‘New York plows ahead’: how the English invaded and changed a city

The Hartgers view of New Amsterdam, the earliest known depiction. Photograph: Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation

In lower Manhattan, at Pearl Street and Coenties Alley in the oldest part of New York City, walls and a cistern are visible under the sidewalk, through panes of clouded glass. Next to them, the outline of a 17th-century building is marked in colored brick.

“That is the footprint of the original Stadt Huys, which was first the city tavern and then became” the city hall of New Amsterdam, the author and historian Russell Shorto said. “When they were excavating to put in that skyscraper [85 Broad Street, built for Goldman Sachs in the 1980s], the archeologists identified and marked out those little bits.