 More than any other man he was responsible for arranging the acquisition of New York from the Dutch, and is remembered there in the name of two other streets named after him in New York, one in Greenwich Village and one in Brooklyn.He was the son of Emmanuel Downing, a barrister of the Inner Temple in London, himself the son of an Ipswich schoolmaster.Emmanuel was a Puritan who undertook missionary work, first in Ireland, and then (at the invitation of Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop) in New England.