NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 
59 
land, taking five souls above fifteen years of age, 
should be given the standing of master and the right 
to claim two hundred acres of land. Here was what 
they had been waiting for; and now the Colony began 
its first real growth, healthy and constant. 
True to their long acquired instinct of conserving 
every particle of the earth, however, the town which 
sprang up to meet the growing need for dwellings was 
compactness itself—this, too, for better protection 
against the savages—and the plots allotted to each 
settler were modest, indeed, when the vast area at 
their disposal is considered. Their dwellings were set 
on the line of the street—streets had been laid out in 
1638—with their gable ends to the front and shoulder 
to shoulder, leaving no space between them for a 
passage to the rear, even, in most cases. Of course 
many came who did not fulfill the required stipulations 
to qualify for the standing of master; indeed these 
made up the majority of the inhabitants. But many 
who held large “bouweries” or farms lived in the 
town, for the protection it afforded, as well as for 
its neighbors. They were essentially neighborly folk, 
these. 
Pieter Cornellisen who came as house carpenter for 
the Company three years before the granting of the 
new Charter, found a strip of land which he bespoke 
that was fifty feet wide at one end, and only twenty- 
