The Indians On Manhattan

( Originally Published 1930's )

THREE or four hundred hungry Indians, who called themselves Manhattoes, were living on this island of Manhattan in what is now New York Bay when Henry Hudson sailed this way one day in the year 1609, seeking a short route to the Indies. The same number of red men, as civilized as the rest of us, still live on Manhattan and in the other boroughs of New York City, a fact which their fellow citizens learned with some surprise when the head chief of all American Indians appeared at the City Hall in 1933 to plead for the establishment of a small reservation in Inwood Park, at the northwest corner of the island, in order that a few families might there continue the aboriginal life for the instruction of the other inhabitants of the modern Babel of New York.

Four hundred Indians then; four hundred now. The number holds after more than three centuries; but what is number compared to status? Now the Indians of Manhattan are suppliants for a tiny corner of the isle which was once the hunting ground of the red men. Today the three hundred are submerged, almost lost, in a "wilderness of human flesh" sprung from Europe, Africa, the West Indies, Central and South America. There are more Chinese on Manhattan than there are Indians; more Japanese, more Albanians, more Syrians, more Hindus. Of the six million inhabitants of New York City, two million reside on Manhattan, and a majority of the others visit the island by day, for work, trade, or play. The sovereign site which the Manhattoes sold for a pittance in 1626 has become imperial in wealth, commerce and population. From its shores, goods and capital go to the ends of the earth; to it come rushing men with ideas who need capital, and men with capital who need ideas. A substantial city set for the most part upon everlasting rocks has become a yeasty ferment of peoples where even standing room is so expensive that decisions must be made quickly and life, perforce, moves at double-quick.

On Manhattan today nothing is quite as sacred as property rights; and no wonder, since life goes forward on the most valuable land, by and large, on the planet. To this stony island, in whose bowels were neither gems nor gold nor other metals, whose insignificant farms have become skyscraper building sites, whose waterfalls were so puny that they were long ago reduced to sewers, has come the wealth wrought by miners in far places, by husbandmen on wide plains, by engineers in distant gorges. In this dominant borough of New York City "ten-cent men sleep under thousand-dollar trees" in parks where nature is assisted to maintain herself against mighty odds, at a cost beyond the bearing except for the fact that the tax gatherer can skim here the cream of the world's trade. A doctor of philosophy, for lack of better shelter, camped until recently in Morningside Park; when they ran him out, his nerve was still good after eight months of this gypsy existence in a setting where every shrub receives attention at the expense of the taxpayer. He lived, with a few modern improvements, the primitive Indian life, yet this particular individual is Jewish, and came to New York because it promised him fortune.

Everything that happens gets on the map sooner or later, though not always in ways to be comprehended by the casual observer. The ordinary maps of Manhattan reveal a great deal of the island's unique and absorbing history; yet a fire underwriter's map and an assessor's map will reveal tremendously more, for they show the structures reared on this golden earth of Manhattan and the values which an energetic, acquisitive population has placed upon this crowded bit of land at various stages of its evolution from a wilderness of forest to a wilderness of flesh-and-blood.

The poor Manhattoes, who sold their island to the Dutch West India Company for trade goods worth twenty-four dollars, considered they had driven a good bargain. So they had, as far as the worth of the island to them was concerned. What made the island richer than Golconda was human activity on a scale and of a complexity of which the natives were incapable.

For agricultural purposes Manhattan would be worth little more than an equal average of hill-and-valley Vermont land. Its rents have been lifted by trade, by the activities of aggressive and foresighted persons evolving a complex society, until at last whatever in-creases wealth anywhere on earth sooner or later marks up values between the Battery and the Bronx.

Not automatically, of course; Manhattan has required remaking to fit each of its New Deals. Lakes have been drained, hills leveled, swamps filled, shore lines extended, streams put underground, tunnels pushed through stone. A few large parked areas have been left; in the little hills and valleys of Central Park one can see a suggestion of what Manhattan was before the realtors and engineers smoothed it out and reduced it to an asphalt checkerboard.

From a little Dutch walled town hugging the south end of the island to an octopus city ever reaching out-ward its subway and railroad tentacles; that is the evolution of New York. Its history is composed of many stages, some of which seem to have slight relation with the others. But in all of these eras the actors--Indian, Dutchman, Colonial Englishman, Revolutionary patriot, Irish immigrant, trader, merchant, artist, and broker—have one thing in common: they walked in their day this Golden Earth of Manhattan and, consciously or unconsciously, contributed to its present enormous worth.

