peoples, with their Chinigchinich religion on the one hand, and the Franciscans, with their Christianity. In addition to discovering the amazing lore and ritual of the datura plant, momoy, t was a golden chance to do the kind of history I admire most, a “localhistory from the soil up” kind of story. Comparing the Indians’ myths, plants, animals, food, medicine, and land-use, with the cultural apparatus and technology which was brought in by the Spanish, opened my eyes to the magnificent chaparral of the California Floristic Province, which was almost wiped out by the invasive Spanish Pasture Mix. Learning about Fr. Lasuen’s grandiose design for the most commodious building in Alta California, the Convento at San Fernando Mission, and the huge amount of quicklime-whitewash needed to cover all that adobe, and the huge amount of oak firewood required to kiln the limestone, and the quarrying of the limestone itself, and wondering where the neophytes got all the resources called for in Vitruvius’s whitewash recipe, led me into the geology of the canyons.
“The Transformation of Lopez Canyon” is an ongoing story that gives me hope for all of Southern California. If this abused, misunderstood sand-trap of hills can spring back from fires and floods and pollution and launch a mighty Superbloom of rare, even endangered species, as Lopez did in May-June of 2020, any place can. The CFP is robust and fit and apt and beguiling, and eager to steal your heart with water-sparing beauty and butterflies year-round, California, if you just let the dumb Connecticut-green lawn aesthetic die already. Of course, Lopez Canyon is also where I realized the Sylmar Hills were remnants of ancient mud volcanoes. This amazing revelation prompted the View to propose “San Fernando Valley National Geologic Monument,” (which is still an awesome idea) and led to a good survey of the rocks and rills round the rim.
I’m really sad to have to leave off “Van Nuys – A Viewing” in the middle. The story tells of how Isaac N. Van Nuys, one of the greatest wheat farmers and agricultural developers in California history, was descended from Dutch wheat farmers who settled in New Netherland in 1651. The story winds around to Brooklyn and New Jersey and to the Genesee Valley of upstate New York — each place, in its day, the center of a wheat-farming bonanza belt. The Van Nuys family story was revealed as a central thread in a much bigger story, that of the Anglo-Dutch commodity wheat culture of the former New Netherland counties. This family-based, small-freeholder, mercantile farming model was the economic and cultural template of settlement of the middle colonies, and it emerged from the English conquest of New Netherland. Wheat agriculture was carefully implanted along with religious freedom, when neither wheat nor free thought was flourishing elsewhere. Eventually, it was the norm that prevailed across the American frontier and drew in millions of immigrant homesteaders eager to copy it. But just as the riled heartland of sober, small-farming, reformed-religious Prairie Populists seemed ready to rise to national power under Wm. Jennings Bryan, the price of wheat collapsed, and the whole family-farm commodity wheat culture retreated. The rush of farm-leavers from rural counties fed the teeming cities. Part of the reason wheat went bust in Kansas and Missouri and Oklahoma, was that one Isaac Van Nuys had athsma, and got the jump on the prairie homesteaders by moving clear out to California. By the 1880s Van Nuys was shipping huge cargoes of Pacific wheat to the grain market at Liverpool, and that encouraged other Californians to go big in wheat. Thus, one of the descendants of the original Van Nuys. who helped found family-farm wheat culture, was so successful he helped strangle it as a settlement pattern. When Ike Van Nuys sold off his massive Valley holdings to developers in 1911, the hay-day of America’s Anglo-Dutch freethinking commodity wheat agriculture was over; exemplified when hundreds of thousands of displaced and dispossessed Okie farmers arrived in the Valley for one last chance at land, and found LA instead. I regret I didn’t get to finish this story of family farms, religious freedom and progressive ideals; but it helped build America, and the future is full of time.
Thank you for following the Valley Village View. If anyone stumbles in here after this, I hope they will find working links and hashtags. I hope the site will still be useful and beautiful for you. I hope it encourages understanding of the phenomenally rich culture of Los Angeles. I hope the photography, especially of the native landscapes, inspires visions of the vast renewal that is waiting for us, could we only learn to give this remarkable land our attention, love and respect.
Fans of LA architecture, as of LA geology, must kneel to a brutal truth: here today, gone tomorrow. Please appreciate the former Sunkist Growers’ Headquarters Building (1969; A.C. Martin and Assoc., arch.), while ye may. She will never again be a prominent landmark, since the parking lots that surround the building are being developed into a massive new mall.
Mid-November; an underground parking lot is being made out of the old loading dock. (A good idea. A much better idea would have been to ban cars from the campus entirely and use that portal for transit to give the development a “Sunkist Station”stop. Na ga happen.
Strange But False: Despite the anecdotes, the Sunkist Building wasn’t meant to look like an orange crate, or a wine crate, or even a milk crate. It seems the design was purely an economical way to house and park xxx workers in x,xxx square feet. It’s also not true that Sunkist wanted to be near the Valley orange groves, or to honor the rich fruit-packing history of Van Nuys. The groves and packers by 1969 were already mostly gone, and the site was selected because it was cheap empty suburban land near a new freeway. Finally false, and for the same reasons, is the idea that when Sunkist abandoned this site for their new HQ in Valencia, they were following the orange growers, or honoring the namesake LA citrus variety that made their fortune. Nobody in the organization apparently gave a thought to Valenicia, the city, as related to its product. (Sunkist is a corporation, even if it was founded by farmers.)
