SOME THOUGHTS ON LOWER MANHATTAN ON THE OCCASION OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S 250TH BIRTHDAY
by Ric Burns

Thank you very much, President Bollinger, for that extremely gracious introduction.

I wish to thank as well Reverend Daniel Matthews and the leaders of the parish of Trinity Church for inviting me to be a part of this moving celebration of Columbia University on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of its founding as King’s College—here in the heart of Lower Manhattan, in the summer of 1754, in two rooms borrowed from the vestry of Trinity Church.

Any such celebration, of course, is inevitably, and properly, a celebration of Trinity itself, and beyond that of all Lower Manhattan—and it’s of Lower Manhattan where both institutions were born that I wanted to speak this afternoon.

This has always been one of the special places of the world—something perhaps especially worth remembering as we struggle to come to grips with the events of two years ago.

It’s not surprising that Columbia has its roots down here. All the old places in New York do, and in the deepest sense so does the whole city, and everything in it too. Because this is our cradle. This our engine house—this is where it all began. In so many ways, Lower Manhattan was the launching pad, the ground zero—not only of New York but of America itself, and much of the modern world.

That’s one of the things, of course, that made the impact of September 11 so horrific. As the great newspaperman Pete Hamill recently pointed out, in our film history of the World Trade Center:

The event was not a strike just at New York. It was at the heart of New York. It was the place that was the womb of this city. It’s where this city was born. You know that bunch of acres at the tip of Manhattan?—that thing holds all our history, everything down there. There’s a kind of template that was cut geographically by the Dutch and the English that still exists to this day. The genius that accumulated and impacted and collided with each other in those streets, that handful of streets below Chambers Street was the city that created the imagination to first go up, to make a vertical city out of a horizontal city. So that when they hit that, they hit where our civilization began. Civilization comes from the same root as civic and as city. It’s a thing that happens in cities. And they came smashing into it, vandalizing it.

This then is the prow of our ship, so to speak. This is where we came from and, in so many ways, where we’re still going. The past and the future meet here as they do in few places in America. Look down, as you walk through the streets of Lower Manhattan—down Wall Street and Maiden Lane, Broad Street, Pearl Street, Water Street and Pine—and you will see the ancient cobbled lanes first laid out by the Dutch and the English more than 350 years ago.

Look up, and to a remarkable extent you’re still looking at the future of the modern world.

This is where to a remarkable degree America first met the rest of the world—and where, for so long, people from abroad had their first sight of America. In that respect, Lower Manhattan for nearly 400 years has been our lighthouse, our beacon, our ensign, and emblem thrust into the sky.

This is where capitalism and democracy were born—where freedom of the press originated—where the American army was saved during the Revolutionary War, and where George Washington took the oath of office. It’s where the stock exchange began, where the first department store emerged, where the greatest shipping center in the world, the South Street Seaport, reigned supreme—and, of course, where the first modern skyline grew.

In the end, more important things have happened here arguably than on any comparably-sized piece of ground anywhere in America. Indeed, as the historian Ken Jackson has said, "You can make a decent argument that the one square mile of Lower Manhattan is the most historic place in the United States."

Certainly no other place in America has played a more important role, symbolically and in fact, in creating the future for much of the rest of the nation—or stirred more powerful emotions or inspired such awe along the way.

F. Scott Fitzgerald saw it that way, coming in by ship with Zelda in the fall of 1927 after a long sojourn in Europe. "It was three years before we saw New York again," he wrote in his extraordinary essay "My Lost City":

As the ship glided up the river, the city burst thunderously upon us in the early dusk—the white glacier of lower New York swooping down like a strand of a bridge to rise into uptown New York, a miracle of foamy light suspended by the stars. A band started to play on deck, but the majesty of the city made the march trivial and tinkling. From that moment I knew that New York, however often I might leave it, was home.

In the end, what makes New York in general, and the one-square mile of Lower Manhattan in particular, the focal point of such interest, fascination and longing—what makes it not only a special place, but, in Joan Didion’s memorable words, "an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself"—is the fact that Lower Manhattan is the birthplace and capital of a unique kind of culture: a culture of constant change and continual transformation; the cauldron of a unique kind of American fire and aspiration—in which change and transformation are the only constants.

And that fire has been here from the very start. The Dutch themselves brought it with them when they first founded a colony at the foot of Manhattan Island in 1624. Unlike every other colony in North America—unlike Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia certainly—New York was founded not as a religious colony but a business establishment—a fateful decision that would radically impact life in Lower Manhattan from that day to this.

Very quickly, that single-minded commercial dedication began to conjure into existence one of the most complex and continually changing societies on the face of the planet. Because no rules existed, religious, ideological or otherwise, for determining who would be included and who would be excluded from the old Dutch colony, word quickly got out that everyone was welcome—and in they came.

By 1644, just two decades after being founded, no fewer than 18 languages could be heard spoken on the streets of New Amsterdam.

Right at the very beginning of New York, in other words, a crucial relationship was established between commerce and diversity, capitalism and democracy. Over the years, those forces—the forces we like to think of as the quintessential American forces—would give rise to a unique culture of transformation, as new ideas, new peoples, new products, new political structures, new architectural forms, and new ways of life were pulled into the vortex of Lower Manhattan.

From the very beginning the continual complaint down here was that nothing was fixed, nothing was static, nothing was simple.

New peoples were constantly pushing in. In 1654, without a shot being fired, Dutch rule gave way to English—but even the notably stricter colonial hand of the British Empire could do little to subdue the indigenous culture of complexity and change in Lower Manhattan.

