The Manhattan Living Architecture Museum-Part I

In world terms, little old Nieuw Amsterdam ( which we all now know and love as New York City)has not been around very long, and has historically torn down buildings that had not been around that long to begin with...which is why there are only these museum-piece old Dutch houses to be seen in odd parts of the City ( when we do a Dutch influence, it is usually in a sort of roundabout way, like the Dutch influenced roof of the carriage house shown above).

Never has there been a City that has not been bombed or something in which so much has been destroyed as New York, and particularly in Manhattan.

I found in my reading early on in school that people who lived in New York City were already complaining that the City had "destroyed its past" as early as about 1820 or so...

I am trying to think of some place downtown that is a remnant..I believe the old Fraunces Tavern where George Washington dined is still around.. 

 And then as the city marched North, decade after decade of buildings were thrown up along Broadway, the City's spine, and a few landmarks from that era like the old Grace Church are still around ( 1836)

And a lot of old houses of the the burgeoning middle class , in places like the North End of Greenwich Village, still survive...after which we get to the commercial burgeoning of New York
with all its cast iron front buildings, early skyscrapers, and gradually bigger and bigger apartment buildings.  Enclaves of older buildings do exist, such as in the Village, but even there you don't go far before running into the 20th and 21st Century very fast...( Now, on to Part Two)!