New York Adult Entertainment: Dutch Treat: Library’s Documents Reveal City’s Scandalous Secrets
Dutch Treat: Library’s Documents Reveal City’s Scandalous Secrets
Pieter Schenk. View of New Amsterdam, ca. 1702.(New York Public Library Digital Archive.)
History records it was a city founded by sober, God fearing church-goers seeking religious freedom. A colony ruled by conservatives who thought gambling, the theater, sex outside of marriage, colorful clothing, and even celebrating Christmas were immoral. But what if it was all a whitewash? An attempt to hide the secret history of the earliest settlers: pirates, prostitutes, smugglers, adventurers, and fortune seekers. Free thinkers for whom even the most liberal city in Europe wasn’t liberal enough? That’s the truth being revealed about the city of Manhattan by Charles Gehring, an archivist working at the New York State Library.
Gehring has made it his life’s work to translate documents that tell the story of New Netherland and its capital New Amsterdam. These seventeenth century Dutch documents describe the beginnings of the colorful metropolis we now call New York. A city filled with lively, vivid, red-blooded charac …
See the full article from “Seattle Post Intelligencer (blog)”