Created by British Officer Bernard Ratzer around 1769, this map of Manhattan depicts its 30,000 residents living below Chambers Street.  North of that were rolling pastures and farms, connected to the city by the Bowery Road running up the middle of the island, and the Greenwich Road along the Hudson.  The word ‘Bowery’ came from the Dutch ‘Baueries’, or farms that lay along it.

Here you find the East River running between Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as a road running through Brooklyn to the site of the Brooklyn Ferry and the present-day Brooklyn Bridge.

Below you will find an animated map enabled with buttons that allow you to superimpose (and remove) the outlines of modern day landmarks.

Greenwich Village grew up as a collection of tobacco farms centered around the Christopher St. docks.  Minetta Creek, which can be seen in this map flowing through Washington Square out into the Hudson just below the Village, irrigated the land, making it ideal for tobacco – the cash crop of the age. It also helped to defend Greenwich Village (it really was a village back then) against the diseases that riddled New York City, just a mile south of it.

Experience these and other stories in our Old Manhattan walking tour.  We offer a unique NY tour experience, told with audio narration, hundreds of pictures, video clips, gps-enabled map, trivia quizzes, local recommendations, and much more.  Walk New York with Racontrs and take a walk through history.