Canal Street: The History of New York City

When New York City was settled by the Dutch in the 1620s, it was all the way down where Battery Park and Bowling Green are today. The city's physical growth was stymied up until the 19th century by a massive network of springs, ponds and swamps from about Chamber Street to roughly Broom or Spring Street and what's now Soho. Around 1805, finally, the city cut a canal from those springs in what's now Chinatown at a diagonal to the west out to Hudson out to the Hudson River to drain all the water of those swamps with them drained away. That whole area was able to be gritted out and developed as essentially the city's first