A Walking Tour of New Amsterdam

I really should have seen this coming. In any place that I've lived in - be it California or elsewhere - I start to get very interested in local history. I mean, I'm no stranger to New York's incredible volume of historical interest spots - my recent entries have mostly been about the American Revolution in New York City.

But lately, due to a current writing project (no spoilers), I've started to become interested in New York's history before the revolutionary era. Before Alexander Hamilton and his colleagues traipsed around this city's streets. Before he was even born, in fact. Before the British got their hands on this place at all...

Watercolour by Johannes Vingboons

I'm talking, of course, about New Amsterdam, which is what NYC was before it was NYC. That's right, the Dutch settled this area before the British! And while their 'purchase' of Manhattan Island from local Native Americans was rather infamously dubious (though at least they bought it instead of doing the British thing and just kicking the natives out or enslaving them), this city's oldest roots as a city are Dutch rather than British. Not a lot of that Dutch history remains - most of the original buildings are gone now, due to the fires set to the city during the Revolution - but it's still interesting to me.

And when I found out that this website offered a free self-guided walking tour of areas of interest to the Dutch history of NYC, I knew I had to take it.

A model of New Amsterdam, which spanned from what was then the southern border of Manhattan all the way to Wall Street.

Follow me under the cut to explore eight stops along the trail of what little is left of 17th Century New Amsterdam...


Stop #1: The Waterfront Promenade of Battery Park

The Hudson River - that thing to the left of the centre post is actually the Statue of Liberty in the distance!

Battery Park is nice in the morning. That was the very first thought I took away from this walking tour, which wasn't the point of it at all, but I thought everyone should know that. It also wouldn't have existed back in 1609 when Henry Hudson first sailed into the river that now bears his name. (Though the Lenape tribe apparently called it the Mohicanituk.) Battery Park is on landfill that was added to the island later!

This is what it looked like in 1812, about 200-ish years after the Dutch lost control of NYC:

In September of 1609 - so a little over 407 years ago - Henry Hudson, an Englishman working for the Dutch, sailed into New York Harbour. An entry from his ship's log calls it 'a very good harbour for all winds' which I begrudgingly admit is correct, all 3 times I have visited Battery Park it's been windy as hell there. Later, in 1624, the Dutch built a fort on the same site of what is now Castle Clinton (though the current structure dates back to the early 1800s, and in the above picture is the round thing jutting out from the front of the island).

Stop #2: The Netherlands Monument

We're still in Battery park here, but the northeastern part of it. This flagpole commemorates the 1624 settlement of New Amsterdam by the Dutch settlers. The text on the side of it reads 'On the 22nd of April 1625 the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company decreed the establishment of Fort Amsterdam and the creation of ten adjoining farms. The purchase of the Island of Manhattan was accomplished in 1626. Thus was laid the foundation of the City of New-York' [sic].

(Incidentally 22 April is the birthday of one of my best and closest friends in the whole wide world, Ashley, back in California. Ashley isn't Dutch though, to my knowledge, I just thought it was neat.)

Another side of the flagpole base featured a relief of Peter Minuit, leader of the Dutch settlers, purchasing the island from the Lenape tribe. Again, I find that kinda dubious so I didn't spend a lot of time here...

Stop #3: The Site of Fort Amsterdam

My next stop was across from Bowling Green (where in the 1770s, young Alexander Hamilton helped incite a Patriot riot, but this isn't about his youthful shenanigans). In the old map above, see where that weird star-shaped structure is? That's Fort Amsterdam, which the Dutch built to help defend their settlement from invaders. (They were worried about British invasion far more than they were worried about the Lenape.)

The fort is, of course, long gone now. It was demolished in 1787. But guess what they built in its place?

In... the 1890s, I believe? They built the Alexander Hamilton Customs House (named for guess who) which now houses the National Museum of the American Indian, a Smithsonian-run institution in NYC. It's almost like an act of cosmic justice. Though the Dutch didn't screw over the local Native Americans as badly as the British, they still weren't great to them, so the fact that their former fort's site is now a museum devoted to Native Americans is amazing, don't you think?

And as it's completely free of course I took a short detour to visit it.

