Sawkill

[1]: 557  This 44,980-foot-long (13,710 m) stream began "within four blocks of the Hudson River":[1]: 95 A rill flowing east from the rocky ridge overlooking Bloomingdale Village, which rose near Ninth Avenue and 85th Street, flowed in a southerly direction through Manhattan Square, where it spread into a little pond, and then turned east, crossing Central Park to Fifth Avenue, receiving three tributaries within its limits, two from the north and one from the south.

[4]: 32  The name for the smaller, northern stream is undocumented, but is recorded by the Randel Map (1870) as entering the East River at 79th Street.

"[4]: 134  The workers of the saw mill are thought to have been primarily the slaves of the Dutch West India Company, whose lodgings, stationed at the mouth of the Sawkill until at least 1639, were referenced as "the quarter of the blacks, the [West India] company's slaves" in the first landmark map of Manhattan Island, the Manatus Map of 1639.

[4]: 33–35  It is thought that the slaves would use the stream to float the logs hewn by the mill to the East River, from which they would be transported to the newly established fort at New Amsterdam, at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, or thence to the Netherlands.

[9]: 163–165 Although local historian Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes regarded the Sawkill as, "the well known Saw-kill, which played an important part in the early days of Manhattan" by 1677, when the land was transferred from the Dutch West India Company to Abraham Shotwell, the stream was known commonly as "ye run of water, formerly called ye saw mill creeke.