Half Moon - New York Magazine › news › articles › 09 › 04 › manhatta090420_lay.pdf ·...
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m o n t h 0 – 0 0 , 2 0 0 9 | n e w y o r k 51
ContactOn September 12, 1609, Henry Hudson, a British
captain sailing for the Dutch East India Company in
search of a passage to the east, anchored the Half
Moon off Manhattan. “It is as pleasant a land as one can
tread upon,” the log noted. The Lenape came out by canoe to meet the ship,
and Hudson traded with them for beans and oysters.
Later, possibly at Jeffrey’s Hook, now the Manhattan
terminus of the George Washington
Bridge, the Lenape attacked Hudson’s ship.
Island TribesThe Lenape are more
commonly known as the Delaware. William Penn
called them “the most merry Creatures that Live, Feast
and Dance almost perpetually; they never have much, nor
want much: Wealth circulateth like the Blood, all parts partake.” At least three
separate communities seem to have inhabited Manhattan.
They grew corn, beans, squash, and tobacco, and
hunted the abundant wildlife, but agriculture probably
provided only a secondary part of their diet. Seafood was
the staple. They fished for shad in the spring, trapped eel in the fall, and ate huge
numbers of shellfish. Downtown’s Indians were known as the Manahate.
They had a settlement on the Collect Pond as well as on harbor islands. They may
have been connected to the Canarsee, of Brooklyn. Their
enemies were the Sankhikan, of central New Jersey.
Deep WatersThe Collect Pond, as much as 70 feet deep, was the largest
body of freshwater on the island, and was a center of
lower-Mannahatta culture for eons. The Lenape settlement just to its southwest may have had three longhouses and six wigwams, housing possibly 100 people. The Dutch and
English used it for fishing and drinking—fishing with nets
was banned in 1734. During the Revolution, there were
rumors of a Loch Ness–type monster that was said to
have consumed a Hessian soldier. The tanning industry
that sprang up on its banks terminally poisoned it by the early-nineteenth century, and
a canal was dug along the course of Lispenard’s Creek—roughly, today’s Canal Street—
to drain it. The slum known as Five Points was built on the
swampy, fetid infill—part of what gave the neighborhood
its particular charm.
King of the ForestThe American chestnut
was the largest tree in the forests that were
Mannahatta’s most widespread ecosystem—some were likely 120 feet
tall and four feet wide. (There are few American
chestnuts left on the East Coast, the result of
a blight first noticed at the Bronx Zoo in 1904.)
Hill of a Town Mannahatta was known as the
“island of many hills,” some 573 in all. The tallest was,
and is, Mount Washington, in Washington Heights.
Downtown’s tallest hill was Bayard’s Mount, just north of
the Collect Pond. Another notable feature was the Sand
Hills, a miniature dunelike range covered with scrub oak running from Tribeca into the Village that separated the salt
marshes of downtown from the heavy chestnut-and-
oak forests of the West Village extending north.
Spring Is Here Aaron Burr’s Manhattan Water
Company commercialized this spring near the corner of Broadway and Spring Street.
On January 2, 1800, the body of a woman named Juliana
Elmore Sands was said to have been found in a well at
the spring, after which there were legends of ghosts. In
1974, a resident of a building on the corner claimed
that a mossy apparition rose from his water bed.
Manhattan Burning As in many of the
forests of the northeast, the Lenape managed their environment on
Mannahatta by controlled burning. Much of the
forest was burned regularly. The Harlem
plain seems to have been kept open by regular
burning, probably for use as a hunting ground.
Hunter and Hunted In Mannahatta as everywhere
in the northeastern forest, wolves were the dominant
predators. Their population was decimated in the 1720s
after a determined hunt in the forests of Inwood.
Crosstown EastThe Saw Kill had the
biggest watershed of all of Mannahatta’s streams and
creeks, with its headwaters near 85th Street and Columbus
Avenue. The island’s streams tended to flow southeast,
following the glacier’s course.
Swampy TerrainGreat Kill drained much of midtown, emptying into
the Hudson at 42nd Street. There may have been a
beaver pond in Times Square.
Fort George, currently Battery Park, in the early days of British control. Trinity
Church is to the left.
The vegetation on the Sand Hills may have looked much like this pitch-pine-and-scrub-oak barren in Long Island.
A Lenape ceremonial mask (in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History) from Lenape in Ontario, Canada.
A 1768 view from the West Village, looking south over the Sand Hills. (The palm tree was added
by an imaginative illustrator.)
An engraving of the Collect Pond and Bayard’s Mount, circa 1798.
The city proper is in the distance.
shorakapok camp
harlem savannah, maintained
by lenape fire
Crossing the WaterThe Lenape crossed from
Manhattan to the Bronx over Spuyten Duyvil Creek
at what was known as the Wading Place, near 220th
Street and Broadway.
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henry hudson’s ship attacked
muscoota camp
unquenchable spring
oak-and-chestnut forest saw kill
lenape pathbeaver pond
sun-fish pond
great kill
sapokanikan camp
sand hills
spring street spring
lispenard marshes
collect pond
bayard’s mount
bear shot, circa 1630
lower east side marshes
minetta stream
Map by Haisam Hussein50 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 0 , 2 0 0 9
mount washington
last wolf shot