Glaciation in Great New York pgs.

THE PRE-COLUMBIAN IN GREATER NEW YORK

When the white man reached the coasts of this New World he found it occupied by beings similar to himself. He may not, at the time, have sufficiently marveled at this, but his indifference to so singular a circumstance has to-day been replaced by the industrious researches of the archaeologist, in an effort to trace the aboriginal record at every point of the continent.

Whatever antecedent steps ushered the Indian to our eastern shores, it is very certain that when Hendrik Hudson entered the great harbor of Manhattan he had dis­covered the beauty and convenience of this inland bay.The shores of the Hudson, the beaches, hills, and plains of Long Island, the islets, promontories, and woods of Man­hattan Island, and the forested recesses and wave-splashed sands of Staten Island on the Raritan Bay were parts of his demesne, and furnished him with food, and offered him pleas­ant haunts for habitation and for pleasure.

Mr. Chas. B. Todd has given us an imaginative picture of Manhattan Island—the nucleus of the greater city—when the red man possessed it, and the white man first put foot upon it: " Nature's temples, not man's, adorned it. Sombre forests overhung the Jersey shore and fringed the water-line of the island. A chain of low, craggy hills covered with noble for-fests of oak, chestnut, hickory, and other trees, with pretty grassy valleys between, extended from the Battery to near the present line of Canal Street; on either side, along the river banks, were wide marshes stretching away to the north; at Canal Street they bore directly across the island, and were so low that on high tides the water flowed across from river to river.

In the sheltered valleys were: the maize fields and queer villages of the Indians and the rude log-cabins of the settlers who had come over the year before. Cow-paths crossed the marshes to the upper part of the island, which was much wilder and more savage, with precipitous ledges, and in many places dense thickets of grape-vines, creepers, blackberry and other bushes which no one could penetrate.

The settlers did not allow their sheep and calves to cross this marsh lest they should be throttled by the wolves, bears, and panthers that lurked in the thickets, and in their letters home they complained of the deer and wild turkeys that broke in and de­stroyed their crops."The Indians that lived in and around Greater New York at the beginning of the seventeenth century are described as " a branch of the great Algonkin-Lenapi family of aborigines," and are called the Manhattos or Manhattans.

The Hacken-sacks and Raritans were on the west and south, the Week-queskucks, Tankitikes, Packaniles, northward, and the Canar-sees, Rockaways, Menikokes, Massapeagues, Mattinecocks, Missaqueges, Conchaugs, Secatauges, and Shinnecocks are given by Todd as their Long Island neighbors. Again, north of all were the more formidable Mohawks and Mohicans.

Mr. Edward Manning Ruttenber tells us that Hudson met the Wappingers or Wapanachki, and they were of the sub-tribe of the Reckgawawanes.

He further narrates: " The point of land from which their attacks were precipitated was on the north shore of the Papiriniwen, or Spuyten Duyvil Creek, where their castle or palisaded village, called by them Nipini-chan, was located. This castle commanded the approach of their inland territory from the Mahicanituck on the south, while a similarly fortified village at Yonkers, at the mouth of the Neparah, or Sawmill Creek, and known as Nappeckamak, commanded the approaches on the north. Their territorial jurisdiction extended on the east to the Bronx and East Rivers, and on the south included Manhattan Island, which, however, was only temporarily occupied during the seasons of planting and fishing, their huts there constituting their sum­mer seaside resorts, and remaining unoccupied during the winter."The succession of the sub-tribal organizations, given by Ruttenber to the north and east of Manhattan, were the Weckquaesgecks, the Sint-Sinks, the Tankitekes, the Kitcha-wongs.

On the east were the Siwanoys and the Sequins. The Siwanoys " extended from Hell Gate twenty-four miles east along the Sound to Norwalk, Connecticut, and thirty miles into the interior." The Weckquaesgecks had a village near Dobb's Ferry. The name Manhattan, as applied to New York Island, was given by the Dutch, not by the Indians.

