FCHP / Lenape Center

City Hall Park Northeast Plaza Proposals

6/28/2025

for Complete CHP Northeast Plaza renovation / Lenapehoking acknowledgement proposal: AFTER READING HISTORICAL geographic PROLOGUE, please scroll past CB1 STREET co-naming application.

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Historical Geographic Prologue

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CB1 Street Co-Naming Application

LENAPEHOKING Lenape Homeland  Historic Place

Friends of City Hall Park in consultation with Lenape Center

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 In the first 40 years of colonization, historical documents report the genocide of  90% of the Lenape Nation population, as well as clear-cutting their villages, growing fields and forest habitat, then forced removal of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.

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City Hall Park Northeast Plaza Renovation

~Lenapehoking Acknowledgement~

Friends of City Hall Park Proposal in consultation with Lenape Center 6/28/2025

for CB1 street co-naming application: please scroll to top.

City Hall Park is NYC Parks’ administrative and physical space from curb to curb on the City Hall Park block.

There are shared municipal uses and responsibilities of the majority public space by DOT, MTA, DSNY, DCAS, DoE, NYPD 1st and 5th Precincts, NYPD Municipal Security Section Intelligence Bureau, the Mayor’s office, other city agencies, and sub-contracted service vendors, as well as by official City Hall visitors and media.

FCHP with Lenape Center propose Northeast Plaza improvements to reclaim the NYC Parks space:

• for desperately-needed, safe, more-peaceful recreation open space for residents, workers, shoppers. tourists, and all who pass by in the center of densely developed lower Manhattan.

• for respectful surroundings for New York City’s Mayor and City Council, other elected official, City Hall guests, and municipal staff in our civic center next to City Hall.

• for well-deserved recognition of Lenapehoking, in part to remedy omission in CHP history signage.

For decades, City Hall Park’s Northeast Plaza, located in arguably the world’s most valuable real estate, has been an under-used open space, a very wide sidewalk, a remainder of the 2nd Avenue elevated train grand terminal (1878 - 1942).

In 2014 NYC Parks sold a permit to one food cart. Rapidly growing from there, particularly after the pandemic lockdown ended, the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian walkway and the Northeast Plaza became choked with commercial vendors.

The NYC Parks public space has become a congested, noisy, smoky, polluting, trash-spewing, unhealthy food court with souvenir sales tables that evacuated from the Brooklyn Bridge ban, all products available within a block. The de facto market has grown to 9 permanent food carts 24/7, with more than 20 vendors’ carts and tables on recent nice days. Who knows how many vendors will invade the wide open space unless there is intervention?

On busy days, crowds of shopping Brooklyn Bridge tourists, plus subway and walking commuters, create congested pedestrian traffic jams that impede free flow through the open space. The environmental intrusions of animal fat smoke, gas generator pollution and noise, several very loud simulataneous music sources, and littered food, paper and plastic cart waste that DSNY and NYC Parks clean up, plus blocking park amenities… continue all day and night even when there are no customers, no pedestrians at all on the plaza. (Please scroll down for photos).

Neither NYPD nor PEP has successfully enforced preventing the illegal, unsafe, annoying, out-of-control encroachment on NYC Parks land.

On this same land, the Lenape people lived here for thousands of years, long before the arrival of Dutch-sponsored explorer Henry Hudson in 1609, Dutch colonization beginning in 1624 and the 1625 New Amsterdam establishment. 

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. 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, with CB1 near the center of Lenape territory. 

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 Plaza renovation honors the First People, their current 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 renovation 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.

This proposed Plaza renovation in our civic center provides a substantial, permanent, culturally-significant acknowledgement of the significance of Lenapehoking by our NYC, NYS and Federal governments 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 through the Plaza daily!

