Like an early Donald Trump, Damen had a thirst for land and wealth. The first European owner of what would later become part of the World Trade Center site had much greater ambitions. Jan Jansen Damen, who came from Holland around 1630 to help set up the new colony, was more than just a simple farmer. Taken from this perspective, what will take place next Sunday, while certainly a milestone for the site, is more like the turning of a page in an already extremely long book, one far older than the nation. Countless other events, many of modest significance, and others of lasting historical import, unfolded here - including Civil War draft riots in 1863 and the inauguration of long-distance telephone service between New York and Chicago in 1892. By the 1850's, the once-rural spot had become an emporium of commerce, manufacturing and global transportation - in other words, a true world trade center. Perhaps most important, it is on the same 16 acres where two towering temples to capitalism would one day be built that New York made its sometimes painful transition from a tiny colonial trading post to the most important metropolis in the world. The land has also been a place of momentous celebrations, like the one in 1807, when Robert Fulton launched the world's first commercial steamship ferry from the foot of Cortlandt Street, revolutionizing the way people and goods traveled across the region and even around the globe.

It is history that has also been marred before by ravenous fires, like an inferno in 1776 that destroyed every one of the dozens of homes on the site. But the stories that stretch out in between, the stories of the men and women who occupied that land and of the way it has been worked and reworked again and again, are in many ways as big as New York itself.įrom early on, this land has been associated with bloodshed: Damen, for example, its first European owner, played a critical role in a decision by the early Dutch colonists to massacre Indians living at two nearby settlements, igniting two years of warfare. 11, 2001, dominates the nearly four centuries of history separating these two groundbreakings. The extraordinary calamity that unfolded on the site on Sept. Pataki and other dignitaries will gather for another groundbreaking: the start of the construction of the Freedom Tower, the centerpiece of the new World Trade Center. Next Sunday, on that same patch of Lower Manhattan land, Gov. ON a hilly spot, near the edge of the Hudson River shoreline, Jan Jansen Damen used a horse-drawn plow to turn up the sandy soil in the late 1630's as he carefully laid out a farm on the small chunk of the New World that he had been allotted by the Dutch West India Company.

Ground Zero by T.J. Hudson