This is the first known street map of Manhattan, commissioned by Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant.  If you look closely, in the center you will also see a canal running up the middle of what is now Broad Street.

Like most colonists, the Dutch were lonely for home and sought to create their new city in the image of the great city they left behind — Amsterdam.  They called their new home, New Amsterdam, and they dug canals from the harbor to mirror the extensive canals of the Dutch capital.

Just above you see a redraft of the Castello Plan made with great detail in 1916.  The ramparts of Wall Street are seen at right.  In case you didn’t know, there really used to be a “wall” at Wall Street.  The Dutch built it to keep out the hostile natives.  In the left of the map, Fort Amsterdam — the structure that looks like a star — stands just next to the present site of Bowling Green Park (that little strip of grass just right of the star).

People familiar with the downtown area will notice that it actually has not changed that much.  The main avenue is Broadway, beginning at Fort Amsterdam and running north through the defensive fortification of Wall Street.  Wall Street runs down (east) to the water where it intersects with Pearl Street, which is where the slave market stood and where Captain Kidd had his house.  You see all of these locations on our tours of Old Manhattan and Wall Street.

The Canal branches out at Beaver Street, running west towards Bowling Green and north where it almost reaches Exchange Place.  The first bridge over the canal became Bridge Street, and the stubby peninsula to the lower left of the Fort represents Whitehall, where Governor Peter Stuyvesant carried out Manhattan’s first land reclamation project upon which to build his governor’s mansion.  It is now home to the Whitehall Ferry.

The map dates from 1660, but it remained lost to history for hundreds of years.  Around 1667, a Dutch map maker sold it to Cosimo III de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.  In 1900, it was found in an old Medici palace, the Villa di Castello near Florence.  And that’s how a Dutch-made map of an American colony acquired an Italian name: The Castello Map.

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