Manhattan

Dutch names sit under much of Manhattan. New Amsterdam was founded at the island's southern tip in 1624, made capital of New Netherland in 1625, and renamed New York when the English took control in 1664; Wall Street follows the line of a palisade Peter Stuyvesant ordered built in 1653, Harlem takes its name from Haarlem, Greenwich Village from Groenwijck, the Upper West Side from Bloemendaal, and Gramercy from a soggy Krom Moerasje. The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 laid the grid over most of what came afterwards, though the West Village's angled streets predate it. Rail decided when much of the island filled in: the Ninth Avenue Elevated reached the Upper West Side in the late 1870s, the city's first subway opened beneath Broadway in 1904, Inwood's arrived in 1906 and East Harlem's Lexington Avenue line in 1918. Many of the names themselves are recent — SoHo from a 1962 planning report, Tribeca and NoHo in the 1970s, NoLIta in 1996, NoMad in 1999.