Below: Dec. 2019. This was after Sunkist had moved out, but the building was still intact with the original plantings.
Brutalism, that ghastly concrete corporate 1960’s-1980’s mistake, was mellowed here by an elegant and austere classicism. That drawn-in waist; she courts the eye with that Grecian bend. In the 1970s, when Sunkist Building was a landmark visible from the freeway, it subtly “matched” the craggy white slate hills of Sherman Oaks. (Thought I doubt that fitting in with local geology was intentional.)
At any rate, it seems they intend to keep the building and its courtyard as the center for the mall. A noble choice for this lovely site.
VAN NUYS — A VIEWING: PART 6New Netherland 1654-1664
The story of the Van Nuys family of America begins with Aucke Jansen, farm boy and carpenter, who established his family in New Netherland in 1651. When we left the Jansens in chilly spring 1654, they had given up on Manhattan, where the city was building the Wall through their backyard. (Imagine: ugly palisades and planks a few feet from their window, spiting their View clear up to the Park, and heilas! shading the windowboxes Magi just filled with iris bulbs, watercress and wild strawberries…)
Building the Wall. We’ve seen that the issue of “who’s going to pay for it?” occasioned a rebelllion of the City Council and the wealthy poorters against the Governor, a rebellion pervaded with all kinds of republican, and (so Stuyvesant thought) ”English Puritan” sentiments. The Puritans had beheaded Charles I, and Cromwell and Parliament were running the British Isles. And of course, militant PuritanNewEngland was just next door. New Amsterdam needed urgent defense. But the rich burghers didn’t want to dip into their silk purses just to save the Company money. They gave an argument that sounds much like “taxation without representation is tyranny.” When a Remonstrance to that effect was presented to CEO Stuyvesant, he duly presented it to his corporate board. The Dutch Masters were baffled to find themselves in the position of being expected to think like statesmen, psychologists, anthropologists, city planners, and military generals. After all, they were just businessmen! Externalizing everything human or natural off the balance sheet was the very focus of their lives. And THEY, in Old Amsterdam, certainly weren’t going to pay for building somebody else’s Wall. Stymied, the City Council turned to the Company workers and held a shame auction, asking the carpenters and sawyers and masons to be patriotic and volunteer free work days to the effort. Aucke bid two days free work — one more than the least he could do. It’s the most eloquent expression I’ve found in the records of New Netherland, from either side of the Atlantic, about what Aaron Copland’s Common Man felt about the Powers That Be during that crisis. But that, and the Wall, and the war, are all in the past….
The years of peace between 1654 and 1664 were the pivotal make-or-break decade for Aucke and Magi’s family; thus it was a pivotal decade for New Netherland as a civilization. Also for the colony’s owner the West Indies Company. Thus, too, a crucial tienjaar for its owner, the United Provinces of the Dutch Republic, and their owners: the Dutch people, incorporated as a syndicate of the States General, the House of Orange, the Classis of the Reformed Church of Amsterdam, the Portugese Synagogue of Amsterdam, and the Bewindhebbersof the East India Company; with controlling interest held by the States of Holland and, need we add, the Bank of Amsterdam. All these wholly-owned subsidiaries, therefore, hadmuch in the balance that decade. In fact in 1654, it seemed up at the front office, the Municipal Chamber of Amsterdam, which set all the above cartel up, and more or less ran it with eyes on every ledger and hands in every till, that applying a bit more effort right now, marshalling the forces of all the above institutions to make New Netherland thrive, might tip the scales from failure to success. But what if success itself, just tips the scales back to failure? That’s Broadway, kid….some of the above subsidaries would succeed; some fail. Thus it was a pivotal decade for American history; as it was for the British Empire; the French Empire; the Iroquis Confederacy; and the Leni-Lenape nation. Because capitalism imperialism democracy religious freedom globalism. Or as Mel Brooks put it: ”Tonight, Broadway…tomorrow…?”
The Jansens are headed for the wilds out beyond Breukelen, where, already since 1652, Aucke was part-owner of a good bit of land. Damn good land. And a damn good bit of it! In fact, some of the best land on Long Island. But that spring of 1654, the family only made it as far out of town as an overpriced rental at ‘t Breukeleveer, the Ferry. But Aucke needed to be there: Dir. Gen. Stuyvesant’s first priority, even higher than the Wall, was Building Brooklyn Ferry. Also the Manhattan terminal thereof, and paving de Strand, and setting schoeylingen — planks — along de Heeren Gracht, the Canal, and de Dok,the Dock. Then he and his partner re-did the job after a washout. In 1657 Stuyvesant decreed a Market adjacent to the Canal, and a Joist for the stevedores to haul goods up to the street, which was paved for the purpose, today Stone Street, and many wealthy traders moved in to be near the action. By 1660 all this was up and running. So ‘t Veer, and later Breukeledorp, Brooklyn Village, was Aucke’s base for commuting to those jobs in town. Brooklyn was leafy and salt breezy, quieter than the City, but still busy and loud. Plus, it was built on the side of a hill — an idea fraught with anxiety for any Dutchman, especially farmers.
https://workwhile.agency/magazine/2018-sep-workwhile-design-talk Note the clever play on the motto of the Dutch Republic and Reformed Church, ”Eendraght Maakt Maght” — unity makes strength. Instead the poster declares, Een DRAGHT maakt maght” “One DRINK makes strength!”
‘T Veer…het werk van Aucke Jansz. van Nuys.
