When the British took over New Amsterdam, they changed the map with these short-lived new street names

One of the attractions of walking through the Financial District is realizing how many of these mostly nonconforming, cow path-like streets got their start 400 years ago in the colonial outpost of New Amsterdam. Broadway, Broad Street, Maiden Lane, Wall Street—these are their anglicized names, but they all date back to the four decades in the 17th century when the tip of Lower Manhattan was a Dutch-owned settlement with canals, windmills, and about 1,500 people. Then the British sailed into New York Bay in 1664 and seized the settlement without much of a fight. (The Dutch took it back briefly in 1673, but the British quickly regained control.) They renamed the colony New York in honor of the Duke of York, set up a new governmental framework, and established 24 articles of capitulation that guaranteed property rights and other liberties to existing citizens. The British also began tinkering with the map, erasing many of the street names associated with Dutch rule. Pearl Street, or…