Long before New York became a city of neon skylines and global influence, it was a rough-hewn Dutch settlement called New Amsterdam. Among its most surprising and powerful histories is the story of a community of free and semi-free Black settlers who made their lives just north of the colonial center—on land that now includes parts of Greenwich Village, SoHo, and the Lower East Side. Known as the Land of the Blacks, this area once thrived with fruit orchards, vegetable farms, and a defiant hope for freedom in a land that made little room for it.
Planting Roots in a Colony of Uncertainty
In 1643, New Amsterdam was on shaky ground. Governor Willem Kieft had plunged the colony into conflict with the Lenape people, sparking Kieft’s War—a brutal and unpopular series of skirmishes. Desperate for help, Kieft turned to a group of enslaved Africans owned by the Dutch West India Company. These men, veterans of labor and even battlefield service, had built the colony’s infrastructure and guarded its vulnerable perimeters. They petitioned for their freedom—and won a compromise.
They were granted “half-freedom”—a peculiar status that allowed them to live as free men, hold land, and raise families, but obligated them to return to service when called and pay yearly dues. In exchange, they received land grants—tracts of eight to twelve acres stretching northward from the palisades of the Dutch settlement. This buffer zone not only protected New Amsterdam from Native American attacks but also gave rise to one of the earliest Black farming communities in what would become the United States.
The settlers included men with names like Domingo Anthony, Anthony Portuguese, Manuel Trumpeter, and Simon Congo—men whose identities reflected the global reach of the slave trade, touching Africa, Portugal, Brazil, and the Caribbean before landing in New Amsterdam.
A Village Grows Beneath the Orchard Trees
The Land of the Blacks was no mere outpost. It blossomed into a resilient, tightly woven community. Wooden houses, often roofed with thatch or hand-hewn boards, rose along winding paths. Families cultivated orchards that bore cherries, peaches, and apples.
These were not only places of work, but of connection and resistance. The settlers baptized their children, married in the Dutch Reformed Church, and organized to protect one another. Oral histories and court records suggest that they also offered shelter to fugitives from slavery—making the Land of the Blacks one of the first havens of Black sanctuary in North America, generations before the Underground Railroad.
Meanwhile, Downtown: The Birth of a Barrier
As this community was rising just beyond New Amsterdam’s northern edge, another, more ominous structure was being erected. In 1653, to defend against potential attacks from Indigenous peoples and rival European powers, the Dutch constructed a wooden barrier: a 12-foot-high wall stretching across the island from river to river.
That wall would one day give its name to the world’s most powerful financial district: Wall Street.
The irony is striking. A physical boundary built in part to “protect” the colony from threats—including the very people who had been enslaved and marginalized—became the symbolic and literal heart of global capitalism. Meanwhile, the African-descended families who had helped protect the colony were fighting to hold onto their own corner of the world.
Displacement and Disappearance
Everything changed in 1664 when the British seized New Amsterdam and renamed it New York. The English crown had no use for Dutch half-freedom. Over the next several decades, property rights for Black settlers were systematically revoked. New laws forbade people of African descent from owning land, marrying freely, or gathering in public in groups larger than three.
By the early 1700s, the Land of the Blacks had been absorbed into the growing city. The orchards and farms vanished beneath cobblestones, buildings, and time. The people who once called it home were pushed into slavery again, or marginalized and forgotten.
A Legacy Beneath the Pavement
Today, the Land of the Blacks is all but invisible. Most New Yorkers and visitors walking the leafy streets of Greenwich Village or lounging in Washington Square Park have no idea they’re standing on land once tilled by free Black farmers in the 1600s. But traces remain.
Minetta Lane—a narrow, winding street—follows the path of a brook that once watered those farms. It was known as the “Negroes’ Causeway”, a name that echoed across generations even after the original community was gone. Washington Square itself was once a potter’s field, and before that, part of the land tilled by Black settlers.
Public historians, educators, and community advocates have begun to restore the memory of this remarkable chapter. Monuments and Epic Walking Tours now tell the story of the Land of the Blacks—not just as a footnote in colonial history, but as a testament to the courage, ingenuity, and resilience of those who dared to plant hope in unwelcoming soil.
Remembering What Lies Beneath
The story of the Land of the Blacks, and of the wall that became Wall Street, reveals two founding truths of early New York: one of division, control, and exploitation, and another of resistance, adaptation, and survival. The wooden wall may be gone, but its legacy of boundaries remains. Just as real, though, is the memory of the people who built lives in its shadow—people who thrived against the odds and set the stage for emancipation.
