Free New York at War by Steven H. Jaffe Page A

loading zone for retailers picking up seafood crates from the Fulton Fish Market, stood a khaki tent manned by gun-toting National Guardsmen in combat fatigues. My routine journey to and from work had also been transformed. Accustomed to riding a commuter train whose terminal was beneath the Twin Towers, I now boarded a ferryboat each day; the train tunnel under the Hudson River had been flooded by the towers’ collapse.
    I was fortunate not to have lost anyone I knew on September 11. Yet, as with millions of other people living in or near the city, I did experience grief, anger, numbness, and a range of other emotions that I struggled to understand. Like my colleagues in the museum and history professions, I began to try to make sense of the events not only in personal and emotional ways (and, in my case, as a native New Yorker) but also in terms of my work as an urban historian and my knowledge of the city’s past.
    Over the ensuing months, it dawned on me that I was in the midst of an urban landscape whose historical affinities to the events of 9/11 were hard to avoid. Some of this history I already knew; other pieces fell into place as I began to look for them. A few blocks to the south, for instance, stood Wall Street—so named for the defensive rampart built there by Dutch colonists to keep English armies and Indian warriors at bay. A mile to the north, at Corlears Hook on the East River shore, those same Dutch colonists had launched a brutal surprise attack on Indian families during a bloody and protracted war. If I glanced out my office window, I saw Brooklyn Heights across the river—site of the American Revolution’s most fateful evacuation and of frantic efforts to forestall an expected British attack during the War of 1812. When I took a walk out onto Pier 17 and looked north past the Brooklyn Bridge, I could make out the location of Wallabout Bay—once notorious as the site where thousands of American prisoners suffered and died during the Revolutionary War, later recast as the shoreline of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a bustling city unto itself during the fight against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. A stroll in another direction took me to the front door of a sister museum at Fraunces Tavern, another landmark of the American Revolution, where in 1975 four people lost their lives to a bomb planted by terrorists seeking independence for Puerto Rico.
    Once I started looking for them, these sites of military significance—and of turmoil and violence—multiplied: Manhattan street corners where Civil War draft resisters, virtually in control of the city, lynched fellow New Yorkers because of the color of their skin; a strip of the Jersey City waterfront across the harbor, shattered by a massive explosion triggered by the kaiser’s saboteurs during World War I; the waters off the beach at Coney Island, where generations of warships, privateers, and U-boats had laid in wait to prey on New York’s cargo-laden merchant fleets. For each era of the city’s history—from its origins as a Dutch outpost on the edge of the wilderness, to its role as a key garrison in the British Empire and as a crucible of revolution, then as the financial and industrial capital of Abraham Lincoln’s Union, and finally as the great metropolis of a globally assertive United States—I found each of these venues distinctive to the events of its day but also part of a larger pattern spanning four centuries. In short, this cityscape was dotted with landmarks of a largely forgotten military history of attacks and attempts to defeat or prevent them.
    I also found that no book-length attempt to narrate and assess the city’s entire military past had ever been published. To be sure, numerous books and articles have analyzed particular wars and battles in New York’s past, and, indeed, this book could not have been written without the splendid work of these historians. For the most part, however, these works have treated their topics in