Technically Speaking, January 2020

This is the fourth installment of a rerun of periodic series chronicling the history of the street. The series originally ran in Technically Speaking beginning in September 2000.

Here is the second Manhattan melodrama for your consideration. The first (December 2019) was a story of an out-of-towner who had his only form of transportation burned to the ground, was forced to live in the streets, and then was sued for negligence.  The second is a story of a fast-talking city slicker who sells real estate he doesn’t own to gullible foreigners.  Common stories? Both take place in the 1600’s!

The date is 1626.  A little over a decade had passed since Adrian Block built huts on Broadway and misplaced his ship’s anchor.  The Dutch, then heavily involved in the fur trade, decided they needed a permanent colony in the Americas.  Manhattan Island, a common stopping point along the trade route, seemed the perfect place.

As most people know, the Dutch purchased the Island of Manhattan for the equivalent of a few dollars in trinkets and beads. What you may not know are the details of that deal and how ironically appropriate they were.

Manhattan must have been quite the Native resort in 1626 because everyone was claiming ownership to it.  It was in that year that the Canarsee band of Lenape Indians, with a keen sense of real estate values, sold the island of Manhattan to Peter Minuit and the Dutch East India Co.  Now we tend to think Minuit got the better part of that deal, but it was a far better deal for the Canarsees, who lived in what we now know as south Brooklyn. Even though they sold the island at a substantial discount, they still came out ahead because they never owned the Island in the first place!  The land still belonged to the Munsee band of Lenape Indians, who, no matter how drunk they had gotten 17 years earlier with Henry Hudson, just didn’t remember selling it!

As you might imagine, this created some tension.  The Munsees showed their displeasure with the whole arrangement by periodically raiding the Dutch colony and making off with their livestock – a rude thing to do, even by New York standards!  The colony’s response, in order that they might put an end to this constant raid on stock, was to build a wall, which they did at their Northern-most edge.  Fallen trees formed the first barrier.  These were later replaced with 12 ft. posts and granite rocks.  Once a wall was constructed, a road providing access to it was also built.  This road, running parallel to the wall, was called, unimaginatively, Wall Street.

Having said the details were ironically appropriate, you might think I was referring to the deal which eventually required the colonists to build a wall, giving us Wall Street.  Not at all.  My remark concerned itself more with the actions of the Indians rather than the colonists.  In selling something they didn’t own, the Canarsees participated in the first recorded short sale in Wall Street’s history.  A short sale, the act of selling something you don’t own, is a particularly sophisticated strategy found only in the securities industry.  How appropriate that Wall Street was created because of a short sale, a strategy found exclusively in the very industry which Wall Street has come to symbolize.

By the way, should you find yourself in Manhattan, as did Peter Minuit and Adrian Block, you should know that despite the gallant efforts of those first Dutch colonists, stock is still being raided on Wall Street and the locals are still taking advantage of out-of-towners!