Why Is Wall Street Called Wall Street?

Almost everyone in the world will know Wall Street in NYC, but why does this famous street have this name? Why is Wall Street called Wall Street? This question is rather easy to answer if you imagine standing at the northern edge of New Amsterdam in 1660. In front of you runs a rough barrier of upright planks, marking the very limit of the town. Beyond it lie fields, and a single dirt road heading north into the island. Those two features, the wall and the road beside it, would one day give the world two of its most famous street names: Wall Street and Broadway. Neither began as anything like what it is now.

Image: Reconstruction by the NAHC of the Wall in New Amsterdam as seen in TimeLens.

Why Wall Street is called Wall Street: The wall

In 1653 the city council decided to build a wall across the northern edge of the town. The reason was fear of the English, with whom the Dutch Republic was then at war. The plan was ambitious, a sturdy line of logs twelve feet high and eighteen inches thick. Reality fell short. What actually went up was closer to a tall fence of horizontal planks than a fortress wall.

A wall that never saw a battle

For all the worry, the wall was never used in anger. No English army ever stormed it. Its lasting fame came not from defence but from the road that ran along its inner side, which people simply knew as the street by the wall. Wall Street. By the next century that street had become the heart of American stock trading, a name now spoken in every financial capital on earth. The wall itself was taken down before the century was out.

Broadway began as a Lenape trail

The road heading north has an even older story. Long before the Dutch arrived, the Lenape used Manhattan as a seasonal hunting ground and wore a path the length of the island, known as the Wickquasgeck Road after one branch of the Lenape. The Dutch widened it and called it the Heere Straat, the Gentlemen's Street, and the Brede Weg, the broad way. The English translated that last name directly, and Broadway was born.

A city written into its street names

Wall Street and Broadway are only the beginning. New York is full of Dutch names hiding in plain sight, from Brooklyn to the Bowery, each one a small survival from the Dutch town beneath the modern city.

See the wall for yourself

On the Castello Plan, the 1660 survey of New Amsterdam, you can see the wall running clean across the island. In TimeLens you can stand at the wall itself, and at the head of Broadway, and see the small Dutch town where two world famous names began.