Flashback: A Tour of 1940s New York City

To walk through New York City in the 1940s was to move through one of the most storied urban landscapes on Earth—the Empire State Building dominating the skyline, the Brooklyn Bridge carrying commuters across the East River, and the memory of the Erie Canal’s transformation still shaping commerce upstate. Yet every one of these engineering landmarks rose on land with far older histories. Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Mohawk Valley, and the Chesapeake region are the ancestral homelands of the Lenape, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Powhatan and related Algonquian nations, and many other Indigenous peoples whose presence long preceded—and outlasted—the era of steel and concrete. Understanding the 1940s city honestly means understanding the Native nations whose lands, labor, and diplomacy made it possible, and whose communities still carry these legacies today.

Mannahatta Before Manhattan: The Lenape Homeland

Long before 1940s taxicabs honked beneath neon marquees, the island at the heart of New York City was Mannahatta, the homeland of Munsee-speaking Lenape bands, a name commonly translated as referring to the island’s many hills. The Lenape lived in seasonally shifting villages, harvesting oysters and clams from the surrounding waters—shell middens along the harbor still testify to centuries of occupation. The waters also supplied the shell material for wampum, the tubular purple and white beads crafted from quahog clam and whelk shell by coastal Algonquian peoples, which served as ceremony, record, and exchange long before Europeans recast it as currency. To explore what wampum is and how it was used is to understand one of the most misunderstood material traditions of the Northeast. The island was famously acquired from Indigenous holders by Peter Minuit in 1626 for trade goods—a transaction the Lenape almost certainly understood differently than the Dutch did.

The Empire State Building and the Mohawk Skywalkers

When the Empire State Building was completed in 1931, it stood as the world’s tallest skyscraper—1,250 feet to its topmost floor, erected in roughly 410 days by crews working at a pace of about four and a half stories per week. Among the most celebrated workers in New York high steel were Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) ironwalkers from the communities of Kahnawà:ke and Akwesasne. Their lineage in structural ironwork dates to the 1880s on the Canadian border, and by the skyscraper boom of the early twentieth century, generations of Mohawk families had made the seasonal commute to New York job sites—a tradition that continued through the 1940s, when the building survived a remarkable event: on July 28, 1945, a B-25 bomber lost in fog struck the 79th floor, yet the structure reopened within days. Mohawk ironworkers would later help raise the World Trade Center towers, and the community’s reputation as ‘skywalkers’ remains a point of cultural pride.

The Erie Canal Through Haudenosaunee Country

Opened in 1825, the Erie Canal—363 miles from Albany to Buffalo—was among the most consequential public works of the nineteenth century, opening the Great Lakes to Atlantic commerce. But its route followed the Mohawk River valley, the traditional corridor and homeland of the Mohawk Nation, and cut through the territories of the entire Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. In the decades before construction, treaties such as the negotiations at Fort Schuyler in 1788 had extracted massive land cessions from the Oneida and Onondaga, shrinking the confederacy’s land base even as chiefs like Cornplanter and Red Jacket protested unequal dealings. The canal accelerated settler settlement across Indigenous country, and the once-vast beaver meadows and orchards of Seneca lands around Buffalo were rapidly subdivided. Learning how the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy was formed reveals why this territory mattered so deeply: the confederacy’s council fires and nations had governed this same landscape for centuries before surveyors mapped a ditch through it.

The Brooklyn Bridge on Ancient Canarsee Land

When it opened in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge—designed by John A. Roebling and completed under his son Washington Roebling—was the longest suspension bridge in the world, its main span stretching over 1,595 feet. The borough it anchored takes its name from the Dutch town of Breuckelen, but the land itself belonged to the Canarsee, a Lenape people whose villages dotted western Long Island for generations before Dutch colonization. The bridge’s massive stone towers and steel cables literally rest on a shoreline shaped by millennia of Lenape stewardship—the same shoreline where, during the Revolutionary era, one of the war’s largest engagements unfolded nearby at the Battle of Long Island in 1776, a battle that itself played out across contested Indigenous homelands.

Crossing the Great Water: The Chesapeake and Its First Nations

The name Chesapeake itself derives from an Algonquian term often translated as ‘great water’ or ‘great shellfish bay’—a fitting description of a watershed that has sustained Indigenous nations for over ten thousand years. At the time of English settlement in 1607, the bay was the heart of the Powhatan chiefdom, a network of more than two dozen Algonquian-speaking communities whose story is often misrepresented through the legend of Pocahontas; the fuller truth about Matoaka of the Powhatan Nation offers crucial historical detail about that world. The region’s engineering crossings must be dated with care: the Chesapeake Bay Bridge between Sandy Point and Kent Island opened in 1952, while it was the even more ambitious Chesapeake Bay Bridge–Tunnel, completed in 1964, that stretched roughly 17.6 miles across the bay’s mouth—one of the greatest engineering feats of its kind anywhere on the globe.

Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways

• The land came first. Every engineering landmark covered here—the Erie Canal, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, and the Chesapeake crossings—stands on the documented ancestral territory of specific Indigenous nations: the Lenape, the Haudenosaunee, and the Powhatan and Chesapeake Algonquian peoples, respectively.
• Native labor built the skyline too. Mohawk skywalkers were a foundational part of New York’s high-steel workforce, an ongoing tradition of expertise, not a novelty.
• The 1940s marked transition, not disappearance. World War II saw thousands of Native American servicemen—including Haudenosaunee men—pass through and defend the nation, while the postwar years initiated federal relocation policies that brought growing numbers of Native people directly into cities like New York.
• Indigenous presence endures. The Lenape diaspora, the Six Nations, the Pamunkey, Nanticoke, Rappahannock, and Piscataway nations of the Chesapeake remain living communities with continuing governments, languages, and cultural programs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which Native nations originally inhabited the land where New York City now stands?

The city’s core islands and shores were the homeland of Munsee-speaking Lenape people, including the Canarsee of western Long Island and the Weekquaesgeek and related bands of Manhattan and the Bronx.

Did Mohawk ironworkers actually help build New York’s famous skyscrapers?

Yes. Mohawk ironworkers from Kahnawà:ke and Akwesasne have worked New York high steel since the late nineteenth century, participating in the era of landmark construction that produced buildings like the Empire State Building and, decades later, the