With the proposed, easily-installed park amenities, added City Hall and safe pedestrian security, repaired bluestones and MTA glass bricks, and meaningful acknowledgement elements, the proposed renovation inexpensively and expediently restores the NYC Parks recreational property, creates a respectful civic center, and is a permanent civic remembrance of the First People.

Project Team

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 floats this rough plan, with future NYPD and City Hall, NYC Parks, CB1 and public comments contributing specific designs to final architectural drawings.

FCHP collaborates on achieving this proposal with Lenape Center’s Joe Baker, Executive Director and Hadrien Coumans, Deputy Director. 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 popular and academic 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.

The complete Plaza renovation (including Street Co-naming) is 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, CHP Gardener Brandon Grant, and Manhattan Commissioner Tricia Shimamura. Contact with DOT is Kate Scherer, DOT Lower Manhattan Planner. Contact with NYPD is NYPD Inspector Melody Robinson, Commanding Officer, Municipal Security Section, Intelligence Bureau and 1st Precinct Community Affairs Officer Nick Iordanou.

Plan notes:

As a precaution against frequently speeding vehicles, potential vehicle accidents, random acts of violence, or planned terrorism, which have occurred frequently recently in pedestrian plazas internationally, a protective fence along Centre Street traffic lane curb is proposed; e.g. one simple, appropriate, effective solution is mirroring the tall curb and metal fence on the other side of Centre Street (Please see traffic fence photo). Citi-bike and proposed two added public bike racks provide needed protection. For added security, quieting the public space, and protecting the fragile, brittle, crumbling bluestone pavement, closing 3 more of the plaza’s 6 potential entrances to vehicles with bollards, except for one open plaza entrance for emergency and service vehicles access, is proposed.

With wide spaces between proposed park amenities and boulders allowing free pathways crossing the plaza to the 9 pedestrian entrances, none of the proposed plaza additions prevent pedestrians from entering, crossing or assembling for public performance or free speech expression.

Six new indigenous trees, with tags acknowledging the Lenape, were planted  on four CHP sites on Arbor Day, 2025, with additional trees approved.Co-name sign within a block: Black Lives Matter Boulevard, diagonally across from requested pole 1.

Historic African-American Burial Ground Monument border is more than a block away. The Black Lives Matter Boulevard co-sign (diagonally across from Plaza), Monument and original complete burial ground are located within Lenapehoking and potentially on the Lenape Werpoes village site.

Project details:

1 - 4.   4 sites with 6 amelanchier trees (donated by FCHP with tree tags (already accomplished), and a proposed permanent plaque.

5. LENAPEHOKING / CHP NE Plaza renovation Proposal

For more NE Plaza historic photos: click History Gallery, then scroll down.

Chalk drawings of bollards, Boulders, benches, signs, tables:

•  Park amenities: 2 5-bike racks, 2 chess tables, 2 6-foot benches, 3 9-foot benches, and 6 9-foot backless benches (parallel to and about 4 feet from the CH fence).

• Vehicle protection security capital improvement: Add traffic fence and high curb along plaza’s eastern border, Centre St west-side curb; new bollards at 3 of plaza’s 6 sidewalk-level entrances.

•  NYC Parks: Repair dangerous bluestone pavement (see photos below).

• MTA leaking glass bricks: Repair, permanently cover, or replace; remove construction fence (obstructs pedestrian movement, attracts obscene graffiti, accumulates trash, since summer 2020). (See photos below).

6. NYC Parks METAL OR CONCRETE Plaque near Time Wheel

In “parterre” planting bed. Acknowledges Lenape history in the history of New York City, amending the nearby Time Wheel NYC history in stone:

 “LENAPEHOKING (Lenape Homeland) 

For thousands of years before New Amsterdam and New York City, and continuing today, this very land is the Lenape homeland. Until genocide, clear cutting their villages, fields & sustaining forests, then forced removal, by the Dutch, English and then the early U.S. government, the Lenape Nation extended from the Hudson Valley to the Chesapeake Bay, the First People in our city.”

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