New Amsterdam : New York 400 Years

The four excavated segments were uncovered in December 2005, when the Museum of the City of New York‘s archaeological team started excavating for the South Ferry Terminal Project. Possibly the oldest man-made structure still in place in Manhattan, the Battery Wall was built as a fortification on the Southwestern tip of Manhattan around the 1740s and 1750s. Not only was it a defense against enemies, it also provided a barrier against the rough waves and relentless wind that slammed into New York Harbor. In the late 18th century, the wall became buried under landfill, and was subsequently lost when colonial fortifications were demolished and Battery Park was built in the early 19th century.

Henry Hudson’s small wooden sailing vessel, the Half Moon, appearing on the horizon in September 1609, as he charted the area for the Dutch, setting in motion a historic transformation. Then, in 1624, another Dutch vessel arrived, bearing the first settlers of the colony of New Netherland.

The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island speak to the city’s ideals of freedom and promise and its long relationship with the water, from clipper ships to World War II battleships to commuter ferries. Several groups of Munsee people inhabited the wider region for centuries — a homeland stretching from Connecticut through New York and New Jersey to Delaware — and moved seasonally from the mainland to the island they called Manahatta, which translates roughly as “place of wood for making bows,” to fish and hunt.

A group of 32 Belgian Huguenot families who joined the Dutch in 1624 on the ship Nieu Nederland (“New Netherland”) to colonize New Amsterdam, in what is now called the island of Manhattan. 

It got its name because the Dutch had carved a canal down the middle, with roads on both sides. Later, the whole thing was paved over, and it became one of the widest streets in Lower Manhattan. At Beaver Street and South William Street in the Dutch period there stood a building that was for a time the home of the enslaved Africans owned by the West India Company. Throughout most of the Dutch period, slavery was a haphazard business in New Netherland, with Africans reaching Manhattan as “cargo” on Spanish or Portuguese ships that had been captured in the Caribbean. Those who arrived were pressed into the service of the West India Company, or W.I.C., which ran the colony.

The northeast corner of the city. The wall — actually more of a fence made of planks — was built in the wake of the municipal charter, when the new city government took measures to defend the place against an expected attack from the English. 

Dutch financial innovation

The original shoreline, which on the east was Pearl Street. The section on either side of Whitehall Street contained the first Dutch houses, erected in the 1620s: On the west side of the street, a row of them overlooked the East River and the wilds of what would later become the village of Breuckelen. In one of these lived Catalina Trico and her husband, Joris Rapalje, a couple of nobodies from present-day Belgium who showed up in Amsterdam as immigrants seeking work, heard of this new venture, got married, jumped on one of the first ships and made their lives here. They would have 11 children, 10 of whom lived to marry and have children of their own. Their descendants today number in the millions. I think of them as the Adam and Eve of New Amsterdam.

At the corner of Pearl Street and Coenties Slip, an outline in gray stones on the wide sidewalk marks the foundation of a building that started life as the Stadts Herberg, or city tavern. Ships arriving from Europe would anchor in the East River; then passengers were rowed to a nearby dock. Apparently the first thing everyone wanted to do after 10 or 12 weeks at sea was have a drink, so this was the most popular spot in town.

The corner of Pearl Street and Coenties Slip, where, outlined on the pavement, is the foundation of what was New York’s first City Hall. It stood to reason, then, that when the city won a municipal charter in 1653, the Stadts Herberg building would be converted into Manhattan’s first City Hall. 

The Dutch adopted it as their main thoroughfare up the island. It was a busy road, plied by Europeans, Africans and Native Americans, as well as by horses and wagons. the often cited figure of 18 languages spoken in New Amsterdam almost certainly didn’t include African or Native American languages, and that, when these were added, the figure would probably have been 25 or more.

 If the beginnings of slavery in New York were haphazard, it quickly became a hardened institution in the English period. And it grew. I’m continually amazed at our ability to will away the past. We still associate slavery with the South, yet by 1730, 42 percent of New Yorkers owned another human being, a higher proportion than in any city in the colonies except Charleston, S.C. The city began to segregate burials in 1697. About 15,000 people were buried at this site designated for interring those of African heritage. It occupied five city blocks.