THE NEW AMSTERDAM HISTORY CENTER CELEBRATES 20 YEARS
From Inception to a Global Online Presence
The New Amsterdam History Center (NAHC) was born in 2005. In observance of our 20th anniversary this year, NAHC has compiled observations from former trustees, donors, and friends of their memories of how NAHC began, and from more recent trustees of how, through our programs, we promoted the story of the Dutch presence in New York City in the 17th century. In this special edition of our newsletter, “New Amsterdam Yesterday and Today,” we offer these cameos of NAHC, yesterday and today.
Esme Berg, Executive Director
The New Amsterdam History Center (NAHC) began its journey in 2005, founded with the vision of deepening public understanding of the Dutch legacy in New York. Initially, the dream was to create a physical museum dedicated to this history. However, after six years, it became evident that such a museum would not materialize. Embracing the opportunities of and with the assistance of historian Dennis Maika, the virtual NAHC was launched with a celebratory gathering at the Downtown Club, marked by enthusiasm and optimism for the Center’s new direction.
Shortly after its online debut, NAHC hosted a book talk featuring author Jean Zimmerman, who discussed her work, “The Orphanmaster.” This event set the tone for future programming, emphasizing scholarship, storytelling, and community engagement. Support from the Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in New York soon followed, with the Consul General, Raob de Vos offering their venue for subsequent programs. This partnership blossomed, and in April 2013, historians Evan Haefeli and Firth Haring Fabend delivered a talk on religion in New Netherland, reflecting NAHC’s commitment to exploring diverse facets of Dutch colonial history.
As interest grew, so too did the scope and reach of NAHC’s programming. NAHC formed collaborations with the Netherlands Club of New York, which offered a larger space to accommodate expanding audiences. Over time, NAHC events migrated across the city, hosted at venues as varied as Governor’s Island, lower Manhattan, the Morgan Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The programming also broadened in scope, exemplified by unique offerings such as an Indo-Dutch cooking lecture and dinner at the residence of the Dutch Consul General.
The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 brought fresh challenges and spurred yet another transformation. With in-person gatherings no longer possible, the NAHC transitioned to virtual events, launching its first online program on October 6, 2020. This event, titled “New York Is a Dutch City: The Enduring Legacy of the 40-Year Dutch Rule in New York,” featured a lively exchange between Russell Shorto in Maryland and Barry Lewis in California. The enthusiastic response signaled a new era for the NAHC, with virtual events attracting hundreds of participants from around the world.
Today, the New Amsterdam History Center continues to thrive as a vibrant, adaptive organization, using digital platforms to inform and inspire a global audience. The 3-D Model of New Amsterdam, described in detail in this newsletter, is a unique way to explore the streets, homes, and gardens of early New York. Its mission—to illuminate the brief but significant Dutch chapter in New York’s history—remains at the heart of its ever-growing and evolving programs.
Firth Fabend, longtime NAHC Trustee and editor of “New Amsterdam Yesterday and Today,” gives her take on NAHC’s beginnings.
For me and for many of us, those first five years are a blur of idealistic, enthusiastic, even passionate like-minded friends and acquaintances trying to find their way in a bewildering world of websites and choices (what’s a website?). We had high hopes, of course, but alas also many punctured dreams. Once the Corbin building was no longer a possibility, we agonized over finding a home base, asking ourselves where our “Center” was to be, and even if we had the right to call ourselves a Center.
Casey Kemper, NAHC’s Second President
Casey Kemper, the second president of the New Amsterdam History Center, spoke of how the idea of an organization solely based on the history of New Amsterdam was born, and how central to its initial creation were the Collegiate Church Corporation and the Holland Society of New York:
“Both organizations were vitally interested in telling a story that had never been properly told. Both provided seed money and infrastructure to get it started, and both stayed with it for the crucial first decade and more.”
Casey mentioned key people: James Van Wagner, a busy executive at Ernst & Young, who not only took time to serve as NAHC’s first president but also stayed on for several terms, until we were on a firm-ish footing. He also mentioned Ken Chase, our valiant secretary for years, Chris Moore, our link with the African-American story, and former trustee, Rett Zabriskie.
