NEW ROCHELLE, NY — We recently had a COVID-induced virtual sit-down with the host of a brand-new podcast which we expect will hold great interest for those of our readers who travel in and out of Manhattan each day for work, visit occasionally for play, or just like a good tale of adventure well told.
Each episode runs about the length of a typical commute from Westchester into Grand Central.
The “Island” is a podcast from New Rochelle resident Chance Kelly which chronicles the first three hundred years of colonization of Manhattan Island and Manhattan’s impact on culture here and around the world. The series examines the city’s effect on religious and personal freedoms across the country and around the globe.
Kelly is an actor, writer and producer who hosts the podcast which he likens to a voyage of discovery that will lead listeners to say “Wow. History is cool.”
Kelly’s screen credits include the role Lt. Col. Stephen “Godfather” Ferrando in HBO’s Generation Kill, Detective Ed Cutler in the NBC series Aquarius and our favorite villain, the Man in the Orange Jump Suit in Unbreakable.
Kelly’s unnamed character engages in mortal combat with nascent superhero David Dunn played by Bruce Willis.
Kelly’s great, great, great uncle — “Honest” John Kelly — emerged from the slums of Five Points to become a Tammany Hall boss and one of the first Irish-Catholic Congressmen.
Island is a chronological series.
The narrative begins in 1609 when Henry Hudson happens upon Manhattan and the river that would come to bear his name. The series culminates in 1909 when William Randolph Hearst arrives to make his mark on New York publishing and Manhattan politics. Along the way listeners will encounter native tribes, Dutch merchants, English explorers, Walloons, Patroons, and more as they trade goods and land, make peace and war, and lay claim to Manhattan, all knowledgeably explained by Kelly and his many guests including present day historians, experts on early Manhattan and the occasional celebrity cameo.
What got you interested in history generally and the history of the island of Manhattan in particular?
I attended college at NYU and one night I came upon this display — down on Laguardia Place. The sidewalk there is exceptionally wide. It was covered with an outdoor display designed to illustrate what the island looked like, before colonization. And it was just one large forest, like an uninhabited island on the other side of the world. It affected me in a certain way. And having had an attachment to the city, since I was a kid, the history of the island became of real interest to me. The more I studied it, the more I realized how many wide gaps there are in the “American History” that we are taught in schools, little or none of it includes this Manhattan history. And without that, you simply can’t see the full breadth of our true American History.
Why did you decide a podcast was the right medium to tell the story you wanted to tell?
I had not conceived this project as a podcast. I will admit I barely knew what a podcast was a year or two ago. The concept is for a television series, and that continues to be the objective. I have no doubt that it can and will be an incredible, epic television series: Turn meets Roots meets Boardwalk Empire meets Peaky Blinders, or something like that. The podcast idea came about when COVID-19 invaded our lives and shut down the universe. I was just putting the finishing touches on the pilot — the sample script to be presented to producers — in March 2020. Realizing meetings with viable production partners were suddenly delayed a year, or more, I figured that we could do the entire series as a podcast, and it should help in a number of ways. It helps further cultivate and develop the content as it sharpens the storylines and characters and builds an interested audience. The more of a following we build through the podcast, the better case we make to producers and investors for the viability of the concept as a TV series.
Who makes up the production team?
The production team is a small handful of very dedicated historians, scholars and archivists, then there’s me along with a very patient and committed sound engineer who pulls it all together. We have a small social media and marketing team.
How has coronavirus changed the way you go about putting together an episode, what obstacles have you had to overcome?
For starters, the studio is in my attic! Beyond that, all interviews need to be done remotely. Although there are technical obstacles it has worked very well. I think people generally prefer to be interviewed in their own space, and my interviews are very casual and not even nearly as formal as a standard work-Zoom meeting these days. And everything with my sound engineer is done remotely as well. So, we’ve conformed to this crazy COVID-19 existence just like our listeners.
You are more than halfway through airing Season One and have so far presented quite a few rough and tumble characters out of Manhattan’s history— if you could travel back in time and interview one of them, who would it be, and what would you want them to tell you about most?
Well, GREAT question. And honestly, I think I was really meant to be born in the seventeenth century and I would love to interview all of them, starting with Hudson and his cranky, cynical mate Robert Juet. I definitely like Peter Minuit. Listeners will know I am quite fond of Adriaen Block. We generally know very little about most of these characters, but these last two, I would say, had, perhaps the most impactful influence on moving the colony forward, in their specific time periods. Block in the very, very primal stages of creating a market, so to speak, even before there was really talk of a “colony”, Minuit, in moving the colony into the next phase.
