The Dutch are coming
400 years ago Henry Hudson sailed from Amsterdam to NY in an effort to find the Northwest Passage. While that pursuit didn’t turn out so well for him, he did manage to introduce the first Dutch colonizers to the US. To commemorate that journey, the Dutch are back this weekend and next weekend only to host The New Island Festival, a great big crazy party on Governors Island. A $35 Dutch passport gets you access to hundreds of happenings like watching Helena 105, a Dutch cow, jump through a hoop, or the Hudson Waterwalk, a stroll across the river in a giant, inflatable ball.
You can also talk to real live Dutch people via a live video link to Amsterdam and ask them everything you’ve always wanted to know but were too afraid to ask about life in the red light district. There’s art and food and a silent disco, in which all the participants listen to the same music on their own headphones so to the passerby it would seem as if a huge crowd of people were quietly dancing to the same beat. The most interesting attraction so far, to me at least, is the archeological site which was uncovered last winter during construction. It contains remains of original Dutch settlements (Hudson’s buddies) nearly 400 years old, and dates all the way up to the 1950s when the remaining inhabitants were forced to leave.
