As I reach Worth Street (known as Anthony Street in the 18th and 19th centuries1) the neighborhood begins to open up a little and a few taller, modern skyscraper buildings begin appearing in the distance. The area I am now standing in was known as the Sixth Ward in the early 19th century, which was encompassed by West Street to the west, Reade Street to the south, Canal Street to the north and Broadway to the east1. It currently is host to numerous city offices including the New York Supreme Court, The US District Court, The Office of the City Clerk, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and US Marshals Services.
I also find many small parks scattered amongst the modern buildings in which the previous mentioned city offices are housed. Collect Pond Park is one of them that I am particularly interested in as it is historically known as the location of a spring fed fresh water pond that was a great source for water in the 17th to the early 19th century and later on was polluted by waste from "noxious industry" (Alyssa Loorya, Archaeologist)2. This assisted in the crumbling of a beautiful community into what became known as" America's first slum" (Peter Brightbill, Historian).3 In order to understand how this came to be, we must first strip away the layers of modern lower Manhattan and uncover who first occupied what we know as New York City. While researching this subject I stumbled over a book published in 1999, A Short and Remarkable History of New York City written by Jane Mushabac and Angela Wigan, which shed light on who the first settlers were. Not surprisingly, it was a Native American tribe called 'Lenapes ("the people")'4 who began settling New York City in the middle of the 14th century. According to Mushabac and Wigan, the land was undisturbed by man with rolling hills, wooded areas, marshes and waterways that allowed for hunting, fishing and cultivation of the land by the Lenapes.