Kenneth Chase was an integral founding member of the Center from its beginning. Along with other members of the Collegiate Church, he was critical in founding the Center as an effort to promote the 400th anniversary of the founding of New Amsterdam. From that time forward, Ken was a moving force in the growth of the Center, a longtime member of the Board until his recent retirement. He thoroughly enjoyed attending the Center’s many programs. Ken remembers his time with the Center with great joy and pride and looks forward to its next twenty years.
NAHC Meeting, April 2008 – from left to right:
Courtney Haff, Jim Van Wagner, Unknown, Casey Kemper, Esme Berg, Charles Wendell
Rett Zabriskie, former Trustee, described what he recalled.
It is probably Russell Shorto who deserves the most credit for the observation that Dutch New Amsterdam contained the beginnings of everything that New York City is today, Rett mused. Others have hinted at it over the years, but Shorto’s Island at the Center of the World made it real for many. The NAHC story can be seen as a prime and effective instrument for making the observation available to continually new audiences.
Rett described how, twenty years ago, several groups came together to consider how to observe the 400th anniversary of the voyage of de Halve Maen up the river that now bears Henry Hudson’s name:
The Holland Society, the Huguenot Society of America, the Collegiate Church of the City of New York, and the New Netherland Institute, all recognized the need to highlight 1609. As the conversations among them progressed, the notion of an actual, physical center, located in the historic Corbin building, right next to the Fulton St. Transit Center, began to form. The Collegiate Church owned the Corbin Building and was willing to provide some space in it. Others were willing to provide materials and work for financial support to make it real. And out of that dream, the New Amsterdam History Center was born.
In January 2005, Dr. Richard Rabinowitz and Dr. Jan Ramirez presented a concept paper, outlining the public value, institutional character, and key audiences for such a center, along with some program possibilities. [See Jan’s account of this valuable endeavor below.] By December 2005, NAHC had submitted an application to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for a grant to fund the project. In the meantime, an ad hoc series of programs on historical themes began. Esme Berg, who joined the board in 2007, was the spark plug for this and was active in staffing NAHC events as well as promoting lectures and educational visits by other historical organizations.
And then the Metropolitan Transit Authority bomb exploded: the Corbin Building was to be appropriated by eminent domain for use within the complex being developed as the Fulton Street Transit Center–now the Oculus. With that, the NAHC mission and vision, and perhaps reason for being, was significantly threatened.
The NAHC reaction to the MTA’s action was quintessentially a New York City reaction. On the one hand, legal action was initiated to try and change the MTA’s action, while on the other brainstorming of alternative plans began. The legal action produced no results, but the brainstorming resulted in a December 2007 grant from the Empire State Development Corporation for $300,000 to develop a Virtual New Amsterdam Project.
These beginnings led to the NAHC we have today, an organization providing both online and in-person experiences of New Amsterdam for today’s New Yorkers and visitors. The Mapping Early New York project, which is detailed in a separate article in this newsletter, provides insight world-wide into the daily life of mid-17th–century New Amsterdam from overarching historical themes even down to counting cows in a 1660 pasture off Broadway on the 3-D model. NAHC programs and events continue to provide insight into 17th-century thinking and acting that both formed our modern life and continues to create new history.
Human beings in all ages, not just our own, feel that life moves too fast to grasp, that events overtake and disrupt the “‘best of all possible worlds”’ that we have built. Voltaire challenged that and provided a necessary perspective and balance with the publication of Candide in 1759. Today, knowledge, perspective, and balance regarding the history that has formed us is shared with many by the New Amsterdam History Center. May the 20 years of this gift be cherished, supported, and continued for many more years to come.
May it be so, Rett!
