Imagine that it is 1660 and you have just entered the town of New Amsterdam via the west gate of the wall and find yourself at the intersection of what is now Broadway and Wall Street.
How would you go about getting a pint or two of pure unadulterated ale, served the way that the beer gods intended, straight from the cask or maybe jug?
Let us ask for advice from my distant relative (possibly), whom we shall refer to as De Vat Fluisteraar.
Poor Sod: Excuse me, my good fellow, you look like a local. Would you happen to know where I can get a beer in this fair town?
De Vat Fluisteraar: You are about seven years too late mate.
Poor Sod: Excuse me?
De Vat Fluisteraar: Yeah, there used to be a fine old boozer down there over the swamp on the south east waterfront. The Stadt Herbergh they called it. We used to hang out there all the time. The whole town did. Even held meetings there.
Poor Sod: So what happened to it?
De Vat Fluisteraar: Some tosser, excuse my Dutch, decided that the meetings were more important than the beer, so they converted it into the city hall. Stadt Huys, they call it now. Was it really 1653? Well, time flies.
Poor Sod: Thanks, I think I will check it out anyway. What’s the best way to get there from here?
De Vat Fluisteraar: You could keep on going straight down De Heere Straet (Ed: Broadway), swing left at Fort Amsterdam (Ed: Bowling Green), go through the marketplace (Ed: Whitehall St.), and then double back along the waterfront on Pearl Straet (Yep. Pearl St.). You can’t miss it, tallest building on the river.
Poor Sod: And what if I didn’t want to get too close to the Fort?
De Vat Fluisteraar: In that case, you should follow the palisade (Ed. Wall St.) down here to your left. Not all the way down, if you know what I mean. You want to skip past the first street on your right (Ed. Broad St.) that just leads to the swamp (Ed. Stock Market?) and the ditch. Take the second right, some call it Smee Straet (Ed. William St.) and then start zig-zagging. Third right (Ed. South William St.), you may have to cut through someone’s garden, then first left towards the mill (Ed. Mill Lane), right again at the T-junction (Ed. Stone St.), and finally take the first left (Ed. Coenties Alley). Place will be on your right as you hit Pearl.
Poor Sod: Thank you, my good man. When we take over, I will make sure that we put an ale house back in the area.
De Vat Fluisteraar: Excuse me?
Fast forward to a more innocent time, say 2024.
Instead of slinking through the Lande Porte in the wall, our intrepid drinker would be staggering out of the subway station at the top of Wall Street, in search of some cask ale in the NYC financial district.
If he were to ask assistance from a young (ha!), confident looking local, I imagine that the conversation would go something like this:
Poor Sod: Hi. Do you have any idea where I can get a cask ale in this area?
The Cask Whisperer: You are about seven years too late mate.
Poor Sod: So what would you recommend?
The Cask Whisperer: Go straight down Wall Street here. Get on to Pier 11 and take the Astoria ferry up to Long Island City. Fifth Hammer is just a couple of blocks when you get off.
The fact is that downtown Manhattan was never a hotbed of cask ale outlets; there has only been three in my memory, mostly operating as such around the same time, the 2010s.
In fact, other than a handful of historic pubs and a smattering of Irish bars, it has always been slim pickings for the casual imbiber.
But I went down to lower Manhattan this past holiday weekend as a tourist, to follow the route taken by that poor sod in 1660, guided by a book on Dutch New York, found and borrowed from my local little library; i.e. the laundry room in my building.
I did not stagger out of Wall Street station, because I had decided to get the Q train downtown and get off at Canal Street to wander through Chinatown first, just in case I needed to get some walking munchies.
But I did start my official Dutch NYC history tour at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, looking down Broadway towards Bowling Green before crossing to walk down Wall Street.
Just like decent boozers, the evidence of the Dutch colony-cum-town of New Amsterdam is slim pickings; there are some scattered plaques, the first of which is attached to the wall of 1 Wall Street, and there is one small archeological site, but the very best evidence that New Amsterdam existed at all is in the layout and some names of the streets themselves.
So let us take a short stroll.
Turning our back on Broadway and Trinity Church, we head east down Wall Street and turn briefly into Broad Street to look for another plaque on the side of the Stock Exchange building.
There is a plaque, but it doesn’t appear to mention the Dutch presence in NYC at all, not that I could read it from behind the barricades, some forty feet away from the building.
What there was though was a bunch of tourists, hanging around in groups and unenthusiastically taking selfies.
So back to Wall and eastwards to William Street, where we hang a right and follow the canyon as it curves towards the East River waterfront, before bailing out as it crosses Beaver Street and sliding right onto South William Street, looping around the flatiron frontage of Delmonico’s steak house, one of those aforementioned classic historic places (1837), but not a pub.
This is where we would be taking a shortcut across somebody’s garden in 1660; navigating the streets back then were just as dodgy as the present day.
We don’t stay on South William Street for long, just long enough to catch the unusual decorative frontage of numbers 13-15: Dutch-style maybe?
Instead we go left on Mill Lane to get to Stone Street where we come face to face with Ulysses’, a “proper” Irish pub with all the trimmings including traditional music sessions, and at one time in recent history, a functioning handpump.
