I went to college in Ohio, far enough from my family home in New Rochelle that without Skype, Zoom, email, whatever, weekend visits were not possible. Ergo, from early September through Thanksgiving of that year, I had been away from home longer than I’d ever been. I felt years older. Transformed. Peculiar.
In late November, my friend Marylou and I took the 12-hour bus ride home to the Port Authority bus terminal in New York through the night, sleeping on each other’s laps, peeing at pit stops, eating whatever junk we could grab at those pit stops.
We reached the New Jersey flats, a couple of miles from the Lincoln Tunnel, around 7 a.m. It was a rainy, foggy morning. We plastered ourselves at the window for our homecoming first look but nothing could be seen through that muck.
And then it could. The Manhattan skyline could not be denied, and there it was, its lights shimmering, the towers piercing the fog.
Our magic city. Marylou and I both burst into tears. And right then I knew no matter where I went in my life, I would always thrill to coming home again, and Manhattan would always be my home.
As an infant I emerged from Manhattan, grew within its aura and would be here for my whole life.
So how did I miss reading Russell Shorto’s wondrous The Island at the Center of the World when, in 2004, it was first published and reviewed?
How on the earth did twenty years escape before I bought and read the book that explains why I cried when I saw the skyline, why Manhattan made me what I am, why I think and feel the way I do?
The book’s subtitle is perhaps a little surprising and unusually descriptive: “The epic story of Dutch Manhattan and the forgotten colony that shaped America.” What? you might ask. We all know Manhattan was Dutch. We haven’t forgotten that. (Indeed, my mouth refuses to pronounce the name of the Texas city as Hewston. It is Howston. Every New Yorker knows that.)
But Shorto tells us what we don’t know, because until now we never had the full and indeed epic story of Manhattan’s remarkable, if short, Dutch history and how it became so fundamental to our existence as Americans.
As Shorto says in his prologue, “Manhattan is where America began.”
The Big Apple