High above the bustle of Charlotte Amalie’s waterfront lies one of the city’s most distinctive features: its historic network of step-streets. Built during the Danish colonial era, these stairways transformed steep, impassable hillsides into vital pedestrian routes linking the harbor to the residential terraces above. Today, they remain some of the most charming—and most revealing—surviving elements of the island’s urban history.
The Danish word gade means “street,” but in the steepest parts of town, streets became stairways. Planners of the Danish West India Company recognized early that horses and carts could not traverse the sharp inclines of Government Hill. Their solution was a system of pedestrian “frigangs”—step-streets constructed in the 1700s to connect the harborfront with the hillside neighborhoods, fortifications, and merchant estates above.
More than 45 step-streets still thread through historic Charlotte Amalie today, each one turning the island’s geography into walkable infrastructure.
The best known of these stairways is the 99 Steps, though the true count is closer to 103. Formally named Store Taarne Gade (“Greater Tower Street”), the stairway climbs toward the watchtower of Skytsborg—today known as Blackbeard’s Castle.
Its placement was purposeful: it served both daily foot traffic and fast vertical movement between the waterfront and the defensive structures overlooking the harbor.
Traditional accounts suggest the stair-streets may have held strategic military value. In emergencies—such as the sighting of enemy ships—soldiers could run these stairs quickly to reach the upper batteries and watchpoints.
The 99 Steps are built largely from brick ballast, the heavy bricks European ships carried for stability on their voyage to the Caribbean. Once the ships arrived, the ballast was off-loaded so that sugar, rum, livestock, mahogany, and other colonial exports could be loaded in its place.
Those discarded bricks became the city’s building blocks—literally.
Every step you see was once part of a global trade route.
Constructed by skilled masons, the stairways are physical reminders of the connection between transatlantic commerce and the shaping of the island’s urban form.
Approximately 45 historic step-streets remain throughout Charlotte Amalie
The 99 Steps actually contain about 103 steps
Built primarily from European ballast bricks
Date to the 1700s Danish colonial period
Connected the harbor with the fortifications and elite residences on Government Hill
These stairways were not simply shortcuts—they were lifelines. Residents, merchants, enslaved laborers, artisans, and visitors climbed them daily, moving between hillside homes, commercial districts, markets, and waterfront warehouses. Goods were carried up and down by hand or in small carts; children played along them; neighbors gathered at the landings.
The step-streets stitched together a vertical city, linking community life across steep terrain.
From Blackbeard’s Castle, the view reveals how the 99 Steps and their neighboring frigangs rise toward key historic structures—residences, towers, and civic buildings that once defined the island’s colonial power center.
Standing here today, you can imagine the mix of footsteps, voices, and cargoes that once filled these narrow corridors.
As you walk these historic stairways, you are following centuries of movement—ascending not just a hillside, but the layers of history that shaped Charlotte Amalie itself.