The following extended extract is from Mr. Ruttenber's excellent paper on " The Native Inhabitants of Manhattan," in the Memorial History of the City of New York:" Kapsee is the Indian name of the extreme point of land between the Hudson and East Rivers, and is still known as Copsie Point. It is said to signify ' safe place of landing,' as it may have been, but ee should have been written ick. The Dutch called it Capsey Hoeck; they erected a 'hand,' or guide-board, to indicate that all vessels under fifty tons were to anchor between that point and the ' hand,' or guide-board, which stood opposite the ' Stadtherberg,' built in 1642.

This indicates that the point had the peculiarity which is held to be expressed in the Indian name. Sappokanikan, a point of land on the Hudson below Greenwich Street, has been explained as indicating- * the carrying place/ the presumption being that the Indians at that place carried their canoes over and across the island to East River, to save the trouble of paddling down to Kapsee Point and from thence up the East River. This ex­planation is, however, too limited.

It was from this point that the Indians crossed the river to Hobokan-Hacking, sub­sequently known as Pavonia, now in Jersey City, and main­tained between the two points a commercial route. Lapinikan, an Indian village or collection of huts which was located here, had, no doubt, some special connection with the convenience of the Indian travelers. Corlear's Hook was called Naig-ia-nac, literally ' sand lands.' It may, however, have been the name of the Indian village which stood there, and was in tem­porary occupation.

It was to this village that a considerable number of Indians retreated from savage foes in February, 1643, and were there massacred by the Dutch. Near Chatham Square was an eminence called Warpoes—wa singular, oes small—literally a ' small hill.' Another hill, at the corner of Charlton and Varick Streets, was called Ishpatinau—literally a ' bad hill/ or one having some faulty peculiarity, ish being the qualifying term. Ishibic probably correctly described the narrow ridge or ancient cliff north of Beekman Street, to which it was applied. Acitoc is given as the name for the height of land in Broadway, Abie, as that of a rock rising up in the Battery, and Penabic, ' the comb mountains,' as that of Mount Washington. A tract of meadow-land on the north end of the island, near Kingsbridge, was called Muscoota, which is said to signify ' grass land,' but, as the same name is given to Harlem River, other signification is implied, unless, in the latter case, the word should be rendered ' the river of the grass lands.'

A similar dual application of name appears in Papirinimen, which is given as that of a tract of land ' on the north end of the island,' about One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Street, between the Spuyten Duyvil and the Harlem, and also as that of the Spuyten Duyvil. Shorackappock is said to have described the junction of the Spuyten Duyvil and the Hudson, but the equivalents of the term—sho and acka— indicate that the interpretation should be, as in Shotag (now Schodac), 'the fire-place,' or place at which the council cham­ber of the chieftaincy was held—an interpretation which clothes the locality with an interest of more significance than the occurrence there of the attack upon the Half-Moon.

The island was intersected by Indian paths, the principal one of which ran north from the Battery or Kapsee Point to City Hall Park, where it was crossed by one which ran west to the village of Lapinikan, and east to Naig-in-nac, or Corlear's Hook. The name assigned to the village, Lapinikan, may have been that of this crossing path, which was continued from Pavonia south of the Lenapewihitaik, or Delaware River.

Many of the ancient roads followed the primary Indian foot­paths.

http://www.farlang.com/gemstones/gratacap-...w-york/page_275

Why They Called It the Manhattan Project

October 30, 2007
Why They Called It the Manhattan Project
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. “Magic” was the name for intelligence gleaned from Japanese ciphers in World War II, and “Overlord” stood for the Allied plan to invade Europe.

Many people assume that the same holds true for the Manhattan Project, in which thousands of experts gathered in the mountains of New Mexico to make the world’s first atom bomb.

Robert S. Norris, a historian of the atomic age, wants to shatter that myth.

In “The Manhattan Project” (Black Dog & Leventhal), published last month, Dr. Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s Manhattan locations. He says the borough had at least 10 sites, all but one still standing. They include warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project’s first headquarters — a skyscraper hidden in plain sight right across from City Hall.

“It was supersecret,” Dr. Norris said in an interview. “At least 5,000 people were coming and going to work, knowing only enough to get the job done.”

Manhattan was central, according to Dr. Norris, because it had everything: lots of military units, piers for the import of precious ores, top physicists who had fled Europe and ranks of workers eager to aid the war effort. It even had spies who managed to steal some of the project’s top secrets.

“The story is so rich,” Dr. Norris enthused. “There’s layer upon layer of good stuff, interesting characters.”

