Free The Epic of New York City by Edward Robb Ellis

approaching.
    Manhattan abounded in rock springs that gushed pure water. The water supply did not become a problem until after the end of Dutch rule, when the population greatly increased. Burghers obtained water from springs and private wells until 1658; then the first public well was dug.
    At first Peter Stuyvesant lived at 1 State Street. Later he bought land from the Dutch West India Company for a country estate, where he could spend the summer months. This consisted of an area roughly bounded by Sixth to Sixteenth Streets, the East River, and Third Avenue. Stuyvesant had brought fruit trees from Holland, and he planted an orchard with his own hands. On what is now the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street he set out a peach tree that flourished for a century, after which the branches decayed and fell off. Everyone thought the old pere-bloome had died. Then, all by itself, it revived, greened again, and put out new shoots. Poems and articles were written about Peter Stuyvesant’s doughty pear tree. When it was 220 years old, it was destroyed in 1867, after two vehicles had collided at the corner.
    Stuyvesant’s farm stood in the center of Bowery Village. The east-west streets were named for male members of his family, together with his title—Peter, Nicholas, William, Stuyvesant, and Governor. The north-south streets were styled after the family’s female members—Judith, Eliza, and Margaret. The only surviving street is the short reach of Stuyvesant Street, preserved to keep open the approachto St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie, a church begun in 1660 as a Dutch chapel on Stuyvesant’s farm.
    He obtained downtown property on the East River at the foot of Whitehall Street, where he put up a handsome stone mansion. Gardens flanked the mansion on three sides, and a velvety lawn extended to the water’s edge. There the governor’s private barge was docked at a landing reached by cut stone steps. This imposing residence was called White Hall, and Whitehall Street was later named for it.
    The first dwelling on Manhattan north of Wall Street was erected before Stuyvesant’s time in Greenwich Village. Governor Peter Minuit had set aside in perpetuity four farms for the company. Minuit’s greedy successor, Wouter Van Twiller, grabbed the property for himself and founded a tobacco plantation. Then he put up a farmhouse that became the nucleus of a hamlet, known as Bossen Bouwerie, or the Farm in the Woods.
    Still farther north on the island, along the Hudson River from about 14th to 135th streets, there stretched an area called Bloemen-dael, or Vale of the Flowers. At 125th Street a ravine, called the Widow David’s Meadow sloped westward to the Hudson. Blooming-dale Village developed in the vicinity of 100th Street and the Hudson River.
    About 1637 a Dutchman, named Hendrick De Forest, became the first white man to settle in what is now known as Harlem. Other colonists soon built there, but Indians ravaged the area so repeatedly that by the time Stuyvesant arrived here, all had deserted their farms. In 1658 Stuyvesant decided to improve this northeastern end of Manhattan “for the promotion of agriculture and as a place of amusement for the citizens of New Amsterdam.” He promised that when twenty-five families settled there, he would provide them with a ferry to Long Island and a minister of their own.
    Taking his word for it, the first settlers broke ground on August 14, 1658, near the foot of 125th Street and the Harlem River. Apparently Stuyvesant named the community New Haarlem for the town of Haarlem in Holland. The new hamlet lay eleven miles from New Amsterdam, the exact distance between Amsterdam and Haarlem in the old country. Along an old Indian path the governor carved a road connecting the two Manhattan communities. By horseback the trip each way took three hours. Dutchmen, French Protestants (Huguenots), Danes, Swedes, and Germans later developed rich farms