The First City: Four Cities Stacked on One Block of Lower Manhattan

The corner of Wall Street and Broad Street is one of the most photographed intersections in the world. People stand on it every day to look at the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Hall steps, the bronze Washington statue, and the back of Trinity Church four blocks west. Almost none of them notice that the street under their feet is named after a wall that is not there anymore, that the wall stood on the line where a defensive palisade was built by enslaved labor in 1653, and that the cemetery for the people who built it sits eight blocks north and was lost for two hundred years.

This is the layered city. Lower Manhattan, on this corridor, is four cities stacked on one block. A Lenape camp. A Dutch trading post. A British colonial capital. The first capital of the United States. Each was built on top of the last, and the last is the one you are standing in.

The first city: the Lenape

Before any of the names that survived, the lower island was Lenapehoking. The Lenape, an Algonquian-speaking people, lived in seasonal camps along the East River shore, on the meadows that later became Bowling Green and Battery Park, and along the trail that ran north along what is now Broadway. They moved between fishing sites in summer and inland hunting grounds in winter. They did not understand land as a thing one could sell. They understood usage rights, seasonal access, shared territories with neighbouring peoples.

In 1626, by the only contemporary account that survives, the Lenape transferred Manhattan to the Dutch West India Company for goods that a letter from Pieter Schagen to the States General in The Hague valued at sixty guilders. The letter is the only record. The deed itself does not survive. The transaction that founded the European city was undocumented at the European end and, by every modern reading, was not the transaction the Lenape thought they were making. Burrows and Wallace in Gotham call it a mutual misunderstanding. The Dutch wrote down a sale. The Lenape were almost certainly signing onto a use-right.

That mismatch is the city's first transaction. The lens of the tour is that the city was founded on a misunderstanding it never corrected.

The second city: New Amsterdam

The Dutch West India Company built its first settlement at the south tip of the island in 1625, then expanded it through the next thirty years into a small grid of cobbled lanes and stepped-gable houses that looked, in plan and elevation, exactly like a small town in Holland. The signature pieces of New Amsterdam are still legible underfoot if you know what to look for.

Stone Street, the cobbled block in the Financial District you can still walk on, was paved in 1658 by an act of the Dutch council. Brewers on the street paid for the cobbles. It is the first paved street in what is now the United States in continuous use, though "first paved" depends on how one counts surface restorations across the centuries. The current cobblestones are a 2000 restoration of the 1658 principle.

The wall that gave Wall Street its name was built in 1653, after the First Anglo-Dutch War scared the colony into believing the English would attack overland from New England. Director General Peter Stuyvesant ordered a defensive palisade running east-west across the island at the northern edge of the European settlement. The labor was done by enslaved Africans owned by the Dutch West India Company, by free Black workers, and by indentured European settlers. The English came by sea instead, and in 1664 four warships under Colonel Richard Nicolls anchored in the harbor, demanded surrender, and Stuyvesant gave it up after a brief, performative refusal. The wall was never used in a battle.

The Dutch had named the trading post New Amsterdam. The English renamed it New York after King James, the future James the Second, then Duke of York.

The third city: colonial New York

For 121 years, from 1664 to the British evacuation in November 1783, Lower Manhattan was a British colonial port. The street grid stayed largely Dutch. The trade went London. The economic engine, increasingly, was enslaved labor.

The two facts that shape the corridor in this period sit a hundred metres apart.

The first is the slave market on Wall Street. On 30 November 1711, the Common Council of New York passed an ordinance establishing a designated municipal market for the auction and rental of enslaved Africans and Native Americans. It stood on Wall Street between Pearl Street and Water Street, at the eastern edge of the financial district, beside the East River piers where the enslaved people had been disembarked. The market operated for fifty-one years, until 1762. At the mid-eighteenth-century peak, roughly one in five New Yorkers was enslaved. Nearly half of Manhattan households held at least one enslaved person. The 2015 historical marker on the corner of Wall and Water tells the basic story. The actual market block sat one block west, between Pearl and Water on Wall.

The second is the cemetery. From around 1697 to 1794, the unincorporated area north of the city wall, beyond the colonial street grid, held the burial ground for the enslaved and free Black population. The ground was outside the boundary of the white-only churchyards. Historians estimate that between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand people were buried there across the century the ground was in use. By 1794 the city had grown north past it; surveyors laid new streets across it; by the early nineteenth century it was paved over, built on, and forgotten.

The market and the cemetery are not adjacent stories. They are the same story. The economic apparatus that ran the colonial port produced the dead who were buried just past the wall.

The fourth city: the first capital of the United States

On 30 April 1789, on the balcony of Federal Hall at the corner of Wall and Nassau Streets, George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States. The building beneath him was an old colonial city hall, recently remodelled by Pierre L'Enfant for use as the seat of the new federal government. Chancellor Robert Livingston administered the oath. The crowd below filled Wall Street.

The First Congress met in this building. The Bill of Rights was drafted and ratified here. The Judiciary Act of 1789 created the federal court system here. For sixteen months, until the capital moved to Philadelphia in late 1790 and then to the new federal city on the Potomac in 1800, Wall Street was the seat of the United States government.

The original Federal Hall was demolished in 1812. The Greek Revival temple that stands on the site today is the third Custom House, completed in 1842. The bronze Washington statue on its steps was put up in 1882. The footprint, though, is the same. Washington's inauguration happened on this exact corner. The wall the street is named for had stood ninety yards east of this corner. The slave market it inherited had been closed twenty-seven years.

The republic took possession of an erasure that was already underway.

What the tour does with the layers

The Lower Manhattan tour walks the corridor that holds all four cities in sequence. Battery Park, where the defensive logic of the Dutch port still names the ground. Bowling Green, where the 1626 transaction was mythologised and the city's first park was leased in 1733. The slave market corner. Stone Street, the first paved street, which the same regime that built the wall also paved. Federal Hall, where the republic arrived. The African Burial Ground, where the bodies were finally counted in 1991 and 1992 after the General Services Administration broke ground for a federal office tower at 290 Broadway and uncovered four hundred and nineteen intact burials. Howard University bioarchaeologist Michael Blakey led the analysis from 1992 to 2009. The site became a National Monument in 2006. The granite Ancestral Chamber, by Rodney Leon, was dedicated on 5 October 2007.

The corridor is three kilometres. Every regime that governed this island chose to build on top of what came before, and what came before is still there. You walk over it for ninety minutes. The argument of the tour is that once you can see it you cannot unsee it.

The financial city, the federal capital, and the city government were all consecrated on top of the same erased ground. That continuity is the load-bearing claim. Finance and erasure were not adjacent stories in early American history. They were the same story, told in stone, on this block.