CB1 Street Co-Naming Application
LENAPEHOKING Lenape Homeland Historic Place
Friends of City Hall Park in consultation with Lenape Center
Two Proposed Street Co-naming signs (circled in red) border City Hall Park’s Northeast Plaza:
1. Centre St & Chambers St SW corner.
2. Centre St & Park Row intersection. (
Scroll down for recent photos of poles.)
Co-name sign within a block: Black Lives Matter Boulevard, diagonally across from requested pole 1.
Nearest border to historic African-American Burial Ground Monument is more than a block away. The Black Lives Matter Boulevard Sign, Monument and original complete burial ground are located within Lenapehoking and potentially on the Lenape Werpoes village site.
Manhattan Community Board 1’s jurisdiction district has been the homeland of the Lenape people for thousands of years, long before the arrival of Dutch-sponsored explorer Henry Hudson in 1609, Dutch colonization that began in 1624, and 1625 establishment of New Amsterdam.
Their homeland is culturally alive today to contemporary Lenape people, with Lenape Center’s office coincidently near CHP on Vesey Street. They are ancient geographic forebears for all of us in our neighborhood, our city and our region, with CB1 near the center of Lenape territory. From some perspectives, we all reside, work and play on Lenape land.
Lenapehoking, translated as “Lenape homeland,” extends from the Hudson Valley to the Chesapeake Bay.
Lenape families lived in a year-round village on a site that is now approximately from Worth Street to Reade Street.
Werpoes was on the shores of a 6-acre, 60-foot-deep, spring-fed fresh-water pond, with walking trails approximately where Centre St, Park Row and Broadway are now situated.
At the very beginning of colonization, the Lenape co-existed cooperatively with early settlers in the New Amsterdam village and in the nearby forest, including engaging in trade with the profit-seeking Dutch West India Company.
The sale of Manhattan island by the Lenape to the Dutch, a transaction with no evidence, is a profound cultural misunderstanding that continues today. In the first 40 years of colonization, historical documents report the genocide of 90% of the Lenape Nation population, as well as clear-cutting their villages, growing fields and forest habitat, then forced removal of the surviving Lenape to distant reservations by the early U.S. government.
The proposed Street Co-naming honors the First People, their contemporary descendants, and this place that is important in their history, in our history, and currently.
It will specifically partially remedy omission in CHP’s NYC historical Time Wheel. It is a travesty that the NYC history written in stone in our civic center begins with the Dutch, ignoring the first people here, short of a reference to Broadway’s origins as a Lenape trail!
Fair compensation for the long-ago massacring and forcibly-taken land is not within the realm of this proposal, but this Proposed Street Co-naming historical acknowledgement of the place is fitting for CHP NE Plaza’s precious Lower Manhattan open space that centuries ago bordered a Lenape village, with the same earth underneath the pavement on which the Lenape walked. CHP Northeast Plaza Renovation Proposal, with further Lenape acknowledgement, will be submitted soon.
This proposed Street Co-naming in our civic center provides a substantial, permanent, culturally-significant acknowledgement of the significance of Lenapehoking by our NYC government, as well as by other elected officials, by CB1 and by neighborhood residents and other Friends of City Hall Park and contributes to achieving the rightful historic position of the Lenape Nation.
This project has potential to make a profoundly positive, enriching, lasting, direct impact on the contemporary Lenape people, which sustains and nurtures their community traditions and identity, on our neighborhood, and on many of the thousands who will pass by the signs daily!
Lenape Center directors and cohort are respected, leading experts on Lenape history and culture, with frequent academic and cultural presentations, including as Visiting Professor at Colorado College and Columbia University.
Lenape Center’s Lenapehoking; An Anthology, (edited by Joe Baker, Hadrien Coumans & Joel Whitney, Brooklyn Public Library, 2023) is a powerful collection of well-written short essays and poems that tell the real story.
There are other well-received books covering the Lenape homeland that you might know, like The Island at the Center of the World (Russell Shorto, Vintage Books, 2006) and Mannahatta (Eric Sanderson, Illustrated by Markley Boyer, Abrams, 2009), many feature and documentary films and TV shows. Few are totally accurate; many are outrageously inaccurate.
This proposal is initiated by Friends of City Hall Park, 30-year-old community group of neighbors and NYers’ city-wide, who use and love our precious neighborhood park and all New Yorkers’ city commons; who volunteer to assist NYC Parks’ care for the 6 acres of publicly-accessible lawns and paths; who work with City Hall, NYPD and NYC Parks to assure and expand public access; and who lobby for adequate NYC Parks funding with the Play Fair coalition and for urban forest development city-wide with Forest for All NYC.
FCHP collaborates on achieving this proposal with Lenape Center’s Joe Baker, Executive Director and Hadrien Coumans, Deputy Director.
The Street Co-naming and complete proposed Plaza renovation are proposed to be sponsored and supported by Mayor Eric Adams, Councilmember Chris Marte, NYS Senator Brian Kavanagh, NYS Assemblymember Deborah Glick, NY Congressmember Dan Goldman, Community Board 1 and City Hall Park Conservancy.
The project has been facilitated at NYC Parks by Regional Parks Manager Terese Flores, Park Gardener Brandon Grant, and Manhattan Commissioner Tricia Shimamura. Contact with DOT is Kate Scherer, DOT Lower Manhattan Planner.