The federal government was invented in New York City.

New Yorkers are so consumed by the present and the future that many residents don’t realize that their hometown was the nation’s first capital — a fortuitous choice that catalyzed the city’s revival after seven years of brutal British occupation.

The site selection was not an accident; it was the first and last time that the location of the national capital was held hostage to the demand of a prospective cabinet member: John Jay agreed to become secretary of state only if the Confederation Congress — the country’s governing body in the 1780s — vacated Trenton, N.J., and convened, instead in New York.

The old City Hall was renovated, George Washington was inaugurated, and for 531 days, in 1789 and 1790, 95 members of Congress, many of them with rival agendas, innovated, improvised and compromised to flesh out the bare bones of the new 4,500-word constitution.

After 1790, Congress decamped for Philadelphia temporarily and then to a swamp on the Potomac, freeing New York to become the capital of capital.

Federal Hall would soon be a dilapidated, century-old relic, razed in 1812 and sold for scrap. But on that site, the federal government commissioned a majestic building whose columned exterior evoked Athenian democracy and whose Grand Rotunda recalled republican Rome.