Watercourses

Broad Street Canal/Heere Graft, Manhattan

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

Broad Street Canal/Heere Graft, Manhattan Sewer

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):

    In 1671, further repairs to the big ditch were made.... but in 1676...the edict went forth that the precious canal must be made way with, and the inhabitants were ordered to cover it and fill it up level with the street....

    So De Heere Graft was buried and its place became Broad Street....

    Under the street, the canal, turned into a sewer, still serves as outlet for the drainage of about thirty-eight acres of closely built territory; and the extensive system of piling, needed to support heavy buildings on the site of the old swamp, still call to mind the original condition of the ground.