The Empire State Building, rising 1,250 feet above the corner of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street, is usually told as a story of steel, ambition, and the Great Depression. Yet the ground beneath it carries a far older history. The island recorded in seventeenth-century documents as Mannahatta — a name rooted in the Munsee (Lenape) language and commonly rendered as ‘hilly island,’ though scholars still debate its precise meaning — was the homeland of Lenape communities long before it was surveyed into a grid of numbered streets. Understanding the world’s most famous office tower means understanding the layers beneath it: an Indigenous landscape of fishing camps, shell middens, and footpaths; a contested colonial transaction in 1626; and a Lenape people whose descendants remain in the region and across North America today.
Mannahatta Before the Grid: The Lenape Homeland
At the time of European contact, the lower Hudson Valley, Staten Island, western Long Island, and northern New Jersey were home to Munsee-speaking Lenape peoples. Manhattan itself lay within this network of communities, which included groups later recorded by colonial scribes as the Canarsie, the Weckquaesgeek (Wappinger), and the Rechgawawanc. These were not fixed ‘nations’ in the European sense but kin-based communities linked by language, marriage, and shared seasonal territories.
Life on Mannahatta was organized around water. Lenape families moved between coastal camps in spring and summer and inland hunting grounds in colder months, harvesting oysters and shellfish from the East River and harbor shallows, fishing, gathering, and cultivating maize, beans, and squash. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century excavations on the island repeatedly uncovered shell middens — dense deposits of discarded oyster and clam shell — along with projectile points and pottery fragments. Much of this material was recovered incidentally during construction projects and now sits in museum collections rather than on the landscape where it was made.
Manhattan’s later roads are widely thought to echo Lenape footpaths, though historians caution that specific trail-to-street identifications are often asserted with more confidence than the documentary record supports. The broader point stands: the island’s geography was already well known, named, and used long before it was surveyed. For a wider view of the region’s Indigenous diversity, see this overview of Native American cultures of the Northeast.
The 1626 Transaction and the Documentary Record
The most repeated story about Manhattan — that the island was ‘sold’ for twenty-four dollars — deserves careful correction. No deed or contract from 1626 survives. The primary evidence is a letter written in November 1626 by Pieter Schaghen, a Dutch West India Company official, reporting that the company had ‘purchased’ the island of Manhattes from its inhabitants for goods valued at 60 guilders. The familiar figure of $24 was not a contemporary price but a nineteenth-century conversion, calculated by the historian John Romeyn Brodhead in the 1840s and repeated ever since.
Equally important is what such an agreement likely meant to Lenape leaders. Scholarship on early colonial land transactions in the Northeast emphasizes that Indigenous concepts of agreement generally involved reciprocal obligation, alliance, and shared use rather than the permanent, exclusive alienation of land that Dutch and later English law assumed. The 1626 record is thus better read as the beginning of a long dispute than as a clean sale.
Violence followed quickly. During Kieft’s War (1643–1645), Dutch forces attacked Lenape settlements at Pavonia and Corlaer’s Hook on the night of February 25, 1643, killing scores of people and igniting two years of brutal conflict. Displacement accelerated under English rule after 1664, pushing Lenape communities westward and northward.
Wampum, Diplomacy, and Material Culture
Shell remained central to the region’s political life long after contact. Wampum — beads ground from quahog and whelk shell — served Lenape and Haudenosaunee diplomats as a material record of agreements, mourning, and condolence. Belts of woven wampum could carry a message, ratify a treaty, or mark a speaker’s authority. Dutch colonists quickly recognized its value and industrialized its production, which altered but did not destroy its ceremonial meaning. Readers interested in this subject can explore what wampum was and how it was used in treaty and council settings.
Archaeological collections from the New York region — beadwork, carved bone, ceramic vessels, and stone tools — form the material evidence for this history. Contemporary institutions such as the National Museum of the American Indian, with its George Gustav Heye Center in Lower Manhattan, and Indigenous-led organizations including the Lenape Center in New York, work to interpret these collections with descendant communities rather than about them. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) provides the legal framework through which many institutions have begun returning ancestors and cultural items.
From Farmland to Skyscraper: The Site at 34th and Fifth
By the eighteenth century the Lenape landscape had been replaced by colonial farmland; the block that would hold the Empire State Building lay within the Thompson family farm, a working agricultural tract with an orchard and a small pond. In the 1890s the site became the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, one of Gilded Age Manhattan’s most fashionable addresses. That building was demolished in 1929 to clear the lot for a speculative office tower financed by John J. Raskob and led publicly by former governor Al Smith.
