LYCOS RETRIEVER 
New Amsterdam: Historic New Amsterdam
built 631 days ago
The Foundation for Historic New Amsterdam wants New York State to reserve one-third of Governors Island for a living museum-park celebrating New York�s historic seventeenth-century legacy of tolerance as the building block of American pluralism. According to Joep de Koning, President of the Foundation, the State Legislature has recognized the island, originally called Noten Eylant, as the site of the first Dutch settlement in 1624 and the origin of American toleration.
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No Broadway theater has as storied, studied and stupefying a history as the 1800-seat New Amsterdam, which celebrated its centenary in 2003. For one thing, over 60 of those years passed without anything theatrical: From 1937 and 1997, the venue showed movies (legit and blue) and later sat empty and crumbling. When Disney bought it in the early '90s they spent $34 million to complete its circle of life -- and to house, appropriately, the stage version of 'The Lion King.' The result is opulence beyond compare: Master architect Hugh Hardy not only researched the original color scheme, but replicated and restored it, along with murals, carvings, floorings, ceilings and fabrics. The baroque decor now shimmers. The mens and ladies lounges are reached by staircases fit for a boulevardier. And while the famous rooftop theater was unsalvageable, all else is elegant and immensely historical -- this was, after all, the home of the Ziegfeld Follies.
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Historic New Amsterdam will evolve over time (not a turnkey project) in stages to its own chronology of walls, streets, slips, canals, buildings, etc. Its construction includes a community effort of people of varied ages, backgrounds and skills and envisages the city's youth to take a significant part of that building process - making the wicker wharfs, cutting the stone, making the bricks and hewing the beams.
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This fundamental New York State history is to be reflected in the living museum Historic New Amsterdam as a museum park to tolerance. It will transform Governors Island, the nation’s only natural historic symbol since 1624, to a crucial national symbol.
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