New York 
New York City, or the Big Apple, who doesn’t know that city? A city with more than 7 million inhabitants. In 1626 Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from the Indians and paid them with trinkets worth 60 guilders.
A few years later it got the name Nieuw Amsterdam.
From 1656 the name got changed to New York by the English when they conquered Nieuw Amsterdam from the Dutch. Peace was signed in the Dutch town of Breukelen, where Brooklyn’s name comes from.
A city we now know from the World Trade Center*, Wall Street, the Guggenheim Museum and the majestic Statue of Liberty. Who doesn’t know Broadway with all it’s theatres, New York counts about 4500 theatres.
And what about the United Nations and more international organizations the city accommodates. The Chelsea Hotel (1883) where many famous artists and writers live and have lived, think of Mark Twain, Arthur Miller and Andy Warhol.
The many parks, like Central Park, and here we are again, the Van Cortlandt Park. In such parks, sited in the suburbs are played a lot of sports like baseball, football and tennis, at Flushing Meadows, the National Tennis Centre.
However
the most famous feature of the city are the skyscrapers, of which the
Chrysler Building, 77 storeys high and 313 m and the Empire State Building,
102 storeys and 448 m high, are some.
What’s
also characteristic in Manhattan is the steam that seams to rise from
the asphalt. A kind of cityheating, powering the buildings, for air conditioning
and heating systems.
Could it be that this metropolis exists by the doing of a branch of the Kortland family? Probably not, still you can find traces of the Cortlandt family in New York.
A nice colleague of Inge’s, Peter-John, who has been to the Big Apple recently with his wife Dana, has been looking around a bit for us and found some traces, evidence of which are some photos that he made for us during his stay.
*Manhattan financial district September 11, 2001. The World Trade Centre, also called the Twin Towers, is no more. At 08:48h a kidnapped American Airlines Boeing 767, flight 11, crashes into the northern WTC-tower. Fifteen minutes later, it’s then 09:03, another kidnapped Boeing , also a United Airlines 767, flight 175, crashes into the southern tower. More than five thousand people, the ones in the kidnapped machines as well as those working in the buildings lose their lives in this terrorist attack.
Next to the WTC building Cortlandt Street (see photo) is a witness to this cowardly deed and is full of rubble. The street is not the street anymore, New York is not New York anymore, the world has changed forever since September 11, 2001.
translated by terry
