As a historian, I regard lower Manhattan as something akin to sacred ground—not simply because of the awful tragedy that took place there on a crystalline September morning a decade ago or because of some explicit religious valence associated with that place. Lower Manhattan is “sacred” because, throughout American history, this has been the proving ground for our highest ideals as a people and as a nation: our tolerance and embrace of diversity.
Consider. Nearly a century Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian immigrant in the service of France, discovered the inlet into New York Harbor, Henry Hudson, an Englishman under contract to the Dutch East India Company, nosed the Half Moon through the same Narrows and struggled north on the river that now bears his name. The first group of settlers to embark on Manhattan were Walloons (French-speaking Belgians), followed shortly by a modest influx of Dutch, Germans, and French. English Puritans bracketed Dutch settlement to the north and east, in New England and Long Island.
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