Gotham Center Launches NYC Revolutionary Trail
The Gotham Center has just launched its first multimedia walking tour, NYC Revolutionary Trail. The 90-minute jaunt through lower Manhattan is modeled loosely on Boston’s Freedom Trail, and details New York's experience with the American Revolution, from 1763 to 1789. Each stop provides audio narration with site information, character profiles, select video, and links to a far bigger library of text, imagery, and source material, for a “choose your own adventure” model of tourism.
This is the first phase in a larger effort the Gotham Center is undertaking for the upcoming 250th anniversary. The website, funded in part with generous support from the Achelis Bodman Foundation, will serve as the basis of a smartphone app and other projects now in development.
While Boston and Philadelphia dominate the national imagination when it comes to America’s founding, NYCRT argues that New York was more often “the city at the heart of the Revolution.” Although it began as the military headquarters and unofficial capital of the British in North America, it produced the most violent reaction of any colony to Parliament’s first wave of taxes and regulation. During the second wave of the “Imperial Crisis,” Parliament also dissolved its legislature — the most draconian action until the final wave, many years later, which set off the war. It was New York that was the site of “the first blood shed in the Revolution,” and the scene of the first big military engagement — the largest and most important battle of the conflict. And over the next seven years, New York remained the only stronghold the British managed to keep, the main hive of espionage, and the graveyard for most rebel soldiers (who died as POWs). The city then emerged as the nation’s first capital, during “The Critical Period.”
Shifting the geographic lens also up-ends traditional views of the Revolution, in line with modern scholarship. While New York has long been depicted as less representative than Boston or Philadelphia because it divided sharply over independence, so did the founding generation at large. The great numbers of loyal and neutral subjects across metropolitan New York in fact make the city a superior vantage from which to understand the Revolution as “America’s first civil war,” the framework so many historians now use to describe it. Years before the actual military invasion, it became a literal battleground, and remained so during the war; today’s suburbs and outer boroughs often reduced to lawlessness. As British headquarters during the conflict, it also became the epicenter for an ongoing struggle for hearts and minds across the colonies, as well as the main sanctuary for neutral and loyal refugees. Because no city was more diverse, New York also provides a far more inclusive narrative, which likewise reflects the actual history better. Half of the slaves who escaped during this “first emancipation” came to New York, where they served as powerful allies of the British, alongside Native groups, such as the “Iroquois Confederation” upstate, the most fearsome Indigenous alliance in North America.
New York thus offers a more diverse, complex, and uncommon view of the Revolution, making fresh an otherwise familiar tale. In NYC Revolutionary Trail, users will learn about some of the period’s most famous characters and events, and many others that are far less known, for an experience that will challenge the knowledge of even the most ardent buff.
Please join us at the Fire Museum on June 6th for a conversation about the project with the Gotham Center’s director Peter-Christian Aigner and NYCRT’s co-founder Ted Knudsen, hosted by Justin Rivers of Untapped New York.