When walking the streets of New York City, I never wondered about the millions of people that walked the same path. I have never asked who built the metropolis I live in or what life here was like 100 years ago. The clearest picture I had of a past New York came with reading Patti Smith’s “Just Kids.” That changed this weekend when I viewed a 22-minute documentary titled “Timescapes” at the Museum of the City of New York.
Here are five things I learned about New York that I never knew:
- Before 1609, the land was inhabited by a Native American people called the Lenape.
- It was named New Amsterdam with the arrival of Henry Hudson and the Dutch.
- DeWitt Clinton, the sixth senator of New York, designed a 2,000 city block grid system that
still exists today. - In the early 20th century, the Lower East Side housed 1,000,000 people alone.
- In 1900, New York was the second largest city in the world (behind London).
