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Let’s be real for a second. If you’re searching for pictures of the New York colony, you’re probably going to be a little disappointed—at least at first.
Why? Because cameras didn't exist.
The first permanent European settlement in what we now call New York happened in 1624. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce didn't snap the first messy, blurry photograph until 1826. That is a massive two-hundred-year gap. So, when we talk about "pictures" of this era, we’re actually looking at a collection of primary source sketches, detailed maps, and oil paintings that were often finished decades after the fact.
It’s easy to get fooled. You’ll see a vibrant, high-definition digital painting of New Amsterdam online and think, "Wow, so that's what it looked like." Honestly, most of those are just historical guesswork. To see the real New York colony, you have to look at the grainy, hand-drawn etchings from the 17th century. They aren't pretty. They're often weirdly out of proportion. But they are the only honest visual record we have of a tiny mud-street village that eventually became the center of the world.
The Hartgers View: The Earliest "Picture" We Have
The most famous visual reference for the early colony is known as the Hartgers View. Published in Amsterdam around 1651, it supposedly shows Manhattan as it looked in the late 1620s.
It’s tiny.
In this sketch, you see a fragile-looking Fort Amsterdam sitting at the tip of the island. There’s a windmill, which the Dutch brought over because, well, they’re Dutch. But here is the catch: the artist who engraved it probably never set foot in North America. We know this because the image is actually reversed. If you look at the original print, the fort is on the wrong side of the island. Historians think the engraver simply copied a drawing and didn't realize that printing it would flip the perspective.
Despite the error, it captures the vibe. It wasn't a city. It was a rugged corporate outpost for the Dutch West India Company. There were no skyscrapers, obviously. Just small wooden houses with steep gables, a few piers for fur trading, and a lot of mud.
Why the Architecture Looks So Familiar
If you look at the Castello Plan—a map from 1660 that acts as a sort of "bird's eye view" picture—you’ll notice the houses look exactly like old Amsterdam.
The Dutch were homesick.
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They built narrow, tall brick houses with stepped gables because that’s what they knew. They even dug a canal right where Broad Street is today. Seriously, there was a canal in lower Manhattan. They called it the Heere Gracht. When you see contemporary illustrations of this canal, it looks peaceful. In reality? It was basically an open sewer. People threw everything in there, from kitchen scraps to animal waste. Eventually, the English got fed up with the smell and filled it in, which is why Broad Street is so wide today.
The British Takeover and the Visual Shift
In 1664, the English sailed in and told Peter Stuyvesant that the colony belonged to the Duke of York now. The visual record starts to change here. Pictures of the New York colony from the late 17th and early 18th centuries stop looking like a Dutch village and start looking like an English provincial town.
The English brought more "ordered" art. We start seeing sketches of Trinity Church—the original one, not the one there now. The first Trinity Church was completed in 1698. If you find an old sketch of it, it looks surprisingly modest. It sat on the edge of the water. Back then, the Hudson River was much closer to Broadway than it is today. Almost all the land west of Greenwich Street is "made land"—basically centuries of garbage and dirt used to extend the island.
The Problem with 19th-Century "History" Paintings
Here is where it gets tricky for researchers. In the mid-1800s, there was a huge boom in "historical" paintings. Artists like Edward Henry loved painting scenes of "Old New York."
They are beautiful. They are also mostly fantasies.
These painters were living in a dirty, industrializing city and were nostalgic for a "simpler" time. They painted the New York colony with clean streets, happy people in pristine colonial outfits, and sun-drenched harbors. When you're looking for authentic visuals, you have to be careful. If the painting looks too "perfect," it’s probably a 19th-century interpretation.
Always look for the watermark or the artist’s date. If it says 1850, it’s a tribute, not a record.
What the Maps Tell Us That Paintings Can't
Since we lack high-fidelity photos, maps are actually our best "pictures." The Duke’s Plan of 1664 is a masterpiece of information.
It shows the "Wall."
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You've heard of Wall Street. In the 1600s, it was a literal wall. It was a wooden palisade built by the Dutch to keep out the British (it didn't work) and to protect against potential attacks from the Lenape people, the original inhabitants of the land. When you look at the Duke's Plan, you see how tiny the footprint of the colony really was. Everything north of modern-day Wall Street was "the wilderness."
