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3 min readNew York

New Amsterdam Walking Tour: Celebrate the Launch with Us in New York

New Amsterdam 1660 is now in TimeLens, and we are celebrating where it belongs: in New York City itself. Together with the New Amsterdam History Center, we are hosting a New Amsterdam walking tour through lower Manhattan, stopping at the TimeSpots along the way.

Phone showing the TimeLens reconstruction of the dock of New Amsterdam in 1660, held up among today's towers in lower Manhattan
Image: Phone showing the TimeLens reconstruction of the dock of New Amsterdam in 1660, held up among today's towers in lower Manhattan

📅 Thursday 22 October 2026, 11:00
📍 Meeting point: the steps of the New York Stock Exchange, Wall Street
👋 Sign up here

Where the tour begins

We start on Wall Street, at the spot where the Dutch built a wooden wall across the island in 1653 to protect the town from an English attack. The wall never saw battle, but the path beside it gave the world one of its most famous street names. If you have ever wondered how that happened, our post on why Wall Street is called Wall Street tells the whole story.

From there, the tour continues past the TimeSpots of New Amsterdam, where you can hold up your phone and see the Dutch town exactly as it stood in 1660, right where it stood.

What you will see

In total we are launching 11 locations in Manhattan, with 18 reconstructions in 360 degrees. Among them:

  • The Fort, the seat of the colonial government, with its church, barracks and council chamber
  • The Wall, the defensive line that became Wall Street
  • The City Hall, built as a tavern in 1641 and the town's first city hall from 1653
  • The Heere Gracht, the canal that ran through the town, much like the canals of Amsterdam
  • The Dock, where goods and passengers from Europe and the Caribbean came ashore
  • The Kierstede House, home of the interpreter Sara Roelofs and the surgeon Hans Kierstede, reconstructed room by room
  • The Stuyvesant House, the "Great House" of Director General Petrus Stuyvesant

Each scene is filled with people drawn from 17th century Dutch paintings, and every location is narrated by author Russell Shorto, whose book The Island at the Center of the World brought the story of Dutch Manhattan to a whole new readership. At each reconstruction you can also take a historical selfie, with New Amsterdam as your backdrop, to share with your friends.

Built on years of research

None of this would exist without the New Amsterdam History Center. The reconstructions are based on their years of research and modelling of the Dutch settlement, much of which you can see in their Mapping Early New York project. Their work starts from one remarkable document, a map drawn in 1660 that shows every house in town. You can read more about it in our post on the Castello Plan.

The reconstructions also bring back the people who lived here, from the Company officials and traders to the enslaved Africans whose labour built the town. One of them is Sara Roelofs, who interpreted between the Dutch and the Munsee speaking Lenape. Her story is told in Sara Roelofs: The Woman Who Translated Between Two Worlds.

Not in New York?

You do not have to be in Manhattan to see New Amsterdam. The reconstructions can be viewed in TimeLens wherever you are, so you can still see the Dutch town and listen to Russell Shorto's narration without the jet lag. Read more about the project in our New Amsterdam 1660 announcement.

Download TimeLens on the App Store or on Google Play.

Thank you

Huge thanks to Toya Dubin, Vanessa Bezemer Sellers and Eduard van Dijk of the New Amsterdam History Center for making this possible, and to Russell Shorto for lending his voice to the town he wrote about so brilliantly.

We hope to see you on 22 October.

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