I love the Walloons. As I said in S01E05, they got serious chutzpah, you know? And that really has a lot to do with, how this even became a colony at all. In fact, the Walloon who preceded Minuit by a year or so and really was, who I call the “Moses of Manhattan”, Jesse De Forest. Jesse never actually came here, he was sent on one of two ships commissioned by the Dutch West India Company that left Amsterdam on July 1, 1623. Jesse on the Pigeon, and another group of Walloons on the Mackerel. The Pigeon was sent to what they were calling “Guyana” but what we would probably more appropriately refer to as Brazil, and the Mackerel went straight to Manhattan and up the Hudson River to Albany. Though the gregarious and diplomatic Walloon Jesse De Forest would do very well in South America, he would fall ill after about a year and never made it to Manhattan. But, no matter — he has a lot of family who did, including some of our major characters in upcoming episodes, including his daughter Rachel De Forest who marries the first physician in the colony, Dr. Jean de la Montagne, a Huguenot, whom we’ve already mentioned. His two sons would also make it — Hendrick and Isaac, and they would purchase a tobacco farm in the area of where the northwestern section of Central Park is today, in the area of West 109th Street to about West 124th Street. This all comes into our story at the start of Season Two. The De Forest family members are ancestors of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who enters our story in S05 and S06, and are thereby all ancestors of CNN reporter Anderson Cooper, whom we’re hoping to have on the show at some point.
What can we expect in the remaining Season One episodes?
Each season is seven episodes. And there are seven seasons total. The final two episodes of this season — S01E06 and S01E07 — I am writing as one continuous “double-episode” which will simply be split in two for time. But, it will obviously focus on very specific events and issues that happened in these years. S01E06 is 1627-1632, and as you know by now, each episode profiles ONE character though of course we introduce several in each episode, we try to focus the story primarily on ONE character, per episode, and S01E06 is Dominie Jonas Michaelius, who is the first ordained minister, sent to the colony, by the Dutch West India Company, in 1628. Now, that works great, for about five minutes…and after his wife dies tragically, seven weeks after his arrival in Manhattan, things go slowly and surely downhill from there. And by the end of the episode, we see some heavy-duty animosity between Michaelius and Minuit. And it gets ugly. We also see the introduction of the Freedoms and Exemptions Act of 1629 which was also referred to as the “patroon act” which meant that wealthy investors from Amsterdam and Hoorn could now essentially become feudal lords over massive swaths of land in New Netherland, in exchange for satisfying certain requirements made by the Company, namely that they must populate their land with at least fifty able-bodied people of fifteen years or older in the first three years of their patroonship. As long as the patroons met all their requirements, they were essentially sovereign municipalities free to write laws and ordinances, collect taxes, and run it as they see fit. Kiliaen van Rensselaer is the one patroon whose name anyone may still recognize today, as his patroonship was centered in today’s Albany, NY and encompassed over a million acres, which lay on both sides of the Hudson. In fact, the college that my son, Chance Jr. attends is named for that very family, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.
Then S01E07 profiles the somewhat inept (and drunken) nephew of Killiaen van Rensselaer, Wouter van Twiller (1633-1638) and this is really where things start to get interesting because along with Van Twiller, comes a cast of remarkably colorful characters including Anthony “The Turk” van Salee, who may have been the first Muslim in North America, and his wife, part-time barmaid and part-time prostitute, Grietchen Reyniers (…who, by the way, are also related to Anderson Cooper.)
Where S01E07 and Season One end — is where our “pilot” actually starts? We didn’t write the pilot as the Hudson episode. Because we didn’t think that particular part of the story looked like what the concept is really about — which is developing the colony of New Netherland and eventually the city of New York. So, for that reason, our “pilot” script is actually S02E01. And that’s when things really kick into turbo. It’s gonna be awesome, so, keep listening!
Anything else you want our readers to know?
Please be interactive. Email us or follow us on social media and visit our website (or our LinkTree) and tell us what you think and what else you’d like to hear. And if you like what we are doing, please give us a FIVE-STAR review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps us out. The Island is available through iTunes, Spotify, Google and all other popular podcast platforms.
Dames en heren, bedankt!
All photos courtesy of Jen Parente.