Building the Empire State Building, 1930–1931
The architects Shreve, Lamb & Harmon and the contractor Starrett Brothers and Eken delivered the tower in a little over a year. Excavation began in January 1930, and structural steel erection started on March 17, 1930. At peak the project employed roughly 3,400 workers, used about 57,000 tons of steel, and raised steel framing at several floors per week. Five workers died during construction, a figure recorded in the photographic archive produced by Lewis Hine, whose images of ironworkers on the beams remain the definitive visual record of the project. The building opened on May 1, 1931 at 102 stories, claiming the title of world’s tallest structure — a distinction it held until 1970. For a deeper technical account, see the engineering of the Empire State Building.
The tower’s Indiana limestone and granite cladding, aluminum trim, and Art Deco interiors belong to a different material tradition entirely from the shell, bone, and stone of Lenape craft. Placed together, they mark the distance between two ways of building on the same island — one grounded in seasonal stewardship of waterways, the other in vertical speculation on land treated as a commodity.
Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways
- Indigenous prior presence: Manhattan was Lenape homeland, used seasonally and named in Munsee, before any European survey.
- A contested ‘sale’: The 1626 record is a single letter reporting 60 guilders in goods; no deed survives, and the $24 figure is a later conversion, not a contemporary price.
- Diplomatic material culture: Wampum belts functioned as records of treaty, condolence, and alliance — evidence that northeastern diplomacy relied on durable, portable documents of shell.
- Violence and dispossession: Kieft’s War (1643–1645) and post-1664 English expansion accelerated Lenape displacement from the island.
- Continuity, not disappearance: Lenape descendants live today in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Ontario, New Jersey, and New York, and remain active in cultural preservation and repatriation.
- Two histories, one site: The Empire State Building (1930–1931) and the Lenape landscape it covers are not separate stories but consecutive chapters of the same ground.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did the Lenape really sell Manhattan for $24?
No single documented sale exists at that price. A November 1626 letter from Pieter Schaghen states that the island was purchased for goods worth 60 guilders. The ‘$24’ figure was calculated by John Romeyn Brodhead in the 1840s as a currency conversion and has been repeated as fact ever since. No deed survives, and the Lenape understanding of the agreement almost certainly differed from the Dutch claim of permanent ownership.
Who were the Lenape, and where are their descendants today?
The Lenape (also called Delaware) are an Algonquian-speaking people of the lower Hudson and Delaware valleys, speaking Munsee and Unami dialects. Federally recognized descendant nations include the Delaware Nation and the Delaware Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma and the Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin; the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario includes Lenape members; and state-recognized communities such as the Ramapough Lenape Nation remain in the New Jersey–New York area.
What archaeological evidence of Indigenous life survives from Manhattan?
Shell middens, ceramic fragments, and stone tools have been documented across the island, frequently uncovered during construction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Much of this material was removed without systematic recording and now resides in museum and university collections, where descendant communities and archaeologists are working to reassess it.
When was the Empire State Building built, and how tall is it?
Construction ran from 1930 to 1931, with the building opening on May 1, 1931. It stands 102 stories and 1,250 feet to the roof; the addition of a television antenna in 1950 brought its total height to 1,454 feet.
Why is wampum important in New York’s colonial history?
Wampum beads of quahog and whelk shell were used by Lenape and Haudenosaunee peoples to record treaties, convey diplomatic messages, and honor the dead. Dutch traders adopted wampum as a medium of exchange in the fur trade, which increased production while the beads retained ceremonial significance in Indigenous hands.
Cultural Legacy and Modern Preservation
The Empire State Building remains an engineering landmark and a symbol of New York, but it stands on ground that was Lenape long before it was Manhattan. Acknowledging that history is not a gesture of subtraction from the building’s significance; it is an accurate account of how the site came to be available for construction at all. Today, Lenape scholars, artists, and tribal historians work to restore the record — through museum consultation, language revitalization, repatriation under NAGPRA, and public interpretation of the island’s deep past. Visitors who look up at the tower might also look down: the shell middens, footpaths, and Munsee place names are as much a part of 34th Street as the limestone and steel.