Tom Visée, Past President
From the Netherlands, Trustee and Immediate Past President Tom Visée contributed his “musings” to our growing compendium.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of my involvement with the New Amsterdam History Center, he wrote. “Shortly after moving to New York in 2014 and subsequently reading Russell Shorto’s Island at the Center of the World, I attended a NAHC event at the Dutch Consulate that resonated with my feelings as a Dutchman connected to the history of my new hometown. I got talking to the Executive Director, Esme Berg, and swiftly volunteered my spare hours to manage the organization’s social media. In 2017, I was invited to join the Board of Trustees, which I gladly did.
As a transportation planner, you might think I felt out of place surrounded by all these academic scholars, but I did not, as we shared a fascination for 17th-century Dutch New York. In fact, I was elected president in 2020, shepherding NAHC through the pandemic. Before heading back home after nearly nine years in the Big Apple, my family and I said farewell to the U.S. with a seven-week coast-to-coast road trip by RV. On the way I was reading Firth Haring Fabend’s book New Netherland in a Nutshell, so that New Amsterdam was never far away. I am still a trustee, representing NAHC, but based in The Netherlands.
Our board contains many historians, but we have slowly been branching out to accommodate more diverse backgrounds, while keeping a focus on the history of New Amsterdam as we continue to curate our programming. As part of this expanding skillset we welcome new trustees, especially those with a strong background in finance, marketing, or fundraising. Do you feel connected to our mission of spreading the love for New Amsterdam, and are you willing and able to invest a few hours per week in our shared goal? If so, please reach out to Esme Berg at events@newamsterdamhistorycenter.org.
I hope to welcome you on the Board of Trustees soon!
We echo your welcome, Tom!
Historians Patricia Bonomi and Firth Fabend Join the Board
Besides Esme, at this time, two historians now joined the Board, Pat Bonomi and Firth Haring Fabend. They brought discipline to the initial burbling enthusiasm, insisting that in our programming we concentrate on New Amsterdam, and not all things Dutch, which was a temptation all too ready at hand. In the fifteen years of programming since then we have held to that strict guideline, departing only a few times from it.
The last decade, from 2015 until today in 2025, is marked by a veritable treasure house of New Amsterdam History Center programs, some of which stand out in particular.
Pat remembers “Dr. Charles Gehring and Dr. Jaap Jacobs in Conversation” (live, not on Zoom. We hadn’t heard of Zoom as yet!), in which one of the most interesting segments concerned the intermarriages, or partnerships, formed between white settlers and the Indigenous people of New Netherland. From his retirement, Charles Gehring emerged to elucidate the matter of white/Indigenous marriages or partnerships in the context of language: “The best translators came from intermarriage, which produced offspring raised as bilinguals,” he explained. “Otherwise, the Dutch had to depend on a simplified trade language.” – Thank you, Charly!
Another was “‘Slave Life in New Netherland,’’’ which Pat organized and moderated; it was in-person (with at least 150 attendees), held at Baruch College CUNY. The participants were Professors Susanah Shaw Romney and David Blight, and Christopher Moore, senior researcher at the Schomburg Library in Harlem (and a NAHC Trustee). They were focused almost exclusively on New Amsterdam, and covered both slave and free Blacks, as well as family and religious life. A fascinating aspect was that Chris Moore (now sadly deceased) was a direct descendent of a New Amsterdam resident in the De Vries family. Chris was also an early advocate for the African Burial Ground downtown.
Other memorable programs were “Trash Talk,” a sort of anthropological look at how New Amsterdam dealt with refuse and recycling; Ross Perlin tackling the old question, “‘Is it true that 18 languages were spoken in New Amsterdam?”’ His answer, even more than 18, if we count Native and African languages, which of course, we should; and the
‘Little Ice Age,” an unexpected topic and fascinating.
Thanks for the memories, Rett and Pat!
Jan Seidler Ramirez, NAHC Trustee
And finally, from sweltering New York in June 2025, Jan Seidler Ramirez has described how she remembers the beginnings of our now 20-year-old New Amsterdam History Center.