The Manhattan ferry landing
Aucke was not a finish carpenter; he wasn’t even a very good joiner it seems. He sometimes rushed a job, sometimes took forever, and disappeared for weeks at a time, likely off farming. He may have been best at dock-pilings and trekschuyt bow-bumpers. Still he is one of a handful of construction foremen who built the New York and Brooklyn Waterfront; built the Wijk of the World on the East River; built the engine of America’s wealth.Aucke was a lead contractor on one of the biggest civic improvement projects in Early America. Could Whitman have been channeling into our souls, any other than Aucke Jasnsz. van Nuys…?
Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore, Others will watch the run of the flood-tide, Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east, Others will see the islands large and small; Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high, A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide… It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d, Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried, Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.
— Excerpt from ”Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, 1856
Robert Moses Peter Stuyvesant decreed all this modern apparatus so that farmers from Long Island — Aucke — could bring their fresh produce and cash-crops to Market in Manhattan. Stuyvesant was focused on infrastructure because of his pivot to grain, away from tobacco. Amsterdam had become the world center of the tobacco industry on the fumes of its own weed. Hudson Valley tobacco was a smooth, satisfying smoke, the finest in the world, sold at a premium on the world market in Amsterdam. The Co. handled Virginia tobacco too, but as mid-market stuff. Taking their cue from the market, the Dutch Masters took care to specify standards for cultivation, harvest, curing, shipping, and packaging of all grades, but especially branded New Amsterdam toebak:
Behold, the market, getting their first taste of Midwout Wowie. “De Toebak Drinckers” by Adriaen Brouwer, 1636.
But tobacco destroyed the soil, and of course, killed the population. Grain was a cash-crop too, but greater supplies of grain locally, would both nurture the population of New Netherland, and also grow the profits of the traders and Company. Stuyvesant knew infrastructure reduced costs for the farmer….which would attract more Dutch wheat farmers to settle Long Island, which would in turn, pre-empt the steady trickle of illegal English squatters from stealing those good but sparsely populated meadows. Stuyvesant saw the city as the American entrepot for foodstuffs, including sales to hungry but flinty-soiled New England. This golden grain would be grown in what Stuyvesant planned as ”breadbasket Long Island.”
Magdaleen, recall, was also working hard, raising and educating the kids, and getting paid in wampum for stringing wampum for pay. This too was easier to do from Brooklyn, more later. The family were probably trudging over Park Slope to their farmland whenever they could, if only seasonally to reap the sea oats and black grass from the salt meadows. The colony’s horses placed a premium on this nutritious fodder, which made salt meadows valuable even if not in grain. Midst the hammering of nails, and the clattering of clamshells, and the verhuilende kinderen, and the horncalls of the ferryman — every three hours, whoa, fuggedaboudit! — the Jansens still could conjure all that fragrant sandy loam waiting for them just over the Slope. Can you conjure that green place? He’s no Whitman, but let Jacob Steendam, Aucke’s land partner, help you:
Jacob Steendam, the First Poet of New York, wrote The Praise of New Netherland in 1661 and published it in Amsterdam as promotional literature. He was one of the most remarkable men in New Netherland history, and, it turns out, became a pivotalcharacter in Aucke Jansen’s story during the crucial years discussed below. Excerpts might lure Patient Reader to click the link, to get to the full text of Henry C. Murphy’s 1865 Memoir of Steendam:
The land in Aucke’s (and Jacob Steendam’s) name was in the meadows straddling the borders of today’s Flatlands and Flatbush. Like his Manhattan lot straddling Wall Strteet, this land also turns out to have a fascinating, quasi-legendary history. The facts were tracked down in 1924 by Frederick van Dyke and his results were published by the Knickerbocker Press. Keskachaugeis a tour-de-force of local history, written to persuade his generation of New Yorkers that those tumble-down shacks in the middle of Brooklyn were a precious heritage for the city and nation, truly historic and truly worth saving:
Above: Frederick van Dyck’s conjectural map re-creation from his book Keskachauge
How did Aucke and his poetic partner get hold of such land? One reason: they were both Company employees, corporate insiders…It turns out, twenty or more years before in the early 1630’s, local executives of the WIC took advantage of a loophole. Director -general Wouter van Twiller, with Andries Hudde, the Company’s surveyor-general; and Wolphert Gerritsen van Couwenhoven, an old-timer who was first recruited by the Company in 1625 to farm Bowery #1, and later worked as steward for Killian van Rensselaer’s patroonship, bought Long Island land titles for themselves in secret side-deals with the Canarsee Indians without Company approval.
The Manatus Map of 1639, erroneously called the Vingboom Map, was probably drawn by Andries Hudde, then the colony’s surveyor. Frederick van Dyke suggests in Kescachauge that Hudde, expected by the Company to highlight the copious land available, deliberately hid the extent to which Long Island was already owned by him. He fudged the shoreline to obscure deep-water Jamaica Bay, as well as its barrier islands containing Indian wampum works, which should be to the left of the heart-shaped farms, 28. Note the long-house marked Kescachew. The label reads Dit zoort van Huizen bewonnen de Wilden — The Indians live in houses like this — perhaps to distract attention away from the obviously Dutch farms and plantages adjacent. Some of Hudde’s land, after he died, was patented to Aucke and J. Steendam.
