Born in the Netherlands in 1608, Andries Hudde arrived in New Amsterdam in 1629 at age 21. A young man of clear ability, in 1633, at age 25, he was appointed to the Council under Governor Wouter Twiller and as Secretary to the Council from perhaps as early as 1632 through 1638. He had mapping skills also, which led to his appointment as Surveyor General from 1642-1647. He is thought by some historians to possibly have been the author of the Manatus Map of 1639.  In 1636, with a partner he purchased land in Flatlands and Flatbush (south Brooklyn), where they established a farm. Two years later he married Gertrude Bornstra, the widow of a son of the Walloon settler Jesse de Forest.

        In the mid 1640s Hudde relocated to the Delaware where he was commissary at Fort Nassau. Here his wife died in 1652, at which time he returned to New Amsterdam for three  years. His house would have been on the Castello Plan, if he had been in New Amsterdam the year it was made, 1660, but he was back on the Delaware by this time. Some of his neighbors in Block C of the Plan were Samuel Edsal, Jacobus Kip, Col. Philip Schuyler, Coenradt Ten Eyck, and wheelwright Cosyn Gerritsen van Putten.

       The Swedes had established a colony on the Delaware, which was decisively put down by Director General Petrus Stuyvesant in 1655, when Hudde returned to the Delaware and held various offices in the New Amstel Colony (owned and operated by the Dutch West India company). He died in 1663 of malaria, en route to Maryland where he planned to open a brewery.

Largely forgotten today, he is yet remembered in the Andries Hudde Junior High School in today’s Midwood, Brooklyn, and the Andries Playground on nearby Nostrand Avenue.