Maiden Lane (Manhattan)
Coordinates: 40°42′26.75″N 74°0′27.63″W / 40.7074306°N 74.0076750°W
Maiden Lane is an east-west street in the Financial District of the New York City borough of Manhattan. Its eastern terminus is at South Street, near the South Street Seaport; its western end is Broadway near the World Trade Center site.
The street received its name in New Amsterdam, as Maagde Paatje, a "footpath used by lovers along a rippling brook" according to the WPA Guide to New York City, a "pebbly brook" that ran from Nassau Street to the East River, where wives and daughters washed linen according to the city historians Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace.
The street was formally laid out in 1696, the first street north of still-palisaded Wall Street.
By 1728, a market was held at the foot of Maiden Lane, where it ended at Front Street facing the East River; by 1823, when it was demolished and disbanded, the Fly Market, selling meat, country produce and fish under its covered roofs, was New York's oldest. It eventually gave way to the 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. From a New York newspaper dated 1831:
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