America's first capital city
New York began as New Amsterdam, a Dutch fur-trading post at the tip of Manhattan that the English seized and renamed in 1664. For a stretch either side of 1789 it was the nation's capital — Washington took the first presidential oath on a Wall Street balcony at Federal Hall before Congress packed up for Philadelphia the following year. The 1811 grid that defines Manhattan was controversial in its own time for flattening hills and erasing the winding colonial streets below Houston. Central Park looks like preserved wilderness and is almost entirely engineered, drained from swampland and blasted out of rock in the 1850s. The subway, opened in 1904, doubles as an accidental museum — the mosaic tilework at Astor Place and Fulton Street was wayfinding before anyone called it art.
