Indigenous People Literally Laid the Groundwork for Manhattan's Queerest Neighborhood
Today, October 11, is both Indigenous Peoples Day and National Coming Out Day.
Thankfully, it’s become more widely known in recent years that Indigenous cultures, by and large, have shown more acceptance, acknowledgement and even veneration for the expansiveness of gender than the colonizers who violently imposed European Christian morality on the land they took—an imposition that still endangers millions of Queer people worldwide today.
Thousands of years after these Indigenous cultures formed, science would only further vindicate the fact that gender is far more than the western social roles artificially attached to genitalia.
Though colonizers have worked to erode virtually every facet of Indigenous life over the course of centuries, paths forged by the Munsee people of the Lenape Nation—which originally occupied the land known today as New York City—still echo in Manhattan’s very geography.
For his work as director of New Amsterdam, the Dutch government granted Wouter Van Twiller 200 acres of farmland near the Indigenous settlement of Sapponckanican in the 1600s.
After his death in 1654, the land would be gradually subdivided to European farmers over the next century or so. Meanwhile, under the Easton Treaty of 1758, the vast majority of the Lenape people were forcibly relocated by colonizers to what is now known as Ohio.
At the turn of the 18th century, the farmland that is known today as Greenwich Village was isolated from the rest of Manhattan, and saw a stratospheric increase in population by early New Yorkers fleeing plagues pummeling most of the city.
Eventually, the population grew dense enough to require roads. In 1817, the New York government formulated a plan to impose a grid system upon the city as these roads were built. This was around a decade before the Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced the remaining Lenape to relocate in Oklahoma.
The farmers of the Village had, by then, relied for centuries on the footpaths forged over thousands of years by the Munsee people of the Lenape Nation for their very livelihoods. The grid plan threatened to eradicate these footpaths and the farmers mobilized against its enactment.
That’s why, by 1820, the Village became the only part of Manhattan (from the Lenape word Mannahatta) above Wall Street that didn’t conform to the famous grid that still partially defines Manhattan today.
On these slanted streets would occur the sip-in at Julius Bar, the Stonewall Riots, dozens of Pride Marches, and the coalescence of a Queer community that’s pervsevered for decades.
No part of North American land is uncorrupted by the horrors and atrocities of European colonization and the systems it’s built.
By 1900, Henry Ford established his automobile company and Manhattan subsequently saw the first taxicabs that would soon be its defining feature. The subway system was introduced around this time as well, and the isolation of the Village enjoyed by Queer people and other bohemians at the time would be undone with the extension of Seventh Avenue past 11th Street.
Eventually, the Queer inhabitants of the Village, many of whom descended from enslaved people brought over by (you guessed it) European colonizers, were eventually priced out of the area and targeted by police.
Greenwich Village is now Manhattan’s most expensive neighborhood, but still sees legions of Queer commuters gather there to frequent the many Queer bars that remain. The Lenape people’s creation of the geography that defines the Village, sadly to this day, remains largely forgotten by most New Yorkers…for now.