In honor of Indigenous People’s Day, I started thinking about any remnant of the pre-Dutch settlements in New York. I’m sure there are some left in the surrounding area, but in the city itself, there’s almost nothing. Manhattan is one of the most worked-over pieces of land on the planet and the other boroughs aren’t much more natural. When we’ve changed the shorelines, cut down hills, and filled in valleys, what are the odds that any artifacts from four hundred years ago are left?
There’s one. The path that Broadway takes north from the tip of Manhattan is, today, irregular without meaning. As the Wickquasgeck Trail, it skirted the island’s swamps, streams, and hills; the path has stayed much the same even though the natural features that defined it are gone.
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