And, for the most part, it was. But historians of such an electric age were willing to push the explanation further than this. They believed that the metropolis’ spiritual variety was not only caused by a fusion of ethnicities, but by historical contingency as well. Most interestingly, authors during the era of Hudson-Fulton often cited the construction of a simple chapel in the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in 1642 as the beginning of New York’s liberal churchgoing tradition.^[11] According to their rationale, the church was meant to “keep watch over the spiritual welfare of New York”^[12], affording unity and piety for the arduous lives of the early settlers, no matter what beliefs they held. For historians at the time of Hudson-Fulton, this was the foundation upon which the forbearing religious character of the entire colony was established.

Other assemblies in the early colonial period were quick to follow their Dutch predecessors’ dutiful example. Quakers, fleeing religious persecution abroad, arrived shortly after the Dutch and built their first New York meetinghouse in Flushing, Queens around 1670.^[13] The famously charitable Trinity Church was the first place of worship to be built by New York’s Episcopalian population, a denomination who also designed St. Paul’s Church, the oldest religious edifice in New York.^[14] Baptists also appeared in New Amsterdam as early 1657, but neglected to erect their own religious establishment until roughly a century after their arrival.^[15]  Believers in the relatively new Lutheran faith first disembarked in the early eighteenth century, and built a fair amount of churches throughout the city.^[16] Presbyterians landed around the same time, and quickly constructed their famous Brick Church. A contingent of French Huguenots arrived shortly thereafter, and sponsored the creation of L’Église du St. Esprit, a famous landmark in 1909.^[17] St. Patrick’s Cathedral, one of New York’s most notable featsof religious architecture, was a result of the belated but nonetheless robust Catholic presence on the island.^[18]  Methodism was also a latecomer to the City, and their well-known John Street Church, first erected 1818, was still in use at the time of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration.^[19]

New denominations were also formed on ManhattanIsland, among them the Collegiate Dutch Reformed Church, whose colonial Middle Dutch Church greeted congregants in 1909 with undiminished enthusiasm.^[20] Adherents of Judaism, by no means a recent religious innovation on the shores of the Hudson, maintained their ancient rites and traditions in the quickly modernizing City. Jews, though present in New Amsterdam in its earliest years, neglected to construct their most impressive places of worship until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shearith Israel and Temple Beth-El, two monumental synagogues built in close proximity to Central Park, were magnificent sights for New Yorkers to behold in the early 1900s.^[21] Other religious sects, though relative newcomers to the City, nevertheless enjoyed freedom and prosperity at the turn of the century. Muslim, Orthodox Russian and Greek congregations, although looked upon with guarded suspicion by the more mainstream religious devotees, were undeniably active in New York City in 1909.^[22]

For visitors and New York natives, the sheer amount of churches and religious sects in the City did not point to a kind of wild, spiritual fanaticism. Quite to the contrary, contemporaries of Hudson-Fulton viewed the wealth of religious buildings and their weekly occupants as tangible evidence of New York’s unimpeded diversity and cosmopolitan reputation. Considering this vast collection of creed and practice, it goes without saying that some of the first architectural monoliths to greet visitors entering New York through the harbor were of purely religious function.  These edifices portended to the intense variety one might encounter on a simple stroll through the city streets, or even in conversation with a local.^[23] This was the New York of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, an open-minded city of a varied, tolerant population.  But how did this reality fit into the context of the historical didacticism of 1909? The leaders of the Celebration were wont to conclude that the Dutch and the Dutch alone were the first proponents of religious acceptance. Leaders of the Celebration asserted that these precursors bestowed upon the City the tradition of liberality that permitted such an intensely pluralistic society to exist in the first place.^[24] In their estimation, the City’s sense of religious toleration had developed, as with all things good and beneficial, under the auspices of New York’s earliest congregants.

The revisionism that defined the Hudson-Fulton Celebration’s brand of history affirmed thatthe City’s tradition of religious diversity, or, frankly, apathy, stretched back to its earliest days as a commercial colony of the Netherlands.^[25] In all fairness to these compulsive historians, they were somewhat correct in their assumption. Though it may seem trite to describe it as such, New Amsterdam was a stronghold of religious toleration.^[26] Since this tired expression seems to suggest some sort of exaggerated benevolence on the part of New York’s earliest settlers, it cannot go unqualified. The instinct to tolerate the presence of many races and creeds in their colony did not stem from an eagerness to attain diversity. Nor did the Dutch cherish diversity once it arrived. This was not tolerance; there was no endorsement of the inherent value of multiplicity.^[27] The incentive to tolerate was far less noble than what the literature of the Hudson-Fulton period insinuated. By virtue of their industrious, seafaring tradition, the Dutch were forced to yield to what was really a matter of necessity.