Manhattan Island: best real estate steal ever?

There’s a rock just outside Inwood Hill Park that marks the location where Peter Minuit (right), director general of New Netherland, supposedly bought Manhattan from Native Americans for the equivalent of $24 in 1626.

Best real estate steal ever—or enduring myth?

For starters, consider that the first account of the deal comes from a snippet of gossip.

“In a 1626 letter, a Dutch merchant reported he had just heard, from ship passengers newly disembarked from New Netherland, that representatives of the West India Company ‘had purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for a value of 60 guilders,'” wrote Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace in their book Gotham: A History of New York to 1898.

In 1848, a New York historian translated that figure into $24. And in 1877, a second historian claimed with no evidence that the amount was paid in “beads, buttons, and other trinkets” (detailed in the 1909 illustration above).

Besides the fact that no deed of sale exists, it’s important to consider what “purchase” meant back in 1626. The way the Dutch defined it may have been quite different from how Native Americans saw things.

Natives may have considered the 60 guilders a rental fee, not a sales exchange, giving the Dutch hunting and other use rights while also retaining them for themselves, according to an insightful piece in Mental Floss.

Also, “it appears from a later repurchase agreement that the people who made the original arrangement didn’t live in Manhattan and so were in no position to offer up even use-rights of visiting privileges,” wrote Burrows and Wallace.

Meanwhile the plaque marking the location of sale, on Shorakkopach Rock (above) in Inwood, remains.

A 1660 map depicts New York’s humble start

Is this village-like settlement really the humble beginning of the bustling New York City of today?

Hard to believe, but that’s what the map says. It’s officially known as the Castello Plan, and the New York Public Library calls it the “earliest known plan of New Amsterdam and the only one dating from the Dutch period.”

It looks tidy and sweet, but don’t be fooled. New Amsterdam in in the middle of the 17th century was “a thinly populated, uncomfortable and muddy place with few creature comforts and much lawlessness,” writes Eric Homberger in The Historic Atlas of New York City.

Four main roads took travelers northward: Heere Straet (Broadway) is on the left, followed by today’s Broad Street, William Street, and Pearl Street alongside the East River.

That fortified street crossing the island from east to west? Wall Street, of course, then 12 feet high and the northern boundary of the city.

There’s a very cool tool on Channel Thirteen’s website that includes a georeferenced version of the Castello Plan—letting users know the names of each street and who owned each house, building, and plot of land depicted.

 At left is more colorful redraft of the original map, done in 1916.

When New York was officially named New Orange

How New York got its name can be summed up like this: In 1624, a Dutch ship arrived at the foot of lower Manhattan, where colonists set up a town they named after Holland’s largest city, New Amsterdam.

By 1664, New Amsterdam fell into the hands of the British (Peter Stuyvesant signed over the colony, now a city, without a fight), who renamed it New York in honor of the Duke of York.

[The city skyline, 1653]

Case closed? Not exactly. In 1673, the Dutch regained control of New York, sailing triumphantly into the harbor with a fleet of 21 ships.

Dutch leader Anthony Colve rechristened the colony New Orange, its official name for about a year—at which point it was permanently ceded to the British under the Treaty of Westminster.

As The New York Times’ Sam Roberts put it in a 2009 podcast, New York “was the Big Orange before it was the Big Apple.”

The wall that divided the earliest New Yorkers

Here it is, the namesake wall of Wall Street, depicted on a colorful mosaic at the (where else?) Wall Street subway station.

Built in the 1640s at the northernmost boundary of the young settlement, the half-mile wall was the idea of Dutch colonists, who wanted to keep British settlers and Native Americans out of New Amsterdam.

It didn’t exactly work—the English took over in 1664. The wall came down just before the 18th century.

Who gave Maiden Lane its name?

A bit of mystery surrounds the origin of innocent-sounding Maiden Lane, one of the first streets laid out by 17th century Dutch colonists.

It may have started as a lovers’ lane.

“Tradition had it that the girls of early Dutch days were wont to stroll by the little stream along what was known first as Maagde Paatje,” says a 1911 New York Times article.

The name might also stem from the street’s rep as New Amsterdam’s clothes-washing center. “Maiden Lane was the site of a freshwater stream where young maidens did their laundry,” explains Gerard R. Wolfe’s New York: A Guide to the Metropolis.

Whether a lovers path or laundry area, Maiden Lane was for a short time home to Thomas Jefferson.

The street eventually hosted a market and then became the city’s jewelry district in the 19th century.

It’s part of the Financial District now, but the name resonates differently than, say, adjacent Gold Street.

“View of South Street, From Maiden Lane,” by William James Bennett, 1827