A colleague recently was asking around trying to figure out how much of what we consider Lower Manhattan (below Chambers Street) is built on landfill. Out best guess was somewhere around 300 acres or so (including the 92 acres of Battery Park City). This map, which I think is from the very early 19th century, really drives the point home.
What I find most interesting about the map, however, are the wards. It may be hard to make them out, but this map divides Downtown into a series of strips that run south to north. What’s interesting about it to me is that they recognize the Hudson as the west side of the city and the East River as the east side. This makes a lot of sense to us now, but when New Amsterdam was founded, the Hudson was thought of as the north side of town and the East River as the south. I never knew when this shift in orientation occurred, but the way the wards are assigned here makes me think it was right around the time this map was drawn.
Also, I think we’re done naming new neighborhoods in this city, but I’d get behind bringing “DockWard” back for the southeast corner of Downtown. I’d even support the inevitable DoWa.
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I think this map might be a copy of an older map. At the time of “contact” the Dutch named the Hudson River (other suggested names: after Maurice, Prince of Orange) the “North River” and the Delaware River the “South River” They had an military expedition to the South River to protect what it thought was its assets, from the English from Virginia and instead found an empty fort there on the river. They had been informed by an endentured servant of George Holmes, Thomas Hall, who had escaped, and informed the Dutch of the encroachment. Though he and Holmes failed at growing the promised tobacco in what became “The Village”, he was later a prominent English citizen, though dwelling outside the “Wall” and ran Isaac Allerton’s warehouse on the East River, who lived in New Haven, near the first ferry to Brooklyn (“location, location, location”) where the English did business in New Amsterdam. He’s listed as one of the city’s first fireman, in the from the Montgomery Ward, where the early ironmongers were. I had to research the parking lot in the South Street Seaport the warehouse was once on the shore, about Pearl Street, a few blocks in from the “East” or “Sound” river today.
This really hammers home how direction is like, pretty arbitrary. I for one have always felt, in my heart, that “south” = the water. In NYC this is of course confusing because there is water in all directions; thus, for me, “south” is just whatever direction I’m walking.