Within the Haunting Bedrock | Part 3. The Heere Gracht Canal, the Cingel Wall, and the British Takeover

New Amsterdam’s Heere Gracht Canal, meaning Gentlemen’s or Great Canal in Dutch, connected inland marshy areas to the East River. This, along with the Cingel Wall, was one of the Dutch colony’s most ambitious infrastructure projects for what would become New York City. They began building the canal in about 1642, using a pre-existing natural inlet and drainage channel on Manhattan’s east side. The Dutch enlarged it into a timber-lined canal in the 1650s. Streets and houses lined both sides of the canal. Three bridges crossed the water. Fish Bridge later turned into Bridge Street when the British filled in the canal. The other bridges were at Stone Street and Beaver Street. The canal, used for drainage and waste disposal, soon became known as the “odorous length.”

The Dutch built a defensive wall known as the Het Cingel in 1653. The packed-earth barricade, buttressed with timber palisades, had protective ditches or moats outside the wall. It ran unbroken between the Hudson and East Rivers.

On March 12, 1664, King Charles II of England granted the land between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers, including Dutch New Nederland, to his brother, James, Duke of York. To enforce this, a British fleet of four warships carrying 120 cannons and 450 troops arrived in New York Bay in August. They demanded the colony’s immediate surrender. Director-General Peter Stuyvesant wanted to fight, but local citizens refused to back him because the city’s defenses were weak and the British offered generous surrender terms. Stuyvesant officially signed the Articles of Capitulation at his farm on September 8, 1664. The Dutch briefly recaptured the city during the Third Anglo-Dutch War in 1673, but it was permanently returned to the British.

The English filled in the canal in 1676 and built Broad Street over the former canal bed. The old waterway eventually became part of the city’s sewer system. They dismantled the Wall by 1699 but filled in its ditch and embankment rather than removing them. Somewhere below, its remnants are lurking.