This has nothing to do with the Dutch or New York - it's stuff from the Chumash tribe of Southern California

Stop #4: The Corner of Pearl Street and Whitehall Street

What it looked like circa 1658

Back then, this corner was the eastern edge of the New Amsterdam settlement. Whitehall Street even derives its name from Peter Stuyvesant's white brick house. Stuyvesant is a familiar name to New Yorkers. His name pops up all over, from Stuyvesant Square in the Lower East Side, to Bedford-Stuyvesant (often abbreviated to BedStuy) in Brooklyn. But who was he?

In 1647, he arrived from Europe to take his post as the new director of New Amsterdam, which was, for that time, shockingly multicultural. One man, a priest named Isaac Jogues, reported that upon his visit to New Amsterdam he had heard 18 different languages being spoken. (I'm trying to guess what they might have been. My guesses include Dutch, English, Lenape, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Hebrew. But that's still only 7.) New Amsterdam also allowed Jewish refugees, Quakers, and Catholics into its walls.

Stuyvesant himself was kind of a huge dick though, tbh.

This is what the corner looks like now, so as you can see there's really nothing left here of the Dutch settlement except for the layout of the streets, which has remained largely unchanged over the centuries. From here, I walked down Pearl Street in search of my next stop.

Stop #5: The Corner of Pearl Street and Broad Street

The fifth stop was supposed to be a plaque commemorating the site of New Amsterdam's first church and New Amsterdam's renowned religious tolerance, which I mentioned above. But for the life of me I could not find the damn plaque. There was construction going on nearby, so it may have been in an area that's currently inaccessible. It's okay, though, because what I did find was so much more interesting anyway.

This is all that remains of an old wall of Governor Francis Lovelace's Tavern. Lovelace was appointed Governor of New York in 1667 very shortly after the British took over New Amsterdam from the Dutch. When archaeological excavation found this wall, instead of building over it, the city of New York left this visible for passers-by like me to find! Isn't that incredible?

Stop #6: The Corner of Pearl Street and Coenties Alley

Speaking of taverns, this is the site of New Amsterdam's most famous tavern, City Tavern, which later became New Amsterdam's City Hall in 1653. (Or, in Dutch, 'Stadt Huys'.)

This is what Stadt Huys looked like in 1664

New Amsterdam actually had a great number of taverns, especially considering its relatively small size. It had so many that it actually developed a reputation for lawlessness as those taverns began to attract pirates, which became an accepted part of the settlement.

Of course, the original building is no longer there. There's a cafe on-site now:

 But something kind of interesting? It's kind of hard to see in the photo but if you look closely, there is a line of yellow on the sidewalk and on part of the street. That yellow line is actually the outline of the City Tavern's foundation!

Stop #7: Wall Street

Did you know Wall Street was named after an actual wall? Actually, you likely did, it's a pretty well-known fact... the wall of wooden logs, known as a palisade if you wanna get technical, was erected in 1653 along the northern border of New Amsterdam to keep out invaders. Contrary to popular belief, the Dutch weren't trying to keep out the Native Americans. No, they were worried about the British coming in from Connecticut, and for good reason because the British did end up coming to claim the territory in the mid-1660s! Those rapscallions!

To commemorate the wall, however, there are what are meant to look like the remains of it placed all along Wall Street:

This is, of course, not the actual wood from the 1650s. It's just a replica to show where the wall was.

Ultimately, the wall didn't save New Amsterdam. The British came by sea rather than by land and took it by force, renaming it New York after the Duke of York. However, they did allow the Dutch families living there to stay, and the culture tolerant of immigration and differing religions and cultures never really abandoned New York, meaning that the city's legacy is very different from cities that started as British settlements, such as Boston or Philadelphia, which are a lot less diverse even to this day.

And interestingly enough, New York has more people of Dutch descent than any other big city in America! According to the little PDF, "Without the Dutch, there wouldn't be coleslaw or cookies, the names Brooklyn, Harlem, or Staten Island." I don't know about you guys, but I gotta give the Dutch credit for cookies, at the very least.

All in all, though lower Manhattan doesn't look at all Dutch anymore, it was still a fascinating way to spend a morning, and I'm glad I did it. It really did help me at least get a little bit of a feel for Dutch culture in New York. (But again, no spoilers.)

Tot de volgende keer!
-Nym-