Broad Street

During the early Dutch settlement an inlet of the bay, which could be made to do duty as a canal, extended inland for about a quarter of a mile on the line of the present Broad Street. This ditch was the natural outlet for a marshy section of considerable size lying above what soon came to be known as The Beaver Path, now Beaver Street. A brook tricked through this marsh, from the common lying north of it, called the Shaape Waytie, or Sheep Pasture, and received the flow of a small stream that ran through the Company's Valley, as that portion of The Beaver Path was named which lay between Heer Straat (Broadway) and the junction of these two rivulets. From the latter point, the Heere Gracht-- or Heere Graft as it was soon called, stretched its odorous length to the bay. By the late 1640s the canals were lined with sheet piling to stabilize both their banks and the narrow streets on either side. The largest canal was the Heere Gracht, which is now Broad Street from Pearl to Beaver Streets. Its narrower continuation, from Beaver Street to a point just south of Exchange Place, was called the Prinzen Gracht. Both were named, perhaps in jest, after two elegant canals that had recently been built in Amsterdam. The Bever Gracht was a branch canal along what is now Beaver Street from Broadway west to about the present New Street. A drawback of the canals was that they also served as open sewers and stank terribly. The British filled them up in 1676.The Dutch create a canal south of Beaver Street by expanding a small rivulet known as “the ditch”. It is called the “Herre Graft”. Broad Street laid out with the canal down the middle. Sheriff later ordered to make sure no filth is cast into the canal. Broad Street is among the first streets paved in New Amsterdam in 1655, paving on either side of the canal is likely stone or bricks. About 28 houses stand north of Beaver Street around 1660. The houses border the open ditch that persists in this area. Shoemakers and tanners join to erect a bark mill at Exchange Place in 1661. They also build homes north of Tuyne Street (Exchange Place).