Whitehall (Manhattan)

The name Whitehall in the context of Manhattan originally referred to Peter Stuyvesant's grand residence at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, a name given to it by the British when they took over New Amsterdam from the Dutch. On the Castello map (1660, "illustration") Whitehall, with its white roof, stands on a jutting piece of land at Manhattan's tip, facing along the waterfront strand that extends along the East River. The only extensive pleasure gardens in seventeenth-century Nieuw Amsterdam/New York are seen to extend behind it, laid out in a patterned parterre of four squares. Other grounds in the center of blocks behind houses are commons and market gardens.

The mansion is long since gone, and now the name survives only as the short north-south Whitehall Street, about four blocks long, which extends from the southern end of Broadway alongside Bowling Green (the street name changes at Stone Street) to the southern end of FDR Drive, adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry terminal, on landfill beyond Stuyvesant's house-site. There is also the Whitehall Street–South Ferry New York City Subway stop on the BMT Broadway Line named after the street; entrances are located at the northern and southern ends of the street (Stone Street and the Staten Island South Ferry terminal).

The street is adjacent to part of the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House.

The most notable recent resident of the street was the corporate headquarters of the NASDAQ, although they have recently moved to Midtown. The Topps Corporation has an office building. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is renovating a building to use as a new headquarters. There are also several other office buildings and low-density shops.

The street is one-way southbound for several blocks near Bowling Green, and two-way for a single block near the Staten Island Ferry. The southernmost block (adjacent to the ferry terminal), provides access from FDR Drive to the Battery area, and is one-way northbound.

There used to be an active car and passenger ferry terminal at the southern tip of Manhattan called Whitehall Terminal, serving Brooklyn, Governors Island, Staten Island, and Weehawken, served mainly by the elevated trains. However since the subways have replaced the els, and cars now travel through tunnels such as the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the terminal has been allowed to decay, and is presently under renovation. Presently there is only a ferry to Governors Island, which is only open to the public on Saturdays. The terminal has been renamed the "Battery Maritime Building".

For many years, a military induction center was located on Whitehall Street before being bombed by Sam Melville in 1969 and rendered unusable. This center was made famous in Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant."