An article in the 8/31 New Yorker titled “Useless Beauty,” starts off saying the first resident of what would become New York City was a “black Latino named Jan Rodrigues” of Dominican descent. He had been on a Dutch ship that left him behind in 1613 with “80 hatchets to trade with the local Indians.”

My two favorite parts of the article are:

1. it goes on to call him a “maverick Dominican arms dealer;”

2. it includes reference to Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, New Yorks’s openly cross-dressing governor from the early 1700s.

With men like this shaping it’s history, no wonder New York is the way it is!