[conspire] Argh! The Dutch!

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> yeah.. I like the Dutch.  I think it helps that I have lived most of my
> life in a Dutch influenced city.

In all of the many times I've been in NYC, although I see countless
historical reminders of the Dutch founding in names of streets and other
things, I never found more than the faintest residual whiffs of Dutch
cultural content or influence (beyond those placenames).

NYC is even less Dutch, in my experience, than Calgary is British.[1]

I happened to have been feeling nostalgic for the British Hong Kong of
my youth, when Deirdre and I went to Calgary (Alberta) for the Westercon
('Due North'), held at the Westin Calgary, downtown.  So, I searched
high and low for even a particle of residual British culture.  Nope.
Culturally speaking, Calgary is Denver with a slightly different accent,
a big oil and gas drilling industry, and national health insurance.
Texas with better weather and better manners.

On our second-to-law day, I happened to visit historic Fort Calgary,
established in 1875 as Fort Brisebois by the newly formed Dominion of
Canada.  Finally, if you closed your eyes and enabled your imagination
enough that you smelled tea brewing, you could pick up some homeopathic
trace of the UK.  And then the whiff fades away, and... Denver.

The experience of standing looking at the Wallabout Market in Brooklyn
and imagine it being Dutch (it never was; the only remaining building
from New Amsterdam, The Rigging House at 120 William Street in lower
Manhattan, was demolished in 1854), in other words, not satisfactory.
The Wallabout Market is merely Dutch Colonial _Revival_ architecture.

[1] Or even less Dutch than San Francisco is Spanish.