Before the city
The land that became New York City was home to the Lenape people for thousands of years before European contact. Their presence is still marked in place names across the region, even where the history itself is under-taught.
1624–1664: New Amsterdam
The Dutch West India Company established New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan in 1624. Many of Lower Manhattan's street patterns — including the winding path of Wall Street, built along an actual defensive wall — date to this Dutch period.
1664: The English take over
England seized the colony from the Dutch and renamed it New York, after the Duke of York. The street grid and much of the Dutch-era layout persisted even as the population and governance changed.
1811: The Commissioners' Plan
The grid system that defines most of Manhattan above Houston Street was laid out by this plan — a deliberate, ambitious act of city planning decades before most of that land was even built up, anticipating growth that hadn't happened yet.
1898: Consolidation
Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island merged with Manhattan to form the five-borough city as it exists today. Brooklyn, notably, had been the third-largest city in the US in its own right before the merger — a fact still occasionally invoked by Brooklynites with a certain pride.
20th century: growth, crisis, and reinvention
Waves of immigration built the neighborhoods that still define the city's character; the subway system expanded to connect the boroughs; the 1970s fiscal crisis nearly bankrupted the city; and the following decades saw a long, uneven recovery and transformation into the global cultural and financial center it is today.