Still, more than six decades after the project’s start, the Manhattan side of the atom bomb story seems to be a well-preserved secret.

Dr. Norris recently visited Manhattan at the request of The New York Times for a daylong tour of the Manhattan Project’s roots. Only one site he visited displayed a public sign noting its role in the epochal events. And most people who encountered his entourage, which included a photographer and videographer, knew little or nothing of the atomic labors in Manhattan.

“That’s amazing,” Alexandra Ghitelman said after learning that the buildings she had just passed on inline skates once held tons of uranium destined for atomic weapons. “That’s unbelievable.”

While shock tended to be the main reaction, some people hinted at feelings of pride. More than one person said they knew someone who had worked on the secret project, which formally got under way in August 1942 and three years later culminated in the atomic bombing of Japan. In all, it employed more than 130,000 people.

Dr. Norris is also the author of “Racing for the Bomb” (Steerforth, 2002), a biography of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the project’s military leader. As his protagonist had done during the war, Dr. Norris works in Washington. At the Natural Resources Defense Council, he studies and writes about the nation’s atomic facilities.

Dr. Norris began his day of exploration by taking the train to New York from Washington, coming into Pennsylvania Station just as General Groves had done dozens of times during the war to visit project sites.

“Groves didn’t want the job,” Dr. Norris remarked outside the station. “But his foot hit the accelerator and he didn’t let up for 1,000 days.”

For tour assistance, Dr. Norris brought along his own books as well as printouts from “The Traveler’s Guide to Nuclear Weapons,” a CD by James M. Maroncelli and Timothy L. Karpin that features little-known history of the nation’s atom endeavors.

We headed north to the childhood home of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the eccentric genius whom General Groves hired to run the project’s scientific side as well as its sprawling New Mexico laboratory. Last year, a biography of Oppenheimer, “American Prometheus” (Knopf, 2005), won the Pulitzer Prize.

“One of the most famous scientists of the 20th century,” Dr. Norris noted, got his start “walking these streets” and attending the nearby Ethical Culture School.

Oppenheimer and his parents lived at 155 Riverside Drive, an elegant apartment building at West 88th Street. The superintendent, Joe Gugulski, said the family lived on the 11th floor, overlooking the Hudson River.

“One of my tenants read the book,” Mr. Gugulski told us. “So I looked it up.” To his knowledge, Mr. Gugulski added, no other atomic tourists had visited the building.

The Oppenheimers decorated their apartment with original artwork by Picasso, Rembrandt, Renoir, Van Gogh and Cézanne, according to “American Prometheus.” His mother encouraged young Robert to paint.

By the late 1930s and early 1940s, blocks away at Columbia University, scientists were laboring to split the atom and release its titanic energies. We made our way across campus — with difficulty because of protests over the visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, which is widely suspected of harboring its own bomb program.

Dr. Norris noted that the Manhattan Project led to “many of our problems today.”

The Pupin Physics Laboratories housed the early atom experiments, Dr. Norris said. But the tall building, topped by observatory domes, has no plaque in its foyer describing its nuclear ties.

Passing students and pedestrians answered “no” and “kind of” when asked if they knew of the atom breakthroughs at Pupin Hall. Dr. Norris said the Manhattan Project, at its peak, employed 700 people at Columbia. At one point, the football team was recruited to move tons of uranium. That work, he said, eventually led to the world’s first nuclear reactor.

After lunch, we headed to West 20th Street just off the West Side Highway. The block, on the fringe of Chelsea, bristled with new galleries, and Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. On its north side, three tall buildings once made up the Baker and Williams Warehouses, which held tons of uranium.

Two women taking a cigarette break said they had no idea of their building’s atomic past. “It’s horrible,” said one.

Dr. Norris’s “Traveler’s Guide” fact sheet said the federal government in the late 1980s and early 1990s cleaned the buildings of residual uranium. Workers removed more than a dozen drums of radioactive waste, according to the Department of Energy in Washington. “Radiological surveys show that the site now meets applicable requirements for unrestricted use,” a federal document said in 1995.

We moved to Manhattan’s southern tip and worked our way up Broadway along the route known as the Canyon of Heroes, the scene of many ticker-tape parades amid the skyscrapers.

At 25 Broadway, we visited a minor but important site — the Cunard Building. Edgar Sengier, a Belgian with an office here, had his company mine about 1,200 tons of high-grade uranium ore and store it on Staten Island in the shadow of the Bayonne Bridge. Though a civilian, he knew of the atomic possibilities and feared the invading Germans might confiscate his mines.

