INSTEAD OF looking at New York City only as the Mecca it has become today for millions of aspiring immigrants as well as Americans from other States, it is perhaps more interesting and necessary now to investigate New York  City as a unique and outstanding metropolis with exemplary lessons for other cities which lag far behind in similar achievements. The first attitude one must adopt to grasp the relevance New York City’s development and fame, and this holds true for other fledgling cities in need of positive guidance, is to look behind the glitz and glamour New York city projects today back into the city’s beginning in the early 17th Century as a Dutch colonial port city named New Amsterdam.

What qualities made such a city, which began with the same basic fledgling wooden structures and humble social comforts as any other colonial port city in the Americas, become the productive, thriving, commercial, professional and cultural giant it is today? Before exploring the human qualities which transformed New York city into a staggering material and cultural center of civilised progress, we have to acknowledge its natural endowments; its geographically strategic seaboard,  its firm geological strata, its abundance of water and fertile soil, its lagoon and island-like portions of land, etc.

Yet these features are not unique to New York, and comparable sites can be found at several other coastal cities in the Americas, for example, Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana at the mouth of the Demerara River and the Atlantic Ocean on South America’s northern coast.

So how is it that New York developed into what it is today, while Georgetown, acknowledging its wilder terrain, remained mainly stagnant in a morass of human disunity and uneducated negativity over centuries until its first signs of massive material development and constructive non-partisan positivity, which are only now in the 21st Century beginning to appear?

What makes such a question even more relevant to these two vastly different social landscapes in North and South America is the fact that historically, they were importantly linked in the late 17th and 18th Centuries. In the 17th Century, what is New York today was a Dutch town named New Amsterdam (the same name  given to Guyana’s second largest town in its Berbice County since the 17th Century as well), until the British Navy invaded North America’s New Amsterdam in the 1660s, and later renamed it New York.

In response, the  17th Century Dutch Navy responsible for protecting Dutch settlements in the Caribbean area and along the three South American rivers of Essequibo, Berbice, and Demerara, called Guyana today, invaded the then British colony of Suriname, which was under the patronage of Lord Willoughby of Parham, and held it until the Treaty of Breda in 1665 settled the issue by awarding the former North American Dutch colony of New Amsterdam to Britain, who renamed it New York, and the former British colony of Suriname to Holland, who named it Dutch Guiana, including it with it first adjacent Dutch colonies of Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo, which they had settled at least 70 years before they ever gained possession of Suriname. The relationship of these two South American Dutch colonies of the 17th and 18th Centuries became further linked to North America, especially its southern and eastern ports like New Orleans, Miami, Carolina, New York and Boston, during the early 1770s struggle for American Independence from British rule.

This link takes on  particular ironic meaning when we consider the vast developmental gap between a North American coastal city and State like New York, and the Guyanese capital Georgetown and coast today. What is this historical link, anyway? It is the fact that during the North American struggle for Independence under George Washington against British domination, the 18th Century Guyanese colonies under Dutch governance aided the North American rebels with food supplies from their estates. For years, sugar, rice, ground provisions, and salted meat were loaded unto American rebel ships, which came all the way from the New York, Boston, and Carolina and anchored at the mouth of the Demerara River or docked along its wharves, especially at the head of what today is known as America Street here in Georgetown.

Those Guyanese today with correct in-depth knowledge of their nation’s TOTAL history would not be surprised at the various  innovative and constructive roles civilian and professional Americans later came to play in the colony’s history, even after it came under British rule.

The Americans built the former Atkinson Field, which was named after the famed aviator, Lieutenant Colonel Bert M. Atkinson, and later became today’s national airport; an American industrialist (Andrew Carnegie) funded the building of the National Library; the first local airline was started by an American, the famed Art Williams; and some of the most descriptive and delightful travel books on 1930s and 40s British Guiana were written by the American couple, William and Mary Beebe.

Even the great social-minded American President Franklin D. Roosevelt spent almost a month helping to construct a road in British Guiana’s interior in the early 20th Century. And some of the greatest American film stars, Jazz and Soul musicians visited or performed in British  Guiana/Guyana between the 1930s and 70s.

