Wall Street recalls the wall that guarded New Amsterdam’s northern edge.
In 1653 Peter Stuyvesant ordered a ditch and wooden palisade, built by enslaved Africans and white colonists. The Dutch called the street Het Cingel, ‘the Belt’; tax records of 1665 say ‘the Belt or the City Wall’. Governor Thomas Dongan may have issued the first official designation of Wall Street in 1686. The wall was removed in 1699.