The English takeover of New Amsterdam occurred in 1664, when an English fleet arrived and demanded surrender. With the Treaty of Westminster in 1674, the British ruled New Amsterdam and renamed it New York City. Their rule made slavery stricter, with harsher laws and fewer freedoms than under Dutch rule. The Dutch West India Company (WIC), which owned the enslaved, used them in large municipal labor gangs. English individuals owned enslaved people and used them for domestic s

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 li

The next layer of Lower Manhattan’s bedrock began being laid on September 11, 1609, when English explorer Henry Hudson sailed the Dutch ship Halve Maen (Half Moon) into New York Bay to claim the region for the Dutch Republic. The Hudson River bears the explorer’s name.

Before European colonization, a network of seasonal roads crisscrossed a biologically diverse ecosystem in what is now Lower Manhattan. The Munsee Lenape called it “Manahatta” (the island of many hills). Rather than build permanent structures, the Lenape favored seasonal encampments. One major site, Sapokanikan, sat near modern-day Greenwich Village, on the shores of Minetta Brook, a trout stream. Another site known as the Werpoes was a Lenape settlement on the southwestern s