As the place of first settlement in the New York Tri-State region and as the wellspring of American toleration (= religious tolerance), Governors Island—a historic canvas of global meaning and thematic substance—when popularly accepted as symbol of American tolerance, enhances the worth of the Statue of Liberty’s significance for all.
This Governors Island legacy is immensely pertinent to the future of our diverse nation because the dynamic principle of tolerance defines personal freedom (= liberty) thereby distinguishing it from “STATIC” or “GENERIC” freedom.
The innovative Tolerance Park—a masterpiece—will recall the birth and childhood of 17th century New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware and will reflect on tolerance issues pertaining to religion, ethnicity and race.
These topics are not about the past but are contemporary and also exceptionally pertinent to the success of our future as a pluralist, democratic nation. Intolerance impairs democracy and may even destroy it. With a 151 feet high Tolerance Monument as centerpiece, the Park—which will use only 30% of Governors Island—will be a place of educational significance to the nation and a showcase of the New York Tri-State’s earliest, as well as third-millennium architectural and material culture (see Vision Statement below).
The Amsterdam-born philosopher Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza, a member of the Portuguese Israelite community, wrote in the mid-seventeenth century: "Ours has befallen a rare fortune to live in a republic where everyone is allowed complete freedom of conscience and God worship and where one doesn't consider anything more precious and loving than liberty."
In his Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus he stated that "the city of Amsterdam leads the fruit of this freedom in its own great prosperity and in the admiration of all other people. For in this most flourishing state and most splendid city, men of every nation and religion live together in the greatest harmony...his religion and sect is considered of no importance... In fact, the true aim of government is liberty."
For short article on Jewish arrival CLICK ON "What can I do?"
This 1651 map was engraved from a 1648 manuscript map produced in Manhattan.
Its creation represents a historic decision of profound importance to American history because it illustrates one’s legal right to seek redress of grievances by directly petitioning the highest level of government—143 years before codification of that right in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights; “Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The meaning of Governors Island lies in its existence as unrecognized Conceptual Art since 1624. Its transformation to Visual Art is to be accomplished by a living museum to tolerance. It will be the nation’s first park that addresses dynamic tolerance issues as they define “American” freedom.
The Tolerance Park will be the place where 350 years of contrasts will visually dissolve harmoniously into a new and unique village, just as divergences and boundaries melt away through the ethical force of tolerance into common humanity.
Twenty percent of the village structures will be exclusively devoted to interactive educational exhibits on religious, ethnic and racial tolerance. The remaining structures of the living museum village will serve as America's FIRST URBAN ARTISTS COLONY THAT FOCUSES ON ARTS AND CRAFTS WITH EMPHASIS ON THOSE FROM BEFORE THE 18th-CENTURY.
The Tolerance Park will be the premier international source for the learning and practicing of trades as performed in the early European guilds as well as a resource for the maintenance, preservation and conservation of various nations' artistic and cultural heritages.
Visually reflecting harmony-in-difference and humility, workspace or housing will be provided behind unique facades and along the shoreline behind authentic, seventeenth-century or in reconstructed as well as transplanted preserved buildings or barns.
The Tolerance Park will also include formal and botanical period gardens. The 50-acre canvas for organic creativity will defend "American" freedom intellectually and visually by linking New York's original 1624 legal-political tradition of the inseparable dual notion of tolerance and liberty with America's contemporary principles which sustain our heritage.
The Park’s unique functions will serve as a magnet for people from all over the world. Its omnipresence will guarantee an endless qualitative and positive economic, artistic and intellectual effect on New York City while radiating the active dynamic of tolerance as the defender and definer of freedom.
As these freedoms are guaranteed in the American Constitution, the park's exhibits will not advance or be reflective of religious, political or personal beliefs and agendas. The park will serve as a global locus for debates, conferences and educational programming pertaining to the topic of tolerance—a primary American value as well as a fundamental human right under the United States Constitution, and so acknowledged and defined by Unesco—and will dialogue, on the intellectual level, with contemporary society.
CREATIVE VISION STATEMENT of MASTERPIECE on FIFTY-ACRE CANVAS (30% of GOVERNORS ISLAND)
Most European towns evolved from medieval times around a central market square. Those historical squares still form the core of many great cities like Amsterdam, Haarlem, Antwerp, Bruges, Utrecht, Ghent and Gouda. Typically, they comprise the town’s most important and meaningful contemporary structures such as a cathedral as cultural beacon of grandeur, a town hall, a weigh house or statuary from the 13th through 17th centuries.