Indeed, it was precisely this radical support of the North American Independence quest by the Dutch governance in late 18th Century British Guiana which contributed to Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice becoming the target of the first British Naval invasion in 1781, after Britain had lost its most important and wealthy North American colony in 1776 to the American Independence quest under Washington.

Most of the defeated British forces in North America also fled into neighbouring Canada, fortifying the Anglo presence already there, and largely colonising the predominant French province of Quebec, an event which later contributed to divided loyalties and simmering resentments between French and English Canada.

What does all this have to do with the example of New York City for other cities in the Americas? Well, New York became a city that benefited enormously in an inspirational fashion from the Declaration of American Independence, because of how it used that declaration to welcome people from around the world who wanted to build and contribute to something new, in which the watchword, ‘Liberty’ would become the guiding light and cornerstone.

Even immigrants from their former rulers, Britain, found new constructive roles that were less exploitive and domineering than their previous colonial era had established. The effect of the American Declaration of Independence was beneficial first of all on a psychological level, because it created a feeling of originality, of a fresh start, of doing things in a new innovative manner rather than in imitation of the traditional models set by  the Old  World continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

This was the ideal initial spark which became a dynamo driving early pioneer New Yorkers to transform their grimy multi-ethnic roughneck port city of traders and hustlers and merchants and artists etc, into a non-stop skyward metropolis.

Despite the fact that Americans and New Yorkers, like the rest of Western society, still had a long way to go in understanding and accepting the human and civic rights of America’s native First Peoples and Africans, whose labour, dispossession and enslavement provided a free ride for previous ‘masters’ inventing their own ‘superior’ lifestyle and models of ‘progress’, we have to recognise and learn from the profound new educational and creative influence of American thinkers and writers guided by the just ideals of the American Revolution, and i
ts inspiration towards free thought.

Thinkers and writers such as Thomas Paine, who wrote a seminal book, ‘The Rights Of Man’; Alex de Toqueville, who wrote some of the best arguments for the post-Independence transformation of America into a liberal country and economy; and later the great philosophers of  individualism, equality, and social conscience such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; also the outstanding American genius of the new modern American poetry, Walt Whitman; and the profound Afro-American thinker and educator, W. E. Du Bois.

None of these early founders of a new American positive attitude and practicality could have emerged without the accommodating social conditions Independent America encouraged.

This achievement is further underlined when we compare somewhere like Guyana’s capital at the mouth of the Demerara River and the Atlantic Ocean with New York at a similar geographical location at the head of the Eastern seaboard of North America. Both towns shared a similar rustic foundation in Dutch hands with Native Indian and African help, but whereas by the late 18th Century, America had freed itself from British colonial controls and models, Guyana in the same period fell completely under restrictive British colonial domination, the bulk of its imported population functioning as estate labour or  emerging traders mostly loyal to British control, without any models of creativity or construction based on liberal thought or unified national identity.

Even the abolition of slavery in 1838 led to further divisive methods of maintaining colonial domination, while earlier decisions near the end of Dutch rule, such as the decision to import 500 Swedish immigrants skilled in dairy farming and production, which would have probably developed into a major national industry today, was vetoed by succeeding British colonial policies which stifled  innovative aspirations of local growth, because such powers demanded only specific  products from their new Guianese colony.

In contrast, the prolific development of New York began over 200 years ago with the exciting freedom of Americans to determine their own trading partners, their own immigration policies, their own liberal laws. But New York’s most influential player in its development would end up being its professional arts and cultural sector, which abundantly utilized the city’s locations, lifestyles, characteristics and problems, in  an endless creation of novels, poetry, plays, films, music, painting and sculpture and non-fiction, whose exportation quickly spread and furthered New York City’s fame around the world.

A most profound 19th Century gift from France to New York — as from one historical revolution sharing the Rights of Man with another — became the gigantic Statue of Liberty, designed by the French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi.

The choice of New York City for such an awesome structure of human significance proclaimed a vision of civil and intellectual freedom independent of the elected changes of a federal Government or State, since New York is not the State which governs America. Washington is. The Statue Of Liberty therefore represents the perennial reminder of  an entire population’s foundation in the ideal of human freedom overlooking a major port of entry to North America. It remains one of the greatest artistic symbols for any nation wishing to proclaim a similar example of a philosophy of freedom at the beginning of its shoreline.