NAHC at 20: Reflections
In 2005, I entered into a relationship with the New Amsterdam History Center (NAHC) neither through the front door of the Dutch Collegiate Church, which had offered hosting services to the fledgling organization, nor through personal Dutch immigrant ancestry, nor any scholarship focused on the formative era of New Amsterdam and New Netherland. Rather, I arrived through a side-door, as a consultant with the Brooklyn-based American History Workshop, which had been retained to help “ideate” possibilities for this venture.
Many of those early discussions focused on NAHC’s intended format. Would it occupy an actual piece of real estate in lower Manhattan, serving as an informative exhibition venue for sightseers looking for traces of the City’s urban beginnings? Might it recreate a 3-dimensional, ambulatory Castello Plan map experience, of the sort that had intrigued several generations of schoolchildren and visitors to the Museum of the City of New York uptown? Should this “Center” hold or borrow authentic artifacts, maps and other 17th-century realia? If so, what additional facility requirements would be involved for security, climate control, design accessibility and staffing infrastructure? Would an adjunct café featuring Dutch-associated food and beer entice local traffic beyond history buffs and tourists, generating revenue to offset operating costs?
These were some of the concepts floated for a location-anchored NAHC downtown. Briefly, the Corbin building on Broadway at John Street – on a land lot then owned by the Dutch Collegiate Church Corporation — surfaced as a potential anchor for this enterprise. However, that possibility folded as plans escalated for restoring New York’s wounded Financial District in the aftermath of 9/11. (At risk of demolition but then saved, the Corbin Building would be integrated into the new Fulton Street Transit Center project.) Soon thereafter, the 2008 global Financial Crisis erupted, curtailing many growth ambitions – including the prospect of investing in a downtown address for NAHC. Brief consideration was given to situating this physical project elsewhere, but logic prevailed: if visitors on foot represented the necessary fuel to run a viable “center-to-be,” it seemed unlikely they would seek encounters with, and vestiges of New Amsterdam in midtown Manhattan or the Upper West Side.
For NAHC, that road not taken opened other doors, which have proven more sustainable and promising. First, the 1660 Castello Plan attraction converted into a scalable, interactive, ever-more fascinating web-supported exploration of New Amsterdam. Today, The Mapping Early New York project is one of the organization’s signature virtual learning experiences. Second, events and talks hosted by NAHC burst from the corset of a repeat destination venue, freeing the organization to issue a round-robin of presenting sites, often in partnership with like-minded history organizations, clubs, and facilities with extant lecture and chamber music spaces. The Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in New York took note, and has provided numerous grants to support those offerings over the years. The diverse palette of these co-host settings has enlivened and broadened NACH’s mobile identity.
The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic troubled and challenged all of us, including NAHC’s immediate operations. That said, restrictions on travel and togetherness would motivate the technological pivot to producing on-line programs. This necessary reconceptualizing grew broader awareness of, and audiences for, NAHC’s deepening content portfolio, removing geographical attendance as a sampling requirement. As the pandemic receded, live events organized by NAHC were reintroduced, to the delight of sociable partakers always ready to experience a new locale or program de-brief with others. However, webcast talks with expert scholars and history practitioners, and other internet-enabled conversations, have carried over as mainstay offerings. These, too, continue to attract both returning and new registrants.
Many years back my short-term consulting association with NAHC expired when I resumed my core occupation as a full-time museum curator. Nonetheless, I opted to remain involved as a NAHC board member, impressed by this small non-profit’s big vision and formidable educational reach. If I have made any contribution to this venture, it has been in the role of a history-oriented New Yorker intrigued by the superscale impact of this once peripheral colonial venture on the world-power megalopolis that New York City became. That curiosity has been channeled through participation in NACH’s program committee, which benefits from the hard-muscle intellect of fellow committee members, many of whom are recognized authorities, veteran archivists and adept researchers of the New Amsterdam period. Together, the committee imports its fund of ideas and impressive knowledge networks to construct NAHC’s annual calendar of public programs and events. The recruited presenters represent wide-ranging expertise, interpretive practices and career points as shared investigators of New Amsterdam’s uneasy European settlement — and the impacts soon unsettling its indigenous people. Over the past few years, guest program moderators have been invited to help unpack this trending scholarship for more generalist audience members. One standout interlocutor has been Manhattan Borough Historian Rob Snyder, a professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University.
