New Visions of Old New York
Presented by The New York City Department of Records and Information Services &
The New Amsterdam History Center
Rendering of 1660 Castello Plan of New Amsterdam, James Wolcott Addams. I.N. Phelps Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909.
New Visions of Old New York features historical maps, drawings, sketches, and official documents from the New York City Municipal Archives alongside newly imagined, digitally-generated content from the New Amsterdam History Center’s Mapping Early New York project. The selections represent ways in which the lives of women, enslaved people, and Native Americans intersected with the settlement created by the Dutch West India Company.
The Dutch and English settlers strove to recreate the ways of life of their homelands as they built the new colony on what had been native land. Concepts of land ownership, the form of government, judicial processes, and commerce, plus their practice of creating written records, mimicked the Old World.
Preserved in the Municipal Archives, this written documentation—contracts, wills, deeds, edicts, drawings, etc.—combined with modern digital maps and 3D models, provides a vivid illustration of what life was like in 17th-century New Amsterdam, albeit from the perspective of the colonists.