Contact Admin. Anchored by Wall Street, New York City has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, [6] [7] [8] [9] and the city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization , the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.
There are varying accounts about how the Dutch-named "de Waalstraat" [12] got its name. A generally accepted version is that the name of the street was derived from a wall actually a wooden palisade on the northern boundary of the New Amsterdam settlement, built to protect against Native Americans, pirates, and the British.
While the Dutch word "wal" can be translated as "rampart", it only appeared as "de Walstraat" on English maps of New Amsterdam. The red people from Manhattan Island crossed to the mainland, where a treaty was made with the Dutch, and the place was therefore called the Pipe of Peace, in their language, Hoboken. But soon after that, the Dutch governor, Kieft , sent his men out there one night and massacred the entire population. Few of them escaped, but they spread the story of what had been done, and this did much to antagonize all the remaining tribes against all the white settlers.
Shortly after, Nieuw Amsterdam erected a double palisade for defense against its now enraged red neighbors, and this remained for some time the northern limit of the Dutch city. The space between the former walls is now called Wall Street, and its spirit is still that of a bulwark against the people.
In the s basic picket and plank fences denoted plots and residences in the colony. In these early days, local merchants and traders would gather at disparate spots to buy and sell shares and bonds, and over time divided themselves into two classes—auctioneers and dealers. Slavery was introduced to Manhattan in , but it was not until December 13, , that the New York City Common Council made Wall Street the city's first official slave market for the sale and rental of enslaved Africans and Indians.