These estates were named after Amersfoort, whence they came, and Couwenhoven called his ”Achterveldt,” the ”back plain.” Slimy Dir. Gen. Kieft, who replaced the grasping van Twiller, made noises about reforming these irregular land grants, but tolerated them for his own reasons, which had to do with dispossessing and exterminating the Indians. But he did have the plantations assessed…though not taxed… and they are rich. We see why Stuyvesant became interested in this land:
16 morgens of land in two crops of wheat. That’s about 30 acres.
Kieft was recalled. When Peter Stuyvesant came stumping in, he pledged loudly that he would curb this speculative abuse and grant no more big spreads…but on those old properties, which the Company seemed only dimly aware of, he slipped in and took the Bouwerij of Amersfoort for himself, with back-door sales or grants or share-tenures of the surrounding land to his own cronies, two of whom seem to be Aucke Jans and Jacob Steendam. And adjacent to these excellently fertile lands was the Money Store, where Magdaleen could go and get plenty wampum at wholesale; it was the Wholesale Wampum District!
These large patents of the good land pre-empted the Company from selling them as small plots. Again, patroons like Jan van Rensselaer and Adriaen van der Donck were outraged at Stuyvesant. Van der Donck sailed home to call the Dir. Gen. out for his hypocrisy, and relentlessly lobbied the Company Chamber in Amsterdam to have him removed and replaced as governor by…Adriaen van der Donck. [Ver Donck seems to have been a bit of a Jared Kushner…a Jonckheer is a “young blood,” a rich man’s son, a showy entitled youth. “De Yonkhers” was what the English heard the Dutch call his estate on the river. He is also, thus, likely to have been the original butt of that New England lout’s ditty about pumped-up Dutch trust-fund kids, Yonkeer Doodle, which might be translated today as ”Young Master Hipster.”]
Map commissioned by A. van der Donck as frontispiece for ”Representation of New Netherland’ Van der Donck had Stuyvesant’s letter of recall from the board in his pocket as he was walking up the gangplank to the ship that would deliver it to the City Tavern in New Amsterdam — when Cromwell attacked Holland and the matter was squashed: ship and letter were recalled for the duration, and the board stuck with Stuyvesant. Ver Donck didn’t quit: the polymath wrote this book, in 1655, with this fabulous map.
The WIC demanded Stuyvesant return flipreorganize develop for profit and tax those big land patents pronto for farm towns. (Remember, they had given over the huge Bouwerij #1 on Manhattan to him in 1651. How many manors does a CEO need?)
From Dr. Strong’s History of the Town of Flatbush, 1864:
Delayed (enabled?) by the War and the internal administrative chaos, in 1654 the Dir. Gen. duly developed the fertile prairies of de Vlakke Bos, including his land and Aucke’s land, as a new model farm town getting started right! MIDWOUT! The hub of the Bay, centered around the First Church of Long Island:
“Flatbush was apparently intended to be Holland’s village, the village of Holland’s care after the long night of the religious wars had ended, and before the struggle with England for supremacy of the sea had begun.” Below is one mid-seventeenth century version of the allegorical Dutch Maiden. She holds the palm of victory and resurrection; she does not bear a martial staff holding a Dutch cap of Liberty. Also, here the emphasis is on the Walled Garden — the mediaeval fortress of protected virginity. The allegorical Belgic Lion, who always appears with the Maiden, is here no living beast, but is reduced to a blazon on a shield. I take this to mean that with the loss of Antwerp, of Flanders and Brabant, the Lion of the South has been sacrificed and is now but an inanimate but rampant buffer between the Maiden and France. The Garden itself, a sacred temenos, is always the Garden of Holland.
Excerpt from Wageninen Agricultural University’s paper on historic Dutch wheat culture:
RELIGIOUS LIFE IN NEW NETHERLAND, 1654-1664
In addition to being a Company Man, and a good wheat farmer, there’s another possible reason Aucke and Jacob got land: they were both of the church, churchy, and so was Stuyvesant. The Director General was the son of a Reformed Church dominee, who married a Reformed dominee’s daughter (Judith Bayard). With all his colorful contradictions, Stuyvesant was a true scion of the Belgic lion, equally staunch in fighting for the cause of the United Provinces — which had only won its war of self-identity in 1648, the year after he arrived in America — and promoting the Reformed Church, causes which he understood as identical. Stuyvesant’s Dutch identity, independence and schoonhijd, was inseperable from Calvinist theology. He understood his political role to be: promote the structured patriarchal middle-class authoritarian community values that had just formed his nation. “Community values” meant the Reformed Church would prevail in New Netherland’s official public life. Few of the worldly businessmen who hovered around the Heeren Gracht doing deals, seemed to care about religion. Stuyvesant thought there was little chance they would ever get it, with only one church on the whole seaboard between the Chesapeake and Hartford. This was St. Nicholas, crammed into Fort Amsterdam. Even that was a tardy arrival: the Company was only embarrassed into building a church at all, in 1638:
De Vries wrote “Voyages to New Netherland” as a memoir of his bad experiences trying to live, trade and invest new money and settlers in the colony. He blamed the Amsterdam Chamber, but mostly the on-site executives, whom he found to be corrupt and incompetent. All the little colonies de Vries planted were wiped out by Indian attacks; those were caused, de Vries accuses, by Kieft’s deliberate provocations. Adriaen van der Donck, of couse, had much to criticise about little St. Nicholas and its churchwardens.
