New York banks stopped exchanging banknotes for gold and silver. British banks became concerned about speculation in America and tightened credit. Their investors demanded repayment of the debts. Cotton exports, which generated much of the nation’s foreign earnings, collapsed. The Panic of 1837 was now in full swing. It upended daily life on the streets of Lower Manhattan into the 1840s.

On the evening of December 16, 1835, the temperature fell fast, and high winds whipped across downtown Manhattan. A night watchman in the Financial District smelled smoke and found it at the intersection of Exchange and Pearl Streets. The fire spread from a large warehouse and tore through Lower Manhattan. Frigid winds stoked the fire. Thick ice covered the East River, the primary water source. Water in the hoses froze.

After leaving the Bowery Theatre, amid the destruction in the final days of the 1834 Anti-Abolition Riot, the mob reached Arthur Tappan’s home, but he and his family had already fled. To keep the fun going, the mob tore his house down, board by board, then burned his furniture in the street. On July 10, 1834, the mobs targeted Tappan’s store, the homes of suspected abolitionists, and churches.

Anti-Abolitionists attacked both the Chatham Street Chapel and the BoweryTheatre. Handbills had been posted detailing British actor Farren’s slur against abolitionists throughout New York City. An agitator yelled, “To the Bowery Theatre!” to deal with Farren. An estimated 4,000 rioters broke down the doors and interrupted Edwin Forrest’s performance. A large contingent of police arrived. They drove the mob from the theater with Billy clubs. Some call this event the “Farren R

Historians highlight the strong links among Nativism, white supremacy, and anti-abolitionism found in the 1834 Anti-Abolition Riots. The Five Points neighborhood was home to Irish Catholics who escaped the Great Famine. They experienced harsh poverty in the company of free Black people. To protect themselves, they formed major street gangs such as the Dead Rabbits, the Forty Thieves, and the Roach. Loyal to their Irish background, they acted as muscle for Tammany Hall’s Democ

From 1776 to 1783, Britain used New York Harbor and Wallabout Bay to imprison Americans in prison hulks. For a resident of Lower Manhattan, the land-based prisons and the prison ships were not a distant rumor, but a major part of the harbor landscape.

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