Dr. Norris said General Groves, on his first day in charge, sent an assistant to buy all that uranium for a dollar a pound — or $2.5 million. “The Manhattan Project was off to a flying start,” he said, adding that the Belgian entrepreneur in time supplied two-thirds of all the project’s uranium.

We walked past St. Paul’s Chapel and proceeded to the soaring grandeur of the Woolworth Building, once the world’s tallest, at 233 Broadway.

A major site, it housed a front company that devised one of the project’s main ways of concentrating uranium’s rare isotope — a secret of bomb making. On the 11th, 12th and 14th floors, the company drew on the nation’s scientific best and brightest, including teams from Columbia.

Dr. Norris said the front company’s 3,700 employees included Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy. “He was a substantial physicist in his own right,” Dr. Norris said. “He contributed to the American atom bomb, the Soviet atom bomb and the British atom bomb.”

So how did the Manhattan Project get its name, and why was Manhattan chosen as its first headquarters?

Dr. Norris said the answer lay at our next stop, 270 Broadway. There, at Chambers Street, on the southwest corner, we found a nondescript building overlooking City Hall Park.

It was here, Dr. Norris said, that the Army Corps of Engineers had its North Atlantic Division, which built ports and airfields. When the Corps got the responsibility of making the atom bomb, it put the headquarters in the same building, on the 18th floor.

“That way he didn’t need to reinvent the wheel,” Dr. Norris said of General Groves. “He used what he had at his fingertips — the entire Corps of Engineers infrastructure.”

Dr. Norris added that the Corps at that time included “extraordinary people, the best and brightest of West Point.”

In time, the office at 270 Broadway ran not only atom research and materials acquisition but also the building of whole nuclear cities in Tennessee, New Mexico and Washington State.

The first proposed name for the project, Dr. Norris said, was the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials. But General Groves feared that would draw undo attention.

Instead, General Groves called for the bureaucratically dull approach of adopting the standard Corps procedure for naming new regional organizations. That method simply noted the unit’s geographical area, as in the Pittsburgh Engineer District.

So the top-secret endeavor to build the atom bomb got the most boring of cover names: the Manhattan Engineer District, in time shortened to the Manhattan Project. Unlike other Corps districts, however, it had no territorial limits. “He was nuts about not attracting attention,” Dr. Norris said.

Manhattan’s role shrank as secretive outposts for the endeavor sprouted across the country and quickly grew into major enterprises. By the late summer of 1943, little more than a year after its establishment, the headquarters of the Manhattan Project moved to Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Despite this dispersal, Dr. Norris said, scientists and businesses in Manhattan, including The New York Times, continued to aid the atomic project.

In April 1945, General Groves traveled to the newspaper’s offices on West 43rd Street. He asked that a science writer, William L. Laurence, be allowed to go on leave to report on a major wartime story involving science.

As early as 1940, before wartime secrecy, Mr. Laurence had reported on the atomic breakthroughs at Pupin Hall.

Now, Dr. Norris said, Mr. Laurence went to work for the Manhattan Project and became the only reporter to witness the Trinity test in the New Mexican desert in July 1945, and, shortly thereafter, the nuclear bombing of Japan.

The atomic age, Mr. Laurence wrote in the first article of a series, began in the New Mexico desert before dawn in a burst of flame that illuminated “earth and sky for a brief span that seemed eternal.”

In Manhattan, the one location that has memorialized its atomic connection had nothing to do with making or witnessing the bomb, but rather with managing to survive its fury.

The spot is on Riverside Drive between 105th and 106th Streets. There, in a residential neighborhood, in front of the New York Buddhist Church, is a tall statue of a Japanese Buddhist monk, Shinran Shonin, who lived in the 12th and 13th centuries. In peasant hat and sandals, holding a wooden staff, the saint peers down on the sidewalk.

The statue survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, standing a little more than a mile from ground zero. It was brought to New York in 1955. The plaque calls the statue “a testimonial to the atomic bomb devastation and a symbol of lasting hope for world peace.”

The statue stands a few blocks from Columbia University, where much of the bomb program began.

“I wonder how many New Yorkers know about it,” Dr. Norris said of the statue, “and know the history.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/science/30manh.html