Today, those celebrated town centers often function as traffic-free oases and meeting points. They foster community and serve as magnets for socializing among diverse layers of residents and visitors alike. Outside the perimeters of those early towns—usually typified by protective moats or walls (as in, for example, Wall Street in 1653)—subsequent growth was accommodated.
Those urban additions—radiating outward from the town’s historical core—often emerged in concentric circles of architectural styles unique to their period. That architectural chronology will be reversed in the Tolerance Park.
Namely, the view from the water will only be on authentic 17th-century [New] Netherlandic facades. Walking from the shoreline towards the Tolerance Park’s core, one will arrive at an inviting, warm, people-friendly market square surrounded by ornamented facades of 21st-century architectural uniqueness and cohesiveness and therefore reflective of harmony-in-difference—the ideal condition of the virtue of tolerance.
The square will be built around a third millennium Tolerance Monument of global meaning, thematic substance and 21st-century visual greatness like, for instance, a 151 ft (46 meters) high version of Barnett Newman’s sculpture Broken-Obelisk (CLICK HERE) dedicated by him to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after his assassination. A copy is displayed in the N.Y. Museum of Modern Art.
This iconic emblem with its implicit testimonial to racial tolerance will comprise a Tolerance Hall to include a museum of human servitude of the 15th through 17th centuries with special emphasis on the Atlantic Arena as well as on its modern counterpart. Its height equates that of the Statue of Liberty’s without pedestal (that is, half the total monument's height because Broken-Obelisk stands on the ground) as Tolerance and Liberty are equal partners in American Freedom.
It will highlight uplifting exhibits and narratives of Herculean courage as inspirational demonstrations of humanity’s capacity for astonishing compassion that emerges from the depths of depravity and indifference. The color of the pyramid section will be black to reflect its theme: "Black has an innersound of nothingness bereft of possibilities, a dead nothingness as if the sun had become extinct" so wrote Kadinsky. Because black’s cognate is blue, the upside-down obelisk section will be translucent to radiate blue light as a blue-sky tribute to mankind’s power to rise and create ex nihilo. It will be situated on the same spot within the TolerancePark as where FortAmsterdam was positioned within Manhattan.
Just as when Governors Island became the region’s first crossroad of three cultures in 1613, the Tolerance Park, when it opens in September 2009, will become a meeting point for the cultures of the world to debate on these issues of profound importance to future generations.
Consequently, the tolerance park will link visually the 1624 historic planting of tolerance (that is, the "father" of American liberty and the basis of successful pluralism) on Governors Island with broad 21st-century awareness of that dynamic ethical force as being indispensable to religious, ethnic and racial liberty in contemporary American society.
In March 1664, King Charles II resolved to annex New Netherland and to “bring all his Kingdoms under one form of government, both in church and state, and to install the Anglican government as in old England.”
New Netherland director-general Petrus Stuyvesant received one letter from his lord directors of the [Dutch] West India Company just one month prior to the arrival of four English frigates on August 27, 1664. In the face of rumors of an English invasion, his superiors attempted to make a virtue out of weakness and suggested that liberty (freedom of conscience in religion) did not need to be militarily defended and would take care of itself. They wrote; “we are in hopes that as the English at the north (in New Netherland) have removed mostly from old England for the causes aforesaid, they will not give us henceforth so much trouble, but prefer to live free under us at peace with their consciences than to risk getting rid of our authority and then falling again under a government from which they had formerly fled.”
A few months later, in September that year, Stuyvesant's worst fears were realized. However, he and his council negotiated the continuation of that explicit founding condition of toleration in New Netherland in article VIII out of twenty-four articles of [provisional] transfer. It guaranteed New Netherlanders, under future English jurisdiction, that they “shall keep and enjoy the liberty of their consciences in religion.”
That article was an affirmation of the existing cultural-legal tradition as the basis of ethnic diversity in New Amsterdam. It was to become New York’s cultural heritage when—upon the insistence of New York Governor George Clinton—toleration became codified in the American Constitution through the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights upon its reintroduction in 1789 and ratification in 1791—“Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.”
