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Governors Island

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Governors Island National Monument
LocationNew York, USA
Nearest cityNew York, NY
Area22 acres (89,000 m²)
EstablishedJanuary 19, 2001
Visitors11,312 (in 2004)
Governing bodyNational Park Service

Governors Island is a 217.65 acre (880,806 m²) island in Upper New York Bay, approximately one half mile from the southern tip of Manhattan, of which it is legally a part, in New York City. It is separated from Brooklyn by the Buttermilk Channel.

First named by the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, it was called Noten Eylant (and later in pidgin language Nutten Island) from 1611 to 1784. In 1624, Governors Island became the locus for the transformation of the New Netherland territory to a North American province of the Dutch Republic from having been a place for private commercial interests through patents issued by the States General since 1614.

From 1776 to 1966 the island was a United States Army post. From 1966 to 1996 the island served as a Coast Guard station. The island's current name stems from British colonial times when the colonial assembly reserved the island for the exclusive use of New York's royal governors. The ZIP Code of Governors Island is 10004.

In 2001, the two historical fortifications and their surroundings became a national monument. On January 31, 2003, control of most of the island was transferred to the State of New York for $1, but 13% of the island (22 acres or 89,000 m²) was transferred to the U.S. Department of the Interior as the Governors Island National Monument which is now managed by the National Park Service. The 22 acre national monument area is not fully operational and is open on a seasonal basis, so services and facilities are extremely limited.

The portion of the island that is not included in the National Monument is administered by the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC), a public corporation of the State of New York. The transfer included deed restrictions which prohibit permanent housing or casinos on the island.

The National Monument area is open to limited public access from early June to Labor Day. It is accessible by ferry from South Ferry at the southern tip of Manhattan. The remainder of the island has no public access.

Governors Island, shown in red, in Upper New York Bay

The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel passes under, but provides no access to the island. A ventilation building is located on the northern end of the island. At one point, Robert Moses proposed an unpopular bridge across the harbor, with a base located on Governors Island; this plan persisted until the intervention of the War Department under Franklin Roosevelt.

Proposals

The question of what to do with Governors Island has been an issue which the governor and mayor have faced since 1996 when the Coast Guard relocated to Fort Wadsworth. On February 15, 2006, Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg called for "visionary ideas to redevelop and preserve Governors Island" to be submitted to GIPEC (see above). The announcement said proposals should "enhance New York's place as a center of culture, business, education and innovation," include public parkland, contribute to the harbor's vitality and stress "environmentally sustainable development." Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff said whatever group or entity is selected to develop the island would assume the $12 million annual maintenance costs that are now split between the city and state.

With regard to transportation to and from the island, one idea being considered is an aerial gondola system designed by Santiago Calatrava.

Some have proposed placing a 151 foot (46 meters) high version of Barnett Newman's sculpture Broken Obelisk - dedicated by him to Martin Luther King - as a Tolerance Monument. The Tolerance Monument would be the centerpiece of Historic New Amsterdam; a proposed 50-acre Tolerance Park on the island's southern tip.

History

Jan Rodrigues from Santo Domingo, a Latin-American of African ancestry and a free man, was the first person to summer on Governors Island in 1613. He was employed as interpreter in trade negotiations with the Hudson River Indians by the private Amsterdam fur trader and explorer Adriaen Block. Rodrigues was left behind on the island in May 1613 to serve as on-the-spot factor to trade with the natives. Rodrigues and Block rendezvoused again in December that year.

In May 1624, Noten Eylant (renamed Governors Island in 1784) was the landing place of the first settlers to the New York Tri-State region.

They had arrived from the Dutch Republic with the ship New Netherland under the command of Cornelis Jacobsz May who disembarked with 30 families on the island in order to take legal possession of the New Netherland territory (the New York Tri-State region) between the 38th and 42nd parallels. Captain May was appointed the first director of New Netherland (Petrus Stuyvesant was its seventh and last director). Most of those settlers were quickly distributed on an island in the Delaware River, at the top of the Hudson River and at the mouth of the Connecticut River in order to complete legal possession of what was now the province of New Netherland.

That territory was discovered in 1609 by the Dutch East India Company with the ship Halve Maen (Half Moon) under the command of Henry Hudson and was subsequently explored, surveyed and mapped by Adriaen Block and his partner Hendrick Christiaensz from 1611 to 1614 (the name New Netherland was first recorded on Block's map of 1614) in order to pave the way for a well-planned, successful landing under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company in 1624. That year, (New York) harbor's first fortification was built on Noten Eylant as well as the (Tri-State) region's first windmill, a saw mill, by Franchoys Fezard. Fezard, also known as Veersaert, arrived with the 1624 settlers who were mostly from originally French speaking Walloon extraction. He was designated to be one of seven advisers to the [Dutch] West India Company board.

In June 1625, forty-five more colonists, whereunder five master-farmers, disembarked on Noten Eylant from three ships named Horse, Cow and Sheep. The ships also landed 103 horses, steers and cows in addition to numerous pigs and sheep. Most of the cattle was moved to Manhattan for better pasture several days after arrival. Military engineer and surveyor Crijn Fredericksz van Lobbrecht, who had arrived with the June colonists, commenced to lay out the moats and ramparts of a large citadel on the southern tip of Manhattan to contain the colonists and Fort Amsterdam as centerpiece of the town of New Amsterdam, now New York City (hence, New York City's birth date of 1625).

