Named after a real city wall that stood here from 1653 to 1699.
Fearing an English invasion, Peter Stuyvesant had a ditch and wooden palisade built on New Amsterdam’s northern edge, using the labour of enslaved Africans and white colonists. The Dutch called the street Het Cingel, ‘the Belt’; after the English takeover in 1664, records call it ‘the Belt or the City Wall’. The wall was removed in 1699, as the city had outgrown it.