New York, the open city, the city created by its harbor, has always been both invigorated and imperiled by disorder.

As the offspring of the Dutch Republic, the most advanced economy of the seventeenth century, the great port drew commerce in eighteen languages — together with “servants, slaves, sailors, and soldiers” whose brawls made the burghers anxious and a police force an early necessity. Three and a half centuries before Mayor Rudy Giuliani preached civility to the unbelieving, Peter Stuyvesant described his city by the sea as “slovenly, drunken, disobedient.” Determined to establish discipline in New Amsterdam, Mayor Stuyvesant imposed fines on townsfolk who allowed pigs, goats, and sheep to wander. He also — George Lankevich relates in his compact new study, American Metropolis: A History of New York City — ordered taverns to close at nine and forbade residents from throwing “rubbish, filth, ashes, oyster-shells, dead animals, or anything like it” into the street. New Amsterdam became the new “Gotham”: the legendary “goat town” of wise fools who, as one eighteenth-century observer noted, were “infatuated with trade” and energized the economy even as they left the streets strewn with litter.