Having attained its twenty-year milestone, the New Amsterdam History Center has, in my judgment, consistently boxed above its weight class. The “Mapping Early New York” project combined with its cornucopia of engaging public programs are remarkable, hard-won achievements. This has been the handiwork of its generous, steadfast board members, talented primary consultants, and the indispensable NAHC trustee Esme Berg, who pilots the organization’s week to week operations as part-time Executive Director and overtime rainmaker.
Change is inevitable with the narrowing and retirement of the non-profit’s founding generation. Newcomers to the board and organization’s patron program are vital to enable NAHC to maintain its collaborative lifeblood and quality of thought-provoking offerings. If the fifty or so formal years of New Amsterdam/ New Netherland hold ongoing relevance for us in the 21st century (yes, a rhetorical statement), NAHC deserves to thrive in its role of nimble archeologist — unwrapping and revealing that tenacious, complex legacy.
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Over the years, our loyal followers have sent in appreciative comments.
Regarding the New Netherland Slave Trade program in November 2023, Suzanne Stevens wrote:
First, thank you for sending me your link to the Slave Ship program. It was one of the finest Zoom programs I’ve attended, and that’s a high bar. Meticulous research, superb organization, articulately moderated and presented by all participants.
It opened my eyes to ways of sharing NAHC programs with new audiences and forming new partnerships with educational and cultural institutions in New York City and beyond.
Re Vrooman Letters, June 2023
We enjoyed the Zoom lecture about the Vrooman letters. We live in North Carolina.
A couple years ago, I found a missing piece of my husband’s family. He knew almost nothing about his maternal grandfather whose last name was Bull, obviously British. But we learned that his mother was a Vrooman. In light of the long-standing enmity, now it’s humorous, and probably not uncommon that a man with British heritage married a woman of Dutch heritage. This opened up a whole new perspective of his family.
Cordially,
Heather & Mark Minion
Regarding the “Mapping” presentation: 1/28/22
It was an excellent program – everyone loved it.
Thank you!
Robert Kelleman
[Re Vrooman again]
I so very much enjoyed this.
I truly appreciate the efforts underway in further understanding this early history of New Amsterdam.
I am an immigrant from Nederland and listened with great interest in this Leiden connection since that is where I was born.
Adriana van Breda
Re Women’s Program – March 2023
“Dear Valerie Paley et al.,
This program was wonderfully interesting. I enjoyed every minute of it. These two women studying their foremothers are learned and eloquent and they seem so obviously to enjoy what they were talking about. Their scholarship struck me as exemplary. What a joy it must be to have them as teachers.”
Keith A. Palka, Emeritus Professor of French
Re Gesina ter Borch – December 2024
Dear Vanessa, Esme & all,
Thank you so much for organizing such an exciting event last night. It was truly inspiring, and a great example of highlighting Dutch history and art in New York.
Kind regards, Sietze [identify]
Re Trash Talk – February 2024
Congratulations and thanks on assembling a wonderful program on “Trash Talk”! We are of course proud of Mike Lucas’ presentation but also much enjoyed Dr. Nagel’s talk as well! This is a wonderful addition to all your other archived presentations.
Jonathan C. Lothrop, Ph.D.
Anthropology Supervisor
Curator of Archaeology
New York State Museum
[“Trash Talk” again?]
I attended the webinar last evening and want to thank you for one of the BEST I’ve had the pleasure of listening to. It was great to learn more about this topic and to see the interplay between the moderator and speakers. The respect and repartee shown AMONG them were a pleasure to witness!
Epilogue
There is much more from the past to report, and we hope and trust, much more to come. In concluding this brief reprise of our first twenty years, we especially hope and trust you, our readers and doers, will be with us as we sail forth into the second twenty on the ample wings of history!
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