History
Broadway was originally the Wickquasgeck Trail, carved into the brush destination of Manhattan by its Native American inhabitants. This trail originally snaked through swamps and rocks along the length of Manhattan Island. Upon the arrival of the Dutch, the trail soon became the main road through the island from Nieuw Amsterdam at the southern tip. The Dutch explorer and entrepreneur David de Vries gives the first mention of it in his journal for the year 1642 ("the Wickquasgeck Road over which the Indians passed daily"). The Dutch named the road "Heerestraat". Although current street signs are simply labeled as "Broadway", in a 1776 map of New York City, Broadway is explicitly labeled "Broadway Street". In the mid-eighteenth century, part of Broadway in what is now lower Manhattan was known as Great George Street. In the 18th century, Broadway ended at the town commons north of Wall Street, where traffic continued up the East Side of the island via Eastern Post Road and the West Side via Bloomingdale Road. The western Bloomingdale Road would be widened and paved during the 19th century, and called "The Boulevard" north of Columbus Circle. On February 14, 1899 the name "Broadway" was extended to the entire Broadway/Bloomingdale/Boulevard road.
Read more about this topic: Broadway (New York City)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)