Before the clang of subway brakes and the applause of Broadway shows, before Washington Square Park grew its iconic arch—there was a different rhythm beneath Manhattan.
It was the sound of water trickling through reeds, of breezes lifting from the Hudson and brushing through tall hickories and chestnut trees. This was the land of the Lenape. Long before Greenwich Village became an enclave for poets and misfits, it was home to the Lenapehoking: the vast territory of the Lenape people that stretched from the Delaware River Valley through parts of what are now New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Manhattan—the Lenape called it Manahatta, meaning “island of many hills.” The island was dotted with streams, wetlands, forests, and meadows, rich with fish, game, and berries. What we now call Greenwich Village was once part of a region the Lenape knew intimately, a landscape alive with seasonal camps and pathways. The specific area we know as Greenwich Village likely fell under the domain of a subgroup called the Canarsie or possibly the Sapohanikan, both associated with the Lenape-speaking Munsee division.
Sapohanikan—this is one of the earliest recorded names of the area. It referred to a Lenape settlement near today’s Gansevoort Street and the Hudson River, possibly named for the “tobacco field” that grew there. The Hudson, known to the Lenape as Mahicannituck—“river that flows two ways”—was a life-giving artery, brimming with oysters, bordered by fertile land where corn, squash, and beans were cultivated in harmony.
The Lenape were not nomads, nor were they a single monolithic tribe. Their lives were deeply rooted in community and ecology. They built longhouses and practiced seasonal migration between inland winter villages and coastal summer encampments. Women held significant roles in Lenape society, often controlling agriculture, property, and clan membership. Their spiritual life was bound to the land, sky, and waters, with rituals honoring the cyclical, sacred balance of nature.
By the early 1600s, their world began to shift.
When the Dutch arrived—first Henry Hudson in 1609, then traders and settlers—initial encounters were cautious but often cooperative. The Dutch, interested in fur rather than land, traded metal tools and cloth for beaver pelts. Yet what the Lenape understood as shared use, the Dutch increasingly treated as ownership. In 1626, the Dutch allegedly “purchased” Manhattan from the Lenape for goods worth 60 guilders. But this infamous transaction—often mythologized as a land sale for trinkets—was not a straightforward real estate deal.
To the Lenape, land was not a commodity. It was kin. You did not own the earth; you were part of it, responsible to it. The Dutch concept of legal transfer was as foreign to them as the diseases that soon followed—smallpox, influenza, and measles—which decimated entire villages.
As the 17th century progressed, the Dutch established New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan and began encroaching north. Sapohanikan and surrounding areas remained outside the city’s official limits for a time, functioning as a kind of borderland. But the pressure mounted. Violent conflicts erupted, including Kieft’s War (1643–1645), when a Dutch governor ordered massacres of Lenape refugees near today’s Wall Street, triggering brutal retaliations.
Greenwich Village—still rural at the time—was temporarily a place of retreat. Ironically, even Dutch and later English colonists used the area for refuge during yellow fever outbreaks, moving away from the denser lower Manhattan to the “cleaner” air and open fields of what was once Lenape land. By the late 1600s, the Lenape presence on Manhattan had all but vanished.
Displacement didn’t happen all at once. It was slow, confusing, often disguised in diplomacy. Lenape communities fractured and relocated: some fled west into New Jersey and Pennsylvania; others moved north toward the Hudson Highlands. In time, the Lenape were pushed further west—to Ohio, then Indiana, and eventually, in waves, to Oklahoma, where their descendants still live today as the Delaware Nation and Delaware Tribe of Indians.
Back in New York, the memory of the Lenape was paved over.
Sapohanikan became a trading post, then farmland. By the early 1800s, the area began transforming into what we now call Greenwich Village—named for its resemblance, perhaps ironically, to a “Green Village” in England. The grid plan of 1811 erased the Lenape’s ancient footpaths. Marshland was filled. Trees were felled. The river was edged with piers, industry, and landfill.
But the land remembers.
Archaeological digs have unearthed Lenape artifacts—arrowheads, pottery shards, oyster shells—in the layers beneath the city’s sidewalks. The flow of Minetta Brook, now buried, still courses under the West Village, echoing the streams where Lenape children once played.
In recent years, there has been a modest revival of memory. New York institutions, including museums and universities, have begun acknowledging Lenape homelands. Activists and descendants of the Lenape have called for land acknowledgment and education. In 2023, the Whitney Museum proposed restoring the name Sapohanikan to the surrounding area.
Today, Greenwich Village is known for its history of resistance: civil rights, LGBTQ+ liberation, artistic rebellion. That spirit—of living beyond the expected, of resisting displacement and commodification—can trace its roots back further than any tenement or jazz club. The Lenape lived here, not just in space, but in relationship—to water, wind, and soil.
Their story is of loss and survival. Though pushed west, the Lenape people did not vanish. They adapted, endured, redefined themselves across borders and centuries. And now, with growing strength, they are reclaiming their voice.
