It's kind of a miracle that Manhattan, as we know it today, exists at all.

The swampy, forested, rocky, oddly shaped, long, narrow island that was home to the Lenape,

and which greeted the first European settlers in the 17th century wasn't exactly the easiest place to establish a community.

As predominantly Dutch and English settlers created New Amsterdam and then New York,

this new settlement was all about making money.

Unlike other early American cities that were founded by those in search of places to practice more spiritual belief systems,

New York, from its earliest days, was in one way or

another about chasing the gold. I heard a New York City tour guide say once that to understand

the history of New York just follow the populations push up the island of Manhattan, particularly

throughout the 19th century and where people stop and congregate for a time,

well, something interesting certainly will be going on.

The early 19th century New York City fathers knew the population most certainly would expand north.

It was really the only place that they could go.

Let's remember that New York didn't bring all the boroughs together

until the very end of the 19th century to create the great metropolis. It was those early civic

leaders that implemented the famous grid pattern of avenues and streets beginning in 1811

to help give this movement North a sense of urban organization.

Today's show is a very special one, since we will be covering more than a century of New York

City history in just about an hour as we take a tour up the island of Manhattan to see just how

it all connects and tells the story of how the gilded age, at least from a social

and geographical perspective, came to be. As Russell Shorto writes in his groundbreaking work,

The Island at the Center of the World, beneath the level of myth and politics and high ideals,

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