The Noten Eylant settlers had been given instructions which incorporated the laws and ordinances of the states of Holland and, specifically, were instructed that they had to attract, “through attitude and by example”, the natives and non-believers to God’s word “without, on the other hand, to persecute someone by reason of his religion and to leave everyone the freedom of his conscience.” In Article VIII of the August 1664 provisional Articles of Transfer, New Netherlanders were guaranteed, under future English jurisdiction, that they “shall keep and enjoy the liberty of their consciences in religion,” a precept which was later to be codified in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights (ratified in 1791).

In 1633, the fifth director of New Netherland, Wouter van Twiller, arrived with a 104-men regiment on Governors Island - its first use as a military base. Later he operated a farm on the island. He secured his farm by creating a deed on June 16, 1637 which was signed by two Lenape, Cacapeteyno and Pewihas, on behalf of their community at Keshaechquereren.

After the New Netherland province was ceded provisionally to the British in 1664, the city of New Amsterdam was renamed and incorporated unilaterally as the City of New York in June 1665. The Dutch Republic withdrew its claim on New Netherland in the multilateral Treaty of Breda in 1667. However, New Netherland was subsequently retaken by the Dutch Republic and relinquished to the English finally by the Treaty of Westminster in November 1674 thus concluding 60 years of New Netherland and having imparted its legal-cultural traditions for the ensuing generations under English and United States authority. Noten (in pidgin language Nutten) Island was renamed Governors Island in 1784 as the island, in earlier times, had been reserved by the British colonial assembly for the exclusive use of New York's royal governors.

When a hundred years later, in 1776, the American Revolution began, George Washington ordered the island to be fortified with earthworks just prior to the Battle of Long Island (also known as the Battle of Brooklyn) - the first ever engagement of the fledgling Army of the United States with British forces, and the largest battle of the entire war. The island engaged the HMS Phoenix and the HMS Rose inflicting enough damage to make the British commanders cautious of entering the East River. The island’s artillery therefore served as an indispensable link - along with sunken hulks, other fortifications, and fortuitous weather - allowed the retreat of the Continental Army without a single shot having been fired, its presence alone thus helping to prevent the revolution from a swift and devastating end, but New York City remained under British occupation and their base of operations on the continent for the remainder of the conflict.

With American independence from Britain in 1783, New York and the nation were determined to prevent any future occupation of the city and its strategic waterways by an enemy power. Towards that end, two fortifications were placed on Governors Island in the years preceding the War of 1812 as part of an extensive coastal defense system including Castle Clinton (or Fort Clinton) at the southern tip of Manhattan. The first, Fort Jay, is a square five bastioned fort started in 1794 on the site of the earlier earthworks. The second, Castle Williams, is a circular casemated work completed in 1811. The two forts are among the best remaining examples of First System (Fort Jay) and Second System (Castle Williams) American coastal fortification.

During the American Civil War, Castle Williams held Confederate prisoners of war and Fort Jay held captured Confederate officers. After the war, Castle Williams was used as a military stockade and became the east coast counterpart to military prisons at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and Alcatraz Island, California.

In 1878 the military installation on the island, then known collectively as Fort Columbus, became a major Army administrative center. By 1912, when it was known as Governor's Island, its administrative leaders included General Tasker Bliss, a prominent general for whom a current-day Army base is named. In 1939 the island became the headquarters of the U.S. First Army. When the Army left Governors Island in 1966, the installation became a U.S. Coast Guard base. Its closing in 1996 concluded almost two centuries of the island’s use as a federal reservation.

Prior to the construction of LaGuardia Airport in Queens, the island was considered as a site for a municipal airport.

On February 4, 1985, 92 acres of Governors Island was designated a National Historic Landmark district.

The island was the site of a December 8 1988 meeting between U.S. President Ronald Reagan, President-elect George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Tom (1937) and Dick Smothers (1939), also known as the Smothers Brothers, were born on the island.

New York State's Birthplace

The New York Senate and Assembly have recognized Governors Island as the birthplace, in 1624, of the state of New York. It also acknowledged the island as the place on which the planting of the “legal-political guaranty of tolerance onto the North American continent” took place (Resolutions No. 5476 and No. 2708).

Legacy

The planting of the laws and ordinances of the Dutch Republic on Governors Island by the New York Tri-State region's first settlers has left an enduring legacy on both American cultural and political life. Of the settlers’ specific instructions, the most important was the one that echoed the 1579 founding document of New York’s birthfather―the Dutch Republic. It promulgated that "everyone shall remain free in religion and that no one may be persecuted or investigated because of religion." This legal-cultural instruction of toleration formed the basis for religious and ethnic diversity in New Amsterdam, now New York City. In 1643, on his visit to New Amsterdam, Father Isaac Jogues reported that more than 18 languages were spoken and that besides Calvinists there were "Catholics, English Puritans, Lutherans, Anabaptists, etc." This religious freedom was preserved by treaty for New Netherlanders exclusively in 1664 as stated above. In 1682, the visiting Virginian William Byrd commented about New Amsterdam that "they have as many sects of religion there as at Amsterdam" whereas in 1686 religious diversity in the newly acquired territory was described by its English governor as "Here be not many of the Church of England; few Roman Catholics; abundance of Quakers; preachers, men and women especially; singing Quakers, ranting Quakers; Sabatarians; Antisabatarians; some Anabaptists; some independents; some Jews; in short of all sorts of opinion there are some, and the most of none at all.". This diversity was the result of the dynamic conception of tolerance as planted first in the western hemisphere on Governors Island in 1624 and affirmed by the New York State Legislature in May 2002.


In fiction

Governor's Island was prominently featured in the IO Interactive game Freedom Fighters, in which it was used as the seat of power for the Soviet Armed Forces, which had invaded the United States.

In the Ultimate Marvel Universe the Triskelion headquarters of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Ultimates is located on Governors Island.

References

External links

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