- The Collect Pond: North of the city was a massive body of fresh water.
- The Bouweries: This is where the word "Bowery" comes from. These were the farms.
- The Commons: This is now City Hall Park. Back then, it was just a place to graze cows.
Visualizing this helps you realize how much we've paved over. There were rolling hills in Manhattan. There were streams. There was a massive hill called "Bayard’s Mount" near what is now Chinatown. The English eventually leveled it to fill in the Collect Pond because the pond became so polluted by tanneries that it was a public health nightmare.
Life Through the Eyes of the Lenape
We cannot talk about the visual history of the New York colony without acknowledging what is missing. There are almost no "pictures" from the perspective of the Lenape (Delaware) people from that time.
Most images of Indigenous people in the New York colony were drawn by Europeans. These drawings are often highly stylized or outright caricatures. They show the Lenape in "noble savage" poses or as background characters in a European success story.
To get a real sense of the pre-colonial and early-colonial landscape, historians now use "topographical reconstructions." By looking at the soil and the original water lines, researchers like Eric Sanderson (the Manahatta Project) have created digital "pictures" of what the island looked like in 1609. It wasn't a city; it was an incredibly biodiverse ecosystem of salt marshes, oak forests, and sandy beaches.
The Best Places to Find Authentic Colonial Visuals
If you want to see the real deal—not the Pinterest recreations—you have to go to the archives.
- The New York Public Library (Digital Collections): Use the search term "New Amsterdam" or "New York 17th Century." They have high-resolution scans of the original maps.
- The Museum of the City of New York: They hold many of the original Dutch and English sketches.
- The New-York Historical Society: This is the gold mine. They have the "Birch Views," which are actually from the late 1700s, but they show the transition from colony to city better than almost anything else.
- The National Archives of the Netherlands: Since New York started as a Dutch company town, a huge amount of the visual record is actually in The Hague.
Why the "Visscher Map" Matters
If you're looking for a "hero image" of the New York colony, it's the Visscher Map (Novi Belgii). Created around 1655, it features a small inset at the bottom called the "Nieuw Amsterdam" view.
It is incredibly detailed. You can see the gallows (scary but true), the church inside the fort, and the "Schreyers Hoeck" (the Weeper's Point), where people stood to wave goodbye to ships heading back to Europe. It captures a moment of peak Dutch influence right before the English arrived.
Practical Steps for History Buffs and Researchers
If you are trying to use these images for a project or just for your own curiosity, here is how you should handle them.
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First, check the source. If the "picture" is an oil painting with a lot of movement and drama, check the date. If it’s from the 1800s, use it for "vibe" but not for "fact."
Second, look at the orientation. Remember that early colonial artists struggled with perspective. They often made the fort look much larger and more imposing than it actually was to impress their bosses back in Europe.
Third, pay attention to the water. The easiest way to spot a fake or a highly stylized colonial "picture" is how the shoreline looks. If the shoreline is straight and paved, it's a later depiction. The real colonial New York had a jagged, swampy coastline.
Finally, don't ignore the maps. A map from 1660 tells you more about the lived experience of a New Yorker than a romanticized painting from 1860 ever will. You can see the size of the lots, the location of the gardens, and the literal walls people built to feel safe in a place that felt very far from home.
The New York colony wasn't the shimmering metropolis we see in movies. It was a gritty, smelly, ambitious, and incredibly diverse trading post. The pictures we have are fragments of a puzzle. When you look at them, you aren't just looking at buildings; you're looking at the DNA of a city that was born to trade and destined to grow.
Keep your eyes on the original sketches. They may be small and messy, but they are the only real window we have into the world that existed before the concrete took over.
To dig deeper into the actual layout of the streets you walk today, look up the Castello Plan. It is a 1660 map that shows every individual house and garden in the colony. Comparing that map to a modern Google Map of Lower Manhattan is the single best way to visualize how the "pictures" of the past became the reality of the present.
Actionable Insight: If you are visiting New York City, head to the corner of Pearl and State Streets. Look for the yellow brick outlines in the sidewalk. These mark the foundations of the Stadt Huys (the first City Hall) which appears in many of those colonial sketches. Seeing the physical scale in person changes how you view those old "pictures" forever.