Indelible

Having just finished talking about how New York has destroyed the traces of its past, I want to look at one more map, showing conditions in 1642 as redrawn in 1897. (Click to enlarge.) Two basic points to start: (1) the north arrow points more or less to true north, with Manhattan’s “north” axis being more or less to the right, and (2) this is inaccurate in terms of geometry. It’s a schematic plan more than a real map. Now the fun part: relating what’s shown to the current-day map.

• The Great Highway is Broadway. Honestly, it’s the same name.
• The Common Ditch is Broad Street, with the mini-canal running up its center. Starting now, I think I’ll be listing our address as 90 Great Ditch.
• The Old Ditch Road is the first two blocks of Beaver Street. I don’t offhand know if that canal was real or an unrealized hope of the Dutch colonists.
• About half of the Oblique Road survives as Marketfield Street. The west half was wiped out when the Produce Exchange was built in 1884.
• The Marketfield is Whitehall Street. It’s interesting that name got switched to the smaller adjacent street.
• The Common Highway and the Road to the Ferry are Stone Street, my route to our office every day. The part of Stone Street just east of Broad was demapped around 1982 for the construction of 85 Broad.
• The Strand and the roadway along the Shore of the East River are, together, Pearl Street.
• The unnamed alley between the Strand and the Common Highway is Bridge Street. Note the little bridge over the Common Ditch is shown at Stone Street rather than at Bridge Street.
• The diagonal boundary on the far right (most clearly seen at the lower right, where the colored land grants give way to Jan Jansen Damens Farm, is where the wall was, and hence Wall Street.
• The unnamed roadway along the North (Hudson) River is Greenwich Street.
• The western edge of the Sheep’s Pasture, where the word “marsh” is written, is the line of New Street.

The population of the 18-year-old village was at that time around three hundred. A priest, Isaac Jogues, wrote about a 1643 visit that “On the island of Manhate, and in its environs, there may well be four or five hundred men of different sects and nations: the Director General told me that there were men of eighteen different languages…” Given the development of the city in the time since, that’s sort of amusing, but that’s not what the title of this blog post is about. The street plan has stayed so much the same as literally everything else has changed that it doesn’t take more than five minutes with a map to work out the street names. The biggest discrepancy between the streets in this area 376 years ago and now is the presence of New Street, and the reason that got was possible to create it is clear: it ran along the boundary of old land grants rather than thought them.

In other words, as has been said many times before, landscape features are forever.