More amusingly, several teams, including the football team are The Peglegs, and their mascot is Pegleg Pete, a little cartoon of Peter Stuyvesant (who had a wooden leg, see?).
Note that each sport has its own team name, they aren’t all the Stuyvesant [whatevers].
I believe all mildly insulting uses of “Dutch” (ie ‘Dutch courage,’ for feeling confident after drinking alcohol) actually refer culturally to German immigrants who were at one time a large immigrant group (and who were Dutch the same way the Pennsylvania Dutch are dutch - which is to say, not all all, they’re Deutsch)
That’sjust a function of old colonial random street layout. It’s a legacy of the Dutch Colonial days, but not typically Dutch.
Boston’s North End is a legacy of the Colonial days of Boston, and are far twistier and narrower than anything at the Southern tip of Manhattan. (Stretch limos and ambulances have trouble navigating some streets in the North End). But Boston wasn’t settled by the Dutch.
From my friend Dan, a longtime New Yorker and historian, who read this thread:
I thought that was of the entries was particularly apt – New Amsterdam may not have had too many native Dutch speakers before it became New York City, and so a golden age of Dutch speaking may never have existed. Did the African slaves who may have built the wall where Wall Street now stands speak Dutch? Probably some, but perhaps not when alone.
Setting aside the houses, churches, and cemeteries that remain in place from the New Amsterdam, and the prevalence of Dutch names (Spuyten Duyvil, Flatbush, Flatlands, Brooklyn, Peter Stuyvesant, Roosevelt, etc. . . ), I suggest that the discussion may have omitted what may be the true, enduring Dutch influence on the U.S.as shown in New Amsterdam. I don’t mean the punitive raid on New Sweden by the residents of New Amsterdam that ended Swedish colonial efforts in what has become the U.S. I mean the enduring culture and politics of capitalism that the Dutch created at New Amsterdam.
New Amsterdam was not founded by Puritans, Pilgrims, Quakers, or Catholics like some other colonies; it was founded by an organization to make money and perhaps from the moment it was formed, non-Dutch were welcome because the focus was not on religious purity but on financial success. When Peter Stuyvesant sought to keep his motley colony at least Christian, his Dutch Masters refused to allow him to discriminate against the Jews who had arrived in New Amsterdam. While the Dutch are long-gone, the free market capitalism, and pro-immigration diversity have spread to most of the continent (some of the descendants of the Sephardic Jews also remain, although I don’t think that they’ve spoken Dutch for centuries). It could therefore be argued that it is easier to perceive the continuing Dutch presence in New York City than it may be to measure the presence of the religious founders of colonies (of course, the Supreme Court is now more Catholic than ever before, but . . .).
That’s not Dutch, that’s simply typical of the historic cores of European cities. Or, for that matter, many American cities too, once upon a time. You wouldn’t think it, but downtown Los Angeles once had a seemingly random layout of small streets where Old Chinatown, the Plaza, and the Civic Center area all came together–all before they built Union Station and the modern Civic Center, and realigned the streets.
Though in the historical context, I wouldn’t say the layout of European cities is screwed up; it merely reflects the need to fit everything into an area that was more or less circular and defined by the defending walls.