We are now on cobblestoned and flag-festooned Stone Street, with tables set up all down the middle of the (hopefully) pedestrian street, and major preparations for Oktoberfest underway.
We make a right onto Stone Street from Mill Lane and walk a single short block to Coenties Alley, where Stone Street was bisected by the construction of the monstrous Goldman Sachs (remember them) building in the 1980s.
It was the construction of this building that uncovered the site of the 1600s Stadt Huys and the Lovelace Tavern (aka The King’s House) which was built in 1670 after the English took over the town and named it New York.
You can see the “remains” of the Stadt Huys as markings on the pavement of Coenties Alley when you make a left from Stone Street towards Pearl Street, and you can see part of the footings of the Lovelace Tavern as you turn right onto Pearl Street itself; you have to look down through the protective “glass” to actually see anything, but there it is, a little bit of seventeenth century New York, right underneath your feet, below the tower, outside of Le Pain Quotidien …
If you were here in 1660 though, you would be on the waterfront, and everything on your left after you make that right onto Pearl Street would be the East River, including the “historic” Fraunces Tavern at the end of the block; it would take another 100 years (1762) before there would be enough landfill to build the tavern.
Fraunces Tavern has an impressive history all of its own, not to be covered here because it has nothing to do with New Amsterdam, but it is a fascinating place to visit and explore; it gets an honorable mention from me as it also briefly had cask ales on tap.
Continuing on Pearl Street, we cross the Broad Street canal/muddy ditch, thankfully filled in since 1660, and pass to the left of an unusual but nondescript single-story building, where halfway down the block we find another plaque on the wall, which identifies the site of the first church built on the island of Manhattan in 1633, a congregation of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church.
The church itself would soon move into the protection of Fort Amsterdam, which is our next stop.
We turn right onto Whitehall Street and walk up towards Bowling Green and Broadway.
We pass on our left, the old U.S. Customs building, now home to a branch of the National Archives and a branch of the National Museum of the American Indian, but this was the location of Fort Amsterdam and is commemorated by a plaque in the entrance foyer.
The problem is that you have to go through the security scanner ritual to actually get into the lobby to experience the plaque in all of its plaquey beauty.
But once you have done that, feel free to explore the museum; the historic exhibits are cool, and the selective contemporary artwork displayed in a downstairs gallery are incredible.
I ended up spending two hours inside.
But I sense a thirst coming on, and we need to complete our stroll, so back outside and make a left to head towards Battery Park, stopping only to admire the Dutch Commemorative flagpole, before skirting the park itself (a zoo) and heading over to Peter Minuit Plaza in front of the Staten Island Ferry terminal.
We will find a three-dimensional metal casting of the entire New Amsterdam street plan as it existed in 1660, parked on top of a large rock; if we were here in 1660, we would hope to be standing on the rocky outcrop where Peter Stuyvesant’s house stood, but in all actuality, we would probably be in the harbor.
A person could work up a real thirst after all of that walking and culture, so I wandered across to The Dead Rabbit on Water street for an Irish lunch: Guinness, cider and a bag of Tayto’s smoky bacon crisps.
This was the one cask ale outlet that I had real hope for, they even had their own name brand beer at one point, brewed by Flagship I think, or it may have been Bronx Brewery, but now they are just another, albeit very enjoyable, Irish pub downtown.
So I followed the advice of that latter day Vat Fluisteraar, wandered over to the ferry at Pier 11, and swung by Fifth Hammer for a few casks before heading home.
It would appear from my borrowed guide book that there are more concrete (or perhaps wooden) examples of Dutch colonial habitation in the other boroughs of NYC, so I sense that this may be the first in a series of casual (hopefully wet) strolls around town.
Scorecard w/e 09/03/24
In the past week, The Cask Whisperer has enjoyed the following casks:
- Old Glenham Severn Summer Ale @ Jones Wood Foundry
- Leo Neverlenny Proper Ale @ Fifth Hammer
Upcoming Cask Events (Festivals and Otherwise)
9/7/2024: Noah Webster House Real Ale Harvest Festival, West Hartford CT
It is coming up this weekend folks!
10/26/24: 9th Annual NYS Cask Fest at Woodland Farm Brewery, Utica NY
Dang, it looks like I am going to miss it this year, I will be down in Virginia for a family event the night before, and it will be a long haul and big ask to go back to NYC via Utica!
11/2/2024: 20th Annual Blue Point Cask Ale Festival, Patchogue NY
11/8/2024: Two Roads Cask Fest at Area 2, Stratford CT
Upcoming Random NYC Casks
- Sadly, no erratics have been identified so far this week.
NYC Cask Venues
Known Operational/Active Beer Engines
- Jones Wood Foundry (x2)
- Fifth Hammer
- Wild East
- The Shakespeare (x3)
- Cask Bar & Kitchen
- Drop-off Service
Occasional Pins (worth a follow on Instagram)
- Strong Rope
- KCBC
- Tørst
- Blind Tiger Ale House
- Threes Brewing
- Brouwerij Lane
