THE ESSENCE OF NEW YORK CITY* by Bayrd Still Professor of History, New York University PROBABLY no American city has been so repeatedly described, so often interpreted, as New York. Whatever be the reason—its size, its ever-changing physical contours, or its position, for newcomers, at the threshold of the continent—it has inspired both visitors and residents, in unusual number, to record their reactions to the local scene. Not many of the commentators have phrased their aims as aptly as Rupert Brooke, who avowedly aspired to "surprise the secret" and "detect the essence" of the city. But literally for centuries before the arrival of the young British poet, in 1913, and for decades thereafter, contemporaries have been producing a composite testimony from which it is possible to deduce the qualities which give uniqueness to the city's personality and which constitute what may appropriately be called the "essence" of New York.1 No aspect of the city's personality has been more frequently stressed than the business-mindedness of its residents and the commercial vigor of the urban setting. "Children of Commerce" was Gouverneur Morris's characterization of the populace in the early years of nationhood;2 but this quality of the community induced comment almost from the moment it was founded, somewhere around 1625, as a Dutch trading post in the New World. As early as 1661, an Englishman visiting New Amsterdam noted that the town was "seated . . . commodiously for trades"; this was the residents' "chief employment for they plant * Adapted from an address to the Society, March 3, 1959. 'Rupert Brooke, Letters from America (London: 1931), 14. See also, Bayrd Still, Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present (New York: 1956), passim; Bayrd Still, "The Personality of New York City," in New York Folklore Quarterly, IX (Summer 1958), 83-92. 2 Allan Nevins, "The Golden Thread in the History of New York," in The New-York Historical Society Quarterly, XXXIX (January 1955), 8. 401