60           THE DUTCH AND  QUAKER COLONIES
To a visitor sailing up the harbour the most conspicuous
objects would have been Fort  James,  standing on  the
present Battery and mounting forty-seven guns, and a little
to the west  of it  the principal town windmill1
Fort James   Qn  thg   other ^ nea]. the present   <gouth p-^
scarcely less conspicuous, was the stone Government House, built by Stuyvesant, the name of which was afterward changed by Governor Dongan to Whitehall. Hard by was the governor's dwelling-house. Going up Whitehall Street, one would espy the warehouse and bakery that had once belonged to the West India Company, and the brewery, convenient for governor and dominie. Near it stood the Dutch parsonage with its quaint flower-beds gorgeous in colours and bordered with closely trimmed box. Coming to the Bowling Green, the belfry of Kieft's church of St. Nicholas would be seen peering over the walls of the fort at the graveyard on the west side of Broadway. Just north of the wall stood the town pump. Stepping back to Whitehall and turning eastward, we come upon the jail and the stocks. Pearl Street, the oldest in the city, was then the river bank, and was often called Waterside or the Strand, but the old name has prevailed, which is said to have been given it from the abundant heaps of oyster-shells, highly prized for the excellence of their lime. The quaint Dutch houses, with their gables and weathercocks and small-paned dormer windows, were built of bricks baked in Holland, cemented with mortar made from this lime. They retained the high stoop (stoep, i. e. steps), which in the Fatherland raised the best rooms above the risk of inundation, and thus bequeathed to modern New York one of its most distinctive architectural features.
From Pearl Street in a gentle curve ran northward to the city wall a street most suggestive of Holland, with a stream flowing through its centre diked on both sides like a Dutch
1 This description partly follows the map of " The Towne of Man-nados, or New Amsterdam, in 1661," of which the original is in the British Museum.