The street was formally laid out in 1696, the first street north of still-palisaded Wall Street. After the street was laid and cobbled, its southern-most end (what would have stretched into Fly Market Slip in the late 1600s/early 1700s) quickly became home to the popular Fly Market a year later, so named thanks to a corruption of the original Dutch word for valley, “vly,” which was often used to describe the natural geography of the area.

The Fly Market offered fresh produce, fish, and meat under a covered roof, and while it lived to become New York’s longest running market, by 1815, city residents requested that it be disbanded and demolished due to its increasingly filthy and inconvenient state. By 1823, the market had closed for good, giving itself over to the newer Fulton Fish Market, and later, the New Amsterdam Market. The Fly Market, and its successor the Fulton Fish Market, which moved to the Bronx in 2005, was one of New York’s earliest open-air fish markets.