Bowling Green and the Site of Fort Amsterdam
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Transcript
Bowling Green is the city’s oldest public park, but the deeper landmark is the ground just south of it. Nearby stood Fort Amsterdam, the administrative and military center of the Dutch colony of New Netherland from the 1620s.
This is where the familiar story of Peter Minuit “buying Manhattan for $24” needs correction. Contemporary records indicate that Minuit concluded a land transaction in 1626 valued at sixty guilders. The twenty-four-dollar figure was a much later nineteenth-century conversion. More importantly, historians caution against assuming that European and Indigenous parties shared the same concept of permanent exclusive land ownership.
The people Europeans called Lenape lived in a broad region they knew through networks of kinship, hunting, planting, trade and seasonal movement. Dutch settlement expanded into that world and eventually contributed to Indigenous dispossession through warfare, disease, legal pressure and demographic change.
Under British rule the fort and city were renamed. After independence, the old fort disappeared and the site was reused.
New York loves the myth of the bargain because it makes conquest sound like clever commerce. The evidence points to something less charming: a colonial encounter in which a transaction occurred, meanings were unequal, and the balance of power increasingly favored the newcomers.