From Old Wells and Watercourses of the Island of Manhattan, by George Everett Hill and George E. Waring, Jr. in Historic New York: the First Series of the Half Moon Papers (New York, 1899):
[During the early Dutch settlement] an inlet of the bay, which could be made to do duty as a canal, extended inland for about a quarter of a mile on the line of the present Broad Street. This ditch was the natural outlet for a marshy section of considerable size lying above what soon came to be known as The Beaver Path, now Beaver Street. A brook tricked through this marsh, from the common lying north of it, called the Shaape Waytie, or Sheep Pasture, and recieved the flow of a small stream which ran through the Company's Valley, as that portion of the The Beaver Path was named whcih lay between Heer Straat (Broadway) and the junction of these two rivulets. From the latter point, the Heere Gracht-- or Heere Graft as it was soon called, stretched its odorous length to the bay.
Around this ditch gathered much of the social and business life of the new community....
From http://www.oldstreets.com/index.asp?letter=C:
By the late 1640s the canals were
lined with sheet piling to stabilize both their banks and the narrow
streets on either side. The largest canal was the Heere Gracht, which
is now Broad Street from Pearl to Beaver Streets. Its narrower
continuation, from Beaver Street to a point just south of Exchange
Place, was called the Prinzen Gracht. Both were named, perhaps in jest,
after two elegant canals that had recently been built in Amsterdam. The
Bever Gracht was a branch canal along what is now Beaver Street from
Broadway west to about the present New Street. A drawback of the canals
was that they also served as open sewers and stank terribly. The
British filled them up in 1676.
A mid-19th century map showing the original lots of the Dutch settlement in the 17th century shows both the marsh and the Broad St Canal (first image is entire map, second image is close-up). Note how close Broadway ("The Great Highway") is to the Hudson ("The North River"); almost all the land west of Broadway at the south end of Manhattan is landfill.
Viele's Water Map shows both the Broad Street Canal and the Maiden Lane stream:
By 1766, in this view from a British map, the ditch is filled in and only the "wet dock" remains at the East River end.
See posts on the Broad Street Canal
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