Ask when was NYC founded, and you'll get a surprisingly debated answer. Dutch settlers first landed on Governors Island in 1624, but the city itself traces its official birth to 1625, when the Dutch West India Company moved its trading post to the southern tip of Manhattan and began building Fort Amsterdam. New York City's government made 1625 the official founding year in 1974, cementing the story that this small fur-trading outpost, not the later English takeover of 1664, marks the true beginning of the city.
That answer to the question, “When was New York City founded?” matters less than what happened next. A cluster of traders, farmers, and free and enslaved Africans built a scrappy settlement at the island's tip, and over the following three centuries, that settlement stretched northward, block by block, until it became the sprawling, five-borough city we know today. Understanding this migration northward is the key to understanding NYC history, and nowhere tells that story better than Midtown.
Lower Manhattan holds the fingerprints of the earliest city. The winding, narrow streets around Wall Street, a genuine oddity in Manhattan's otherwise gridded layout, follow the footprint of an actual wooden wall the Dutch built in 1653 to defend against English attack. Bowling Green, just steps from where Fort Amsterdam once stood, remains New York's oldest public park. Visitors who wander this part of the city are literally walking the layout the Dutch first traced nearly 400 years ago.
For its first two centuries, this southern tip was New York. Commerce, government, and daily life stayed clustered downtown. It took the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, the grid system that organized Manhattan's streets north of Houston, to set the stage for the city's real expansion. Once the grid existed, New York had a blueprint for growth, and growth followed the rail lines, streetcars, and eventually the subway northward.
Midtown Manhattan didn't become the city's cultural engine by accident. Through the 1800s, it was still mostly farmland and scattered development. The turning point came in the early 20th century, when theater impresarios, department stores, and eventually the entertainment industry planted their flags around what became Times Square and the Theater District. Broadway, which started as a Lenape trail and Dutch cattle path, became the spine of American entertainment.
The 1920s accelerated everything. Midtown boomed with construction, and the era's signature architectural style, Art Deco, reshaped the skyline with bold geometric lines and glamorous detail. This is the same decade, the Roaring Twenties, that gave rise to The Belvedere Hotel, which opened its doors in 1926 directly across the street from the old Madison Square Garden and was once recognized as the MSG Hotel.
Built by Mack Kanner, the youngest of eighteen children and the man widely credited as the founder of Manhattan's Garment Center District, The Belvedere Hotel was designed by architect Bertram N. Marcus with the same Art Deco flourishes defining the neighborhood around it. Kanner, who also built the New Yorker Hotel, understood exactly what Midtown was becoming: the entertainment capital of the country.
Few New York history facts capture Midtown's theatrical energy quite like this one: the Belvedere once housed performers and staff from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, who stayed there while performing at old Madison Square Garden just steps away. Theatrical performers, actors, musicians, and sports figures filled its rooms for decades, drawn by the bright lights of Broadway and the roar of the crowds at the Garden. The hotel sat at the literal intersection of sports and show business, a role few other buildings from that era can claim.
That old Madison Square Garden, the third iteration of the arena, built at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street, is gone now, replaced by an office tower, but The Belvedere Hotel still stands less than a five-minute walk from the site. From the hotel's front door, guests can reach Times Square in about six minutes on foot, Radio City Music Hall in roughly ten minutes, and the Broadway theater district in just a few short blocks, all without a rideshare, though a quick car ride covers the same ground in minutes during busy hours.
This is the throughline connecting Dutch fur traders to Broadway marquees: New York City has always grown by reinventing its old neighborhoods while leaving traces behind for those who know where to look. The history of NYC isn't confined to a museum. It's in the crooked streets of Lower Manhattan, the Art Deco lobbies of Midtown, and the buildings still standing after a century of change.
100 years after opening its doors during the Roaring Twenties, The Belvedere Hotel remains a living chapter in that story; not a replica of old New York, but a piece of it still welcoming guests today.
Book a stay at The Belvedere Hotel and experience a century of living New York City history from the heart of Midtown.