Sir Kenneth’s got Harlem on his mind at the Frans Hals Museum
“When one begins to discuss the question, ‘does it work?’ or even ‘does it pay?’ instead of asking ‘is it God’s will?’ one gets a new set of answers. And one of the first of them is this: that to try and suppress opinions one doesn’t share is much less profitable than to tolerate them.”
— Sir Kenneth Clark, Civilisation Part 8 “The Light of Experience”, about the Age of Reason in Holland.
Dutch tolerance is so famous, we forget it is no older than Broadway; and it was worked out as much in the Bowery as on the Damrak. During the crucial years that Aucke was hammering Brooklyn Ferry, the sole and only implantationofreligious freedomEVER by a European nation on this continent, took place. And it seeded in Brooklyn and voluntered on the “South River’ — the Dutch name for the Delaware — which let Penn blossom in Pennsylvania; and freedom of conscience bore precious fruit in Franklin; and Jefferson…. and the Bill of Rights. It came about because the WIC’S books were a Breughel hellscape of red-ink in the 1650s; the fall of Recife in Brazil to the Portugese was a national calamity, but it also blew new holes in the Company ledger; many of their investors and traders were ruined or homeless or both. So the Amsterdam Chamber were simply furious when their CEO Peter Stuyvesant, soldier, statesman, Latin scholar, Bible scholar, poet, admirer of Spanish literature and cuture, suddenly turned into Archie Bunker when the first Jew stepped off the boat in New Amsterdam.
We know that Jew by name; Asser Levy. Kosher butcher, civic gadfly, pillar of Old New York. All Americans are in Mynheer Levy’s debt, and in the debt of the wealthy Portugese Jews who arrived a few weeks after him, who added their chutzpah to his ongoing efforts at civil rights. These were port Jews from Recife, Brazil, which had just fallen to the Ports. But they had deep contacts within the WIC, and some were investors.
Below, two occasions when Aucke and Asser had court-mediated transactions:
Hmmm…in 1662, Aucke wrote a check to Asser for over 400 fl., quite a lot of money indeed. (Of course it wasn’t a check, but it was a notarized conveyance of funds, and Asser apparently had to pay 1% for the transfer-of-funds service, to the city’s notary.) Was Aucke satisfying a butcher’s debt? Had he borrowed 400 fl. from Asser, and was he re-paying what he owed with interest? Nothing appears acrimonious. In 1665, a very strange case comes up: Aucke had hired out his eldest daughter (as what?) to Mynheer Levy — or Mevrouw Miriam Levy — and before the year was up, the girl up and quit, and went to seek work (as what?) at the house of a wealthy young newlywed Christian couple, the Bayards. Asser Levy went to court and demanded that the maid’s dad, Aucke Jansen, should appear and give good reason why the girl wouldn’t honor her contract. I read this episode with sympathy for Levy. He seems hurt, and wants the public to know he is faultless in the girl’s flight from her contract. It is not outlandish to surmise Anti-Semitism was involved, but it is possible there wasn’t a whiff of it. After all, Aucke and his daughter knew the Levys were Jewish when he hired her out. Levy was a kosher butcher; could it simply be that the girl found it outlandish to keep two sets of plate in the house? Was Levy’s wife a termagant? Or was it all a Dutch-door operetta in which the faithful girl had to flee her mistress because young Hans the cheesemaker next door made her ache so? And we don’t know what the girl was employed to do. If she was stringing wampum, the fluctuating price could be a factor. Aucke did not appear to explain the breach of contract. It ought to be noted that the husband of the girl’s new house, young Balthazar Bayard was Dir. Gen. Stuyvesant’s double-nephew; Baltus was son of Anna Stuyvesant, the governor’s sister, and Samuel Bayard, brother of the governor’s wife. The wife was a daughter of Govert Loockermans, the rich patroon. OY!] But the whole episode does demonstrate nicely that family farming, as family butchering, is inherently a community pursuit for the Dutch colonists: family members were routinely placed elsewhere for employment around the social circle, not merely for the extra wages, but as social connection, social enhancement, social bonding, social climbing, and social exclusion.
It is largely through their perseverance in the face of oppression, that America owes its religious freedom and secular Constitution. In 1654, when Levy arrived, no nation had religious freedom, nor did New Netherland. In 1663, despite Stuyvesant’s bigotry, Jews, Puritans, Lutherans, Mennonites, Presbyrerians and the most-despised Quakers had all established private house-congregations in the colony, and this was due to the will of the Corporation in Amsterdam. The WIC were so pissed off at the way their CEO and Provincial Sec’y Tienhoven dissed and persecuted their faithful investors, that gradually the Board fired Tienhoven — whose hat and cane were found floating in a canal. The Amsterdam chamber came close to demanding free thought in 1663. Just in time. By 1664, religious freedom was de facto in New Netherland, thus too in the new English colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania — and no place else in America. Thus it was affirmed by the English as a convenient fait accompli. It thus remained a de jure precedent in 1790, and happily, ever after. We would never have gotten it otherwise. Thank Asser Levy, Moses da Silva, and a few greedy investors in Holland.
