GREAT MISCHIEF Locations Today

Most photographs by the author. Satellite photographs courtesy of Google Maps.

Click on thumbnails for full-screen view. Links to local scenes are below.

All the action of the story occurs in the two New York counties now called Brooklyn and Manhattan. In 1760 their combined population would have been about 25 thousand; today it’s over 4.1 million.	A schematic map showing the municipalities chartered by the Dutch before the English takeover. Gravesend was originally populated by English Anabaptists (who made a real estate deal with the Nyack Indian tribe); the others were primarily Dutch.	It’s not only indifference to historical conservation. Virtually all colonial structures were destroyed by the two major fires of 1776 and 1835. The route of the Brooklyn ferry of the story was exactly that of the Brooklyn Bridge (1883).
Only by traveling to the remotest farming sections of eastern Long Island today can one realize what New Utrecht must have looked like in 1759. It remained a tiny, isolated agricultural hamlet until very late in the 19^th Century.	The Dutch Reformed Church of Flatbush has been located on the same site since 1654. Erasmus Hall High School was begun there in 1786.	Flatlands was originally called Nieuw Amersfoort. Probably the Dutch community of our hero’s era would have still used that, but in this particular your author took the easy way out.

Contemporary Scenes from the Sites of GREAT MISCHIEF:

New Utrecht — Flatbush — Flatlands — New York City

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