These streets date back to when New York, now the largest city in the United States, was a Dutch outpost. And in the more than three and a half centuries since, the painstaking way the stones must be laid by hand has not changed.
Although they are called cobblestone streets, Mr. Berman said that most were actually made of chunks of granite, known as Belgian Blocks. Cobblestones are not a specific kind of stone, but include a variety of natural stones from places like rivers and fields that are typically rounded and irregularly shaped. Belgian Blocks, which were used as ship ballast, were extracted from quarries and cut into mainly rectangular blocks of uniform size.
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