^ Tribeca circa sometime in the 1700’s. WILD.
If anyone else hasn’t caught on to this yet, this newsletter has largely become an excuse for me to succumb to all of my absurd curiosities in the name of investigative journalism. This has a caveat as I’m easily distracted so fear the day anyone looks at my google history. Apparently scientists are trying to retrieve all the artifacts from the Titanic – just guess where that google black hole led me to.
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Real Estate gives me a reason become completely entrenched in New York history. While some streets of the past have been eliminated and much of the city was instituted into a numerical grid system, a lot of downtown clings to unique names. Recently I was curious about the latter and killed an hour researching exactly that:
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Wall Street – It was originally named “de Waal Straat” by Manhattan’s early Dutch settlers. It’s derived from the wall built by Peter Stuyvesant on the Dutch colony’s northernmost border to keep out rival English settlers. Another theory is that it may be named for the 30 Walloon families, one of the first European settlers of the island.
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Bowery – It is the English version of bouwerij, Dutch for “farm.” It connected the farmland on what was then the outskirts of the City to the Wall Street area.
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Houston Street – It is named for William Houstoun, a delegate from Georgia to the Continental Congress through 1786. Wealthy landowner Nicholas Bayard III named the street and he ran it through the property he owned. Also see: Bayard Street.
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Canal Street – Is is named for the canal dug in the early 1800s to drain Collect Pondinto the Hudson. In the 1700s, Collect Pond was a popular picnic area, wintertime skating rink, and provided drinking water for the growing City. The pond was filled in 1811, and Canal Street was built along the path of the drainage system.
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Maiden Lane – Dutch version of “Maiden’s Path,” known first as the ‘Maagde Paatje'” was a stream where young girls and women did their laundry.
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Pineapple, Orange and Cranberry Streets – In the mid-1800s, a Miss Middagh, enraged by prominent families naming streets for themselves, ripped down street signs and replaced them with the fruit names – all while leaving the one for Middagh Street, named after her own family. The city ignored her changing the signs for bit then obliged and renamed them accordingly.
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Canal Street – Is is named for the canal dug in the early 1800s to drain Collect Pondinto the Hudson. In the 1700s, Collect Pond was a popular picnic area, wintertime skating rink, and provided drinking water for the growing City. The pond was filled in 1811, and Canal Street was built along the path of the drainage system.
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Maiden Lane – Dutch version of “Maiden’s Path,” known first as the ‘Maagde Paatje'” was a stream where young girls and women did their laundry.
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Pineapple, Orange and Cranberry Streets – In the mid-1800s, a Miss Middagh, enraged by prominent families naming streets for themselves, ripped down street signs and replaced them with the fruit names – all while leaving the one for Middagh Street, named after her own family. The city ignored her changing the signs for bit then obliged and renamed them accordingly.
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Orchard Street – The area was literally an orchard, owned by James De Lancey (see: Delancey Street), a wealthy landowner and Loyalist during the Revolutionary War. By the 1840s the former orchard and farm was divided up into lots, and a brand new form of housing – the tenement – serving new Irish and German immigrants.
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Bank Street – In 1798 Yellow Fever was plaguing New York and after one of the bank clerk’s at The Bank of New York’s Wall Street location contracted the virus, the members purchased 8 lots in the Village on a street we know now as Bank Street.
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Many street are named after heroes of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, as seen in: Lt. Eldridge, Nathaniel Greene, Lt. Col. Benjamin Forsyth, Captain William Henry Allen, General Horatio Gates, Maquis de Lafayette, Augustus Ludlow, Alexander McDougall, Hugh Mercer, Oliver Hazard Perry, Henry Rutgers, Richard Varick, and James Wooster. All these men were of high command and achievement in those two wars.