The Dutch in New Netherland

R the top of the World Trade Center one evening four . years ago was an experience we will not soon forget. It was a few days after the publication of our book A Sweet and Alien Land, the story of Dutch New York, New Amsterdam. But from the restaurant's windows up on the 1 1 0 t h floor, it was almost impossible to see that little corner of Manhattan that had preoccupied us, as authors, for so long. Stretching away to the horizon we could see a vast modern city; but what had once been New Amsterdam itself was now almost hidden away at the foot of this towering symbol of modern New York. When we walked for the first time through Lower Manhattan, three years earlier, the Dutch past had seemed closer. It was Labor Day, and the streets were deserted—just like any Dutch town on a Sunday. The old warehouses, decrepit and neglected, that still stood between newer skyscrapers might have been in Leiden or Delft, although they were built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long after New Amsterdam became New York. But what was even more striking was the fact that the streets still ran according to the old plan laid out by Master Kryn Fredericks, the engineer from Amsterdam who arrived in Manhattan in 1625. He was sent by the newly formed West India Company, which had received a charter for this first Dutch settlement in the New World and was now anxious to protect its province, a promising source of the precious beaver furs. A fort was, understandably, the first priority and Fredericks brought with him a grandiose design. Starting an American tradition perhaps, it was to be a pentagon in shape; its circumference would measure more than 1,000 feet and the moat surrounding it would be eight feet deep. In the middle of the fort enclosure, there was to be a marketplace; around it, houses for the Council and the town notables, as well as a schoolhouse, church, and hospital all under one roof; and there were plans for a small town outside the fort. The project was never fully carried out, and the fort was never the size Fredericks had intended. But the street names in Lower Man-