Excerpt from History of the City of New York: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time The preparation of this work was first suggested by the need of collecting the floating facts relative to the history and growth of our city, and condensing them into a compact form for the use of the general reader. In the short space of two hundred and fifty years, New York has sprung up, as it were, by magic, from a hamlet of four wretched huts, into the commercial metropolis of the western hemisphere. The many changes that have occurred during this time have been noted by lovers of their native city, who have made collections from time to time of facts and incidents invaluable to the historian yet these are scattered among numerous volumes, where few have time to seek and unearth them. Histories of the State also abound but there is not a single history of the city of New York from its earliest settlement to the present time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.