There are a hundred threads in this crazy-quilt of a decade we might yet pull. One we mustn’t fail to grasp emerged in 1655, when de Witte Paerd sailed up the Narrows to land the first purpose-ventured cargo of Africans to be auctioned as farm slaves to the burghers. There had been enslaved Company farmhands, Brazillian drummers, family fieldhands, patroon’s butlers and maids etc. in New Netherland before. Stuyvesant owned thirty or forty. Now came….. ”slavery” — a business, a trade, a solution. As the ordinance makes clear, it would be a lucrative re-export for the Company, should anyone want to sell them South. Aucke hadn’t yet finished de Dok; or the slip on the Lords’ Canal; and Stone Street hadn’t yet been set; so while the illustration gets right the spirit of the calamitous event, the first public auction, we must imagine the Africans wading in irons to the East River Strand, the muck soft under their bare feet, but sharp with glacier stones and piercing shoots of saltgrass.
This is a Long View but it might have been much longer. We’ll pull more dangling threads in the next bit. For instance, the story of Aucke’s mysterious competitor-friend, fellow church builder, Midwout neighbor, and all-around Ned Flanders, that Freryk Vlypzen, Company carpenter, later aka Frederick Phillipsen, Lord of the Manor of Phillipsburg. In the name change lies the hub of what made this decade so crucial and pivotal. For now, take away five things: 1) wheat is the new wampum. 2) Dutch Reformed remains hemmed in a kraal in Flatbush model town, while religious freedom opens wide the Narrows for immigrants from everywhere to New Amsterdam. 3) The Indian balance of power in the Hudson Valley shifted away from the Keskachauge, after Penhawitz’s tribe at the Canarsie wampum works was decimated by the North River Indians, Mohawks; they muscled in to cut out the Leni-Lenape middle-man, and bring their beaver pelts directly to the Dutch. Next were the Mahicans; then the Susquehannocks… 4) The English are prowling; the Connecticut border is completely undefended, and the Dutch are distracted as hell by a debt-bloated balance sheet and the pains of forging modernity; in the light of the above, 5) Black slave labor and Dutch slave trading are going to be just another way of doing business and getting ahead in New Amsterdam — er, New York.
The navigation lines in the WIC maps converge for some occult reason on Westchester, somewhere east of the Tappan Zee. Mt. Kisco? At 302 feet?
DUTCH STUDIES DEPT.
“We can go to a pub or we can take a beer, and we can come up with many ideas. But: to take an idea; to take the consequences of the idea…to take all the ins and outs, and fill in…and make it work, all the whole, the whole…story….now that is quite a thing. That really becomes something.”
— The opening quote of “Dutchness,” interviewing Dutch designers on their national style. Link below!
The Dutch Republic coalesced in 1581 among the combined Frisians, Groningers, Hollanders, and Utrechters, and most Flemings. The Calvinist Protestant northern states bloodily and relentlessly staved off (literally) re-conquest by their Catholic Spanish overlords in the 80Years’ War. Out of that harrowing struggle for identity was born “Dutchness:” Which is the title of a delightful documentary that interViews Dutch designers on their stijl: https://youtu.be/opzKlkJVm-c
Nuis is the smallest, least significant dorp in the modern province of Groningen, named for the central city, which was once Groeningen, ‘Greeneries.’ This bit of fertile coastal upland is where Anglo-Saxons had previously farmed and intermarried with the Frisians. A thousand years later, when it was the County of East Friesland, this is where the ancestors of Isaac Van Nuys came from, to America. Het Nij Huis could mean the “New House” or the “Near House.” But when Nijhuis was NieuwHuis, two or three generations before Aucke Jansen left it to “Build the Wall” on Holland’s American border, it was the newest, but still the smallest, least significant dorp in a vast vanished lordship called Ommelanden. Princes come, princes go, ditto several different Reformations, frequent invasions from Louis 14th to Napoleon to Adolph Hitler, and finally 70 years of Post-War economic miracle in the Netherlands — and little Nuis is … little Nuis.
From Carrie V. Allen’s “A Record of the Family of Isaac Van Nuys (or Van Nice) of Harrodsburg, KY, son of Isaac Van Nuys of Millstone, NJ,” 1916. Digital PDF at wvancestry.com
By 1651, when Aucke Jansen was hired as a carpenter by the West India Company, the United Provinces were the richest nation on the globe, backed by their astonishing sea-and-don’t-forget-river-power. And — this is the embarrassment of riches — simply greedy for more.
The WarenhuisThe Front Office — West Indisch Huis
We’ll look back later on the rise of the merchants of Amsterdam; but their creation, the WIC, was a corporate trading monopoloy for the “whole Western Hemisphere” set up by the Estates General of the Netherlands, a complement to the fearsome East India Company. [Combine two Hemispheres, and you get the punctuation mark atop Amsterdam’s Stadhuis:]
The colors of the Geoctrooieerde West Indische Compagnie — the Chartered West Indies Company. I never realized before but according to Newnetherlandinstitute.org, the shift from orange to red in the Dutch national colors, about 1650, was more or less gradual and inadvertent. One theory is the orange was too bright to “read” against the glare of sea and sky. Another theory is the orange paint faded quickly. It seems like both theories are really two halves of the same theory. But the orange stripe lives on in the flags of the City of New York and the City of Albany.
Van Nuys was a cognomen before it was the family surname. There were so many “Jansens” in the colony, even several other carpenters’ families, that Company recorods had to distinguish them by where they were born. The Company recruited so many carpenters in 1651 because before that, by mismanagement, by double-dealing from their executives (like Peter Minuit, whom I nominate for the honor, “Father of the Non-Compete Clause”), and most alarmingly, by the recurring incidents of rash, drunken shoot-ups of friendly Indians, the trading post at New Amsterdam, and its outlying farms, now faced concerted Indian counter-attack.