"New York has first a Chaplain . . . of the Church of England," an exasperated Governor Thomas Dongan lamented in 1687, "secondly, a Dutch Calvinist; thirdly, a French Calvinist; fourthly a Dutch Lutheran. Here be . . . Roman Catholics, abundance of Quaker preachers—singing Quakers, ranting Quakers, Sabbatarians, Anti-Aabbatarians, some Anabaptists, some Independents, and some Jews—in short of all sorts of opinions there are some, and the most part of none at all."

Decade by decade the culture of change burgeoned and grew at the foot of Lower Manhattan.

In 1773, Alexander Hamilton, an illegitimate 16-year-old boy from the West Indian Island of Nevis, landed in New York—"like a seed blow by happy chance onto perfect ground," one man later said. As the Dutch gave way before the English, so the English gave way before the Americans, and in the years following the Revolution men like Hamilton would play a crucial role in accelerating the pace of change in New York still further.

At noon on April 30, 1789, George Washington was sworn in as the first president of the United States on the steps of Federal Hall just a stone’s throw from where we sit.

After the briefest interlude as the first capital of the new nation, Lower Manhattan would once again swiftly exchange the past for the future—trading the pomp and circumstance of political dignity for the speed and agility of economic enterprise.

On May 17, 1792, less than two years after the capital moved south, the New York Stock Exchange would be founded, under a buttonwood tree at the foot of Wall Street. And thanks again in large part to Alexander Hamilton, whose remains lie in the graveyard of Trinity Church just a few blocks away, Lower Manhattan would now take off as the headquarters and command center of the most continually transformative culture in the history of human society.

In the decades to come, what Joseph Schumpeter called the "creative destruction of capitalism" would come to be concentrated on the streets of Lower Manhattan as nowhere else on earth—as the physical, economic and social structures of life were continually built up, torn down and rebuilt again—to an often mind-boggling and bewildering effect.

"The city is now undergoing its usual annual metamorphosis," the diarist, businessman and one-time mayor, Philip Hone, wrote in early May 1831. "Many stores and houses are being pulled down and others altered, to make every inch of ground productive to its utmost extent . . . At the corner of Chambers Street, a row of low buildings has been removed to make way for one of those mighty edifices called hotels . . . The spirit of pulling down and putting up is abroad. The whole of New York is rebuilt about once every ten years."

In the generations to come—arguably more than any other place on the face of the planet—the vast and awesome forces of modern life would sweep through this extraordinary one square mile—transforming it beyond recognition, propelling the city up the entire length of the island of Manhattan, and then, as if that weren’t enough, straight up into the sky.

Inevitably, the two institutions that bring us here today—Columbia University and Trinity Church—were embroiled from the start in the "creative destruction" of Manhattan. Indeed, to a remarkable degree these two great institutions can be thought of as exemplifying and embodying the horizontal and vertical dimensions respectively of the forces of transformation that arose so powerfully here.

Columbia in the end was destined to surge up the island of Manhattan, riding the explosive growth of the city northward like a horizontal rocket—coming to a kind of rest at the end of the nineteenth century on Morningside Heights—but still, to this day, restlessly moving northward.

Trinity, for its part—the 140-foot spire of whose original church, built in 1698, was the first high place in Lower Manhattan—was left to represent the insatiable vertical aspirations of a city continuously on the lookout for change, upward mobility, and transcendence. Surrounded as it is today by the skyscraping towers of Lower Manhattan, it is a reminder that this is one of the places where human beings have always aspired most intensely.

Of course the relentless culture of change in New York has not always been unambiguously constructive. Indeed often enough the fires of change have been savagely literal—making it a miracle that anything at all has survived the ravages of time in Lower Manhattan.

Time and again the city has burned—during the Revolutionary War, for example, when half the city was razed to the ground, including the highest structure in town—Trinity Church, whose 140-foot-high wooden steeple, one witness said, "resembled a vast pyramid of fire." And again in the Great Fire of 1835, which destroyed 700 buildings in the heart of the commercial district.

In the last 200 years it has been battered by riots and fires and economic depression, by neglect, corruption, abandonment, and decay.

And yet time and again, Lower Manhattan has risen from the ashes, real and metaphorical—each time building higher and grander than ever before—as if no calamity were stronger than the unstoppable energy of this place to build and rebuild again.

No matter what winds blow through Lower Manhattan it will always be rebuilt. The local genius for transformation will never be subdued for reasons that are destined to remain partly explicable and partly mysterious and obscure.

Some of it has to do with the history and culture of the place. Some with the energy and talent of people like the men and women gathered in this room, and with institutions like Columbia and Trinity—people and institutions of vision and commitment—which will always help ensure that Lower Manhattan will be a place of rebuilding and renewal and return.

Part of it probably has to do with the extraordinary physical setting itself. "When land and water meet," the great architectural writer Elliot Willensky once said, "something wonderful always happens."

But something more powerful even than that is at work here. This has always been the place where we aspired most intensely, where we reached highest into the sky, and in the end some indefinable poetic quality—some fire of creation—has always attached itself to Lower Manhattan—and it is this, perhaps, more than anything else, that will always ensure that it will rise and shine again, no matter how powerfully the winds of change and transformation blow.

The poet Ezra Pound once tried to capture that fire, that quality of eternal creative energy, in words, and it’s those words I would like to leave you with today.

"Is New York the most beautiful city on earth?" he wrote in 1913, staring out across the skyline of Lower Manhattan. "It is not far from it. No urban nights are like the nights there. I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on magical powers. Squares and squares of flame, set and cut into the ether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will."

With Pound’s words ringing in our heads, I would like to second his affirmation of the beauty and powerful poetic character of Lower Manhattan, and indeed of New York at large—and in that spirit wish Columbia University a very happy 250th birthday.

Thank you.