The street is visible on the Castello Plan along the eastern shore of New Amsterdam, together with Schreyers Hook Dock (cf.

The colony's first church was built in 1633, during the tenure of director Wouter van Twiller at 39 Pearl Street, just outside the fort.

In 1652 a wooden defensive wall was constructed along the town's northern perimeter to protect against possible attack by English colonists.

[6] The Walton Mansion at 326 Pearl Street was a four story house built in 1752 prior to the American Revolution, known as the scene of extravagant parties.

In 1784, Alexander Hamilton, and others founded the Bank of New York and set up offices in the old mansion, until moving three years later to Hanover Square; at one time a boarding house, it was taken down in 1881.

In the winter of 1835, a gas pipe burst in a warehouse at the corner of Pearl and Merchant Streets, causing a fire that consumed some 600 buildings over seventeen blocks.

The building was demolished in 1925, but is memorialized in a painting by Richard Haas in the New York Public Library Main Branch’s DeWitt Wallace Periodicals Room.

[17] In July 1854, African American school teacher Elizabeth Jennings boarded a streetcar at the intersection of Pearl and Chatham Streets and was forcibly ejected.

Chester A. Arthur, a 24-year-old attorney, was successful in a lawsuit brought against the Third Avenue Railway Company, thus beginning the gradual desegregation of all New York City transit systems by 1865.