The Company was losing money, despite the fortunes in beaver pelts being made by individuals in the market. After 35 years in business, the Company was several hundred thousand guilders in the red on the New Netherland account. A change in board membership, and the appointment of Peter Stuyvesant as governor in 1647, signaled a new effort to ship over actual Dutch farmers capable of growing food and families on small plots. And by preference, the ideal farmer colonist would be also either a professional artisan with an existing family, or a professional soldier without one. Thus, immigrants who would be capable of building an actual Dutch colony. [The previous colonists were too often either jobbing traders, in and out with the tides and uncommitted to the place; or wild-cat fortune hunters who ran off into the woods to sell brandy and firearms to the Indians in exchange for contraband beaver pelts, which they smuggled through the woods to the English at New Haven. [The Co. had accused Peter Minuit of doing just this, and they recalled him as Governor in 1627. Back in Europe, Minuit got revenge by selling his knowledge of the country to the Swedes, who launched him right back to America to build their “New Christiania,” to compete with New Netherland. This was a terrible shonde, for the board back in Mokum.]
To foreshadow the later events of Aucke Jansen’s story a bit, get acquainted with the Flatbush Reformed Church, which is the Mother Church of the Dutch Reformed faith in America. The famous old relic we may visit today is in fact the fourth church building on the site. The first Flatbush church, the original pioneer construction of planks and shingles, as well as its parsonage, were framed, according to Stuyvesant’s measurements and design, by Aucke Jansen van Nuys between 1654-1660. We will revisit this episode in detail. For now, it is enough to say, that Aucke played a central role in the implantation of the Dutch Church in New Netherland, and that this Church itself played a central role in the survival and florescence of Dutchness in America’s history.
The first church on this site was framed by Aucke. This revered ancient colonial relic, is the fourth.Mary French writes a blog at nycemeter.wordpress.blog. Believe it or not I can’t link you to her article. I can link you to the brave Haitian Times, which covers the noble effort to put up an historical marker about the forgotten Black Cemetery, where New Amsterdam and Brooklyn families buried their slaves well into the 19th century.
I have not found any evidence that the Van Nuyses owned slaves; they certainly did not in Aucke’s or his children’s generation. But a significant percent of the colonists did own one or two, and throughout its history the whole colony benefitted from the labor of the Company’s slaves. An often overlooked part of African-American history is the importation of slaves to the colonies on Dutch ships; on arrival they were auctioned and re-traded among individual wealthy merchants, who would then re-sell and re-ship their human cargo to the Chesapeake English. But in New Netherland itself, most of the slaves were New World-born, arriving with their owners from the WIC’s colonies in Brazil or the Caribbean. They had been already thoroughly acculturated, and at the corporate level, slaves were often given their own house lots, and given trusted posts, or were highly trained in specialty occupations like cuisine, ceremonial trumpeting, and were precision drummers for the militia or merchant marine.
At the small householder level, New Netherland and later New York slavery tended to take the form of a single personal, permanent, “family farmhand.” These hands were supposed, by community morals, to live and work out in the fields. Stuyvesant (who had plenty of slaves or his own, up to 70 persons) discouraged his middle-class farmers from taking house-servants for moral reasons; the nuclear family was a holy space. Dutchness on the whole discouraged slavery, and kept it modest by New World standards. But Calvinism ha a wide latitude for the institution of bondage; and since there were so many small family farms, that meant there were correspondingly, many more slaves than any place in the North. Of the Northern States before the Civil War, the place with the highest percentage of families owning slaves was Kings County, NY with 30%. It partly explains the otherwise inexplicable fact that the Democratic Party of southern slaveholders has always been run and led by New Yorkers (see, e.g. Martin van Buren).
a place as strange as…
Aucke thrived working under the disastrously hot-headed Peter Stuyvesant; he got land and kept his land by loyally saluting the colors of York when the English drumrolls started — saluting right beside the humiliated Stuyvesant. Aucke made himself useful under the hated English Catholic martinet, Gov. Edmond Andros, installed by the despised Catholic Duke of York, brother of King Charles II. Aucke played it the Company Way — whoever the Company fired, Aucke still was there.
Aucke had three wives, all Dutch. His and Magalene’s Nuis-born children, and his American-born children by his later marriages, all grew up and got married in Brooklyn as Dutch-speaking English subjects. From the original Downtown lot granted him by the Company in 1651, Aucke started early trading land, buying and selling farms all over the Dutch areas of Brooklyn, settling his children, serving a year as Schepen, building infrastructure, and investing in improvements including Brooklyn Ferry.
Two beavers rampant: Seal of the City of New Amsterdam
AMSTERDAM, OUD en NIEUW
In 1585 the Siege and Capture of Antwerp by the Spanish had cut the glittering head off Dutch Civilization at the line that became Belgium. All the wealthy and sophisticated Protestant Walloons and Sephardic Jews of Flanders, not eager to face the Inquisition, kept their heads and left. They took all the glitter and spice and “relationships, bubbeleh!” of Antwerp up to the Protestant province of North Holland. They moved en masse into a cheap, reedy mud-flat port on the south side of the frigid Zuider Zee, where peasants had dammed the Amstel at the Ij, to get some land for a wijk. Amsterdam swelled to accommodate the refugees. No it didn’t swell — it unfolded, built modern infrastructure, and developed. It evolved, grew wealthy and wise and beautiful. It was, and is, the sublime organic expression of a Dutch civilization.
The new Amsterdam Stadhuis, City Hall. The first Classical building in the Netherlands, by van Campen. Begun 1648, completed 1667.
This phenomenal growth explains why the WIC had to go all the way to Nuis to find a carpenter willing to go to America. All the really good guild carpenters were building the Stadhuis! Remember the quote at the top —- watch with wonder, the brief animated Growth of Amsterdam:
THE MAGIC OF 1609 In 1609, the City Council of Amsterdam had chartered the Bank of Amsterdam as a publicutility, to deal with the ridiculous international coinage problem. The Bank made sure that the coins that came to Amsterdam, were re-coined there in Amsterdam at a premium. It was immediately accepted as the strongest, most sensible, most stable standard in all Europe. The B of A was a wisselbank — an exchange bank — no loans, no credit, no hanky-panky! — and it worked as planned. Merchants flocked there to dump chewed-up shillings and florins for paper certificates. Ah, clever, clever. Currency, good everywhere on Earth, but mostly spent in and around downtown Amsterdam, where you could buy anything. The Bank gradually separated all the gold from the silver in Europe, and arbitraged the silver in Batavia by slipping it to the East India traders. DThe Chinese traders who met them in Batavia, would take nothing else, not even gold! China used silver coins as its own money system, so demanded silver over gold. This worked out fine for Amsterdam, where gold was higher than silver. In 1609 also, the States of Holland (same folks) sent Henry Hudson off on a slow boat to China, where he found the Hudson River. The Amsterdam traders who quickly chartered ships to follow him there, found Leni-Lenape dripping with beaver furs, who had no use at all for, scoffed at and spat at, both their gold AND their silver. Show me the wampum, said the Canarsee. Until they figured out what that meant, the Dutch embarrassed themselves that day at the Battery, offering Venetian glass beads. The Indians were simply too polite to say Feh!
Peter Minuit was not the first Dutchman to grasp how quicksilver “money” is — while it can be a storehouse of value, it is primarily, and most valuably, a simple medium of exchange. This was the secret of the Bank of Amsterdam — one only needs the tokens. The legendary 24 dollars worth of trinkets and beads he traded for Manhattan was not quite a swindle, as often depicted; nor does anybody today believe there was any binding real-estate deal taking place. What it was, was a barely successful guess at what the Indians seemed to want as a medium of exchange. and how they practiced making bargains for land deals and beaver pelts. Very quickly the Dutch realized that, though they had bought themselves a few months to build a town, the beads were a poor substitute for the big-medicine wampum belts which were so apparently prized by all the Indians all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Just as quickly, the Nieuw Amsterdam merchants realized all this magicwampum was made locally, ONLY from the distinctive shells of particular quahogs and whelks off Long Island, right here! Thus, by St Nick! the Old Amsterdam traders sitting on the money supply of Europe, suddenly found themselves as New Amsterdam traders sitting on the money supply of North America! Double-Dutch! They immediately set up a sweatshop of overworked Canarsee girls digging clams, for a few clams a day, chopping and polishing the shells into beads, stringing them into belts and strips and straps. They then flooded the market with wampum in large denominations and small change. The Indians knew the Dutch didn’t quite understand what wampum belts meant to them — but in war and peace, the beads did their work. The beavers didn’t stand a chance.
Smug classical economists use Dutch wampum as a laugh-line, a counter-example when teaching that the most prudent fisc and the stablest currency is always the tightest. They say that the Dutch inflated the wampum economy, that they ballooned wampum until it was “practically worthless,” and that obviously Nieuw Amsterdam should have kept their wampum hard and tight with high interest rates. My stars, folks, we’re talking about quahog shells. Economists can easily find a way to make anything scarce, hard, unfair. [Good luck with their digital currency! Show me the wampum.]
From the other side, Native scholars have illuminated for us how the Dutch completely misunderstood the spiritual and social traditions surrounding wampum. Those belts, they show, the real ones, not the Dutch knock-offs, were Big Medicine: messages, symbols, carefully-worked remembrances of truces and alliances, wars, and great leaders. As a European Duke would treasure a medal from this monarch, so a local chief would proudly display the wampum of friendship from his sachem or the Dutch governor. But then the Dutch cheapened wampum by turning it into loose cash that eventually just ended up impoverishing and dispossessing the Indians — who certainly didn’t think they were agreeing to trade their land and living, but to share it. Note the recurring imagery of two rivers, or two men clasping hands in friendship:
Both criticisms reveal, from different sides, how difficult it is to make a money — any money — or a land deal — any land deal — that seems both humane, and fair. But wampum didn’t die because of “inflation” — it died because the Indians had pretty much trapped out all the beaver and sold out or their haunts in the Hudson Valley, out of New York, out of New Jersey, out of “Nieuw Netherland.” Wampum was “near worthless” because it had fulfilled its purpose as trade coin — there was nothing else to buy. The customer had been completely dispossessed, and Aucke’s grandkids already needed new land.
The story of the growing pains of New Amsterdam during that turbulent time just as Aucke and his family were getting off the boat, is most delightfully told in the brilliant Broadway musical satire Knickerbocker Holiday, by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill. I’ve put up the recording, in four files, of the full 1944 radio broadcast with most of the original Broadway cast, including the inspired Walter Huston as the peg-leg tyrant of the Bowery. Click and be drawn…
The Valley Village View 