Comparatively recent as were the beginnings of the city, hardly a trace of the original village remains. Not a single building has come down to us from the Dutch period. It was to have been expected that something would survive the flight of less than three centuries. A happy chance might easily have preserved the stone “temple” erected within the walls of the Fort in 1652, or the slightly older warehouse, or some one of the many curious little stone or brick houses in which the burly burghers of the seventeenth century smoked their long pipes by the chimney-side, while their wives plied the spinning-wheel, their daughters spread the board, and their children, in padded breeches, played about the sanded floor. The Stadt Huys, originally built as an inn, to relieve Director Kieft of the burden of overmuch entertaining, dated back to the same year as the Dutch Reformed Church in the fortified enclosure. The organization of the old church is still maintained, and the functions of the city government have been performed in successive buildings to the present day; but the picturesque old government house—fifty feet square, three stories high in the walls and two in the attic, with windows in the gable of its crow-stepped roof,—that should have been cherished as a most interesting relic of the city’s earliest period, lasted but a little way into the present century, having then been used for over a hundred years for commercial purposes. [Illustration: STAINED-GLASS WINDOW IN “BOWLING GREEN OFFICES.” SHOWING GREEN ABOUT 1760.] Chief among the few other survivals from the early days, and antedating all of them, is Bowling Green. This oldest bit of park land in the city dates from the Dutch occupation. It lay immediately in front of the Fort, and no building has ever stood upon its diminutive, oblong site. The relatively old row of buildings (Steamship Row) which overlooks it from the south will ere long be replaced by a Custom House worthy of the second port of entry in the world. This will occupy the site of the old government house, which once served the purpose for which the new building is designed. In 1771, it was found advisable to enclose the Green with an iron fence. Bereft of the crowns that surmounted the posts, the fence still surrounds it, though the equestrian statue of George III., which it was put up to protect, vanished in 1776. In the excitement that followed the reading of the Declaration of Independence, in that year, the crowd marched down Broadway from the Common, and tumbled the King from his pedestal. The leaden carcass was shipped to Connecticut, where the wife and daughter of Governor Wolcott cannily converted it into rebel bullets. An indignity similar in degree though different in kind was offered to America’s eloquent Parliamentary advocate, William Pitt, whose marble effigy at Wall and William Streets was decapitated during the Revolution by the Tories, and left standing for years as a mere “disturber of traffic.”