Having decided that we would take the children on the staten Island ferry so they could see Lady Liberty, we spent the morning strolling around Lower Manhattan. Lower Manhattan is one of the few areas of Manhattan that wasn’t built around the grid structure and as such reminds me of how towns and cities look in my homeland- England. The shear fact that there is little organisation to the street layout means that it is easy to get disorientated and you find yourself having to consult a map to make sure you aren’t in fact walking around in circles! Fortunately all this stopping and starting means that there are lots of opportunities to take photos…now, where’s my camera?

There are varying accounts about how the Dutch-named “de Waal Straat” got its name. A generally accepted version is that the name of the street name was derived from an earthen wall on the northern boundary of the New Amsterdam settlement, perhaps to protect against English colonial encroachment or incursions by native Americans. A conflicting explanation is that Wall Street was named after Walloons — possibly a Dutch abbreviation for Walloon being Waal. Among the first settlers that embarked on the ship “Nieu Nederlandt” in 1624 were 30 Walloon families

Excerpt taken from the Wall Street Wikipedia page