PTAC Repair in New Utrecht, NY

In 1643, Anthony Janszoon van Salee, a half-Dutch, half-Moroccan son of a pirate, and a resident of New Amsterdam, obtained from the Director General of New Netherland a patent on a tract of land of more than 200 acres on western Long Island. It ran along the shore of the Bay opposite Staten Island. Most of the land was undeveloped until 1652, when Cornelius van Werckhoven took it over. A surveyor, Werckhoven was born in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and became a principal investor in the Dutch West India Company. Upon Van Werckhoven’s death in 1655, Jacques Cortelyou, guardian for Werckhoven’s children, received permission to sell lots of the land to create a town. Twenty lots were laid out. Cortelyou named the settlement Nieuw Utrecht after Werckhoven’s hometown.

Nicasius de Sille, an attorney from Arnhem, Gelderland, was one of the first to purchase a lot. He built a house using locally available stone, topped with red roof tiles imported from the Netherlands. He moved to New Utrecht from his former residence in New Amsterdam, at the lower part of the island near the current intersection of Broad Street and Exchange Place. De Sille served as an advisor to Governor Petrus Stuyvesant and as a “schout fiscal”, a combination of sheriff and district attorney. In 1660, de Sille completed a “List of the Inhabitants of New Amsterdam”, at the behest of Stuyvesant. The names and addresses on the list correspond to the houses drawn on the Castello Plan.

Once a defensive palisade wall was erected around the town of New Utrecht on western Long Island, more residents settled there. In 1657, New Utrecht was granted status as a village, and in 1661 Governor Peter Stuyvesant provided New Utrecht its own charter. New Netherland was taken over by the English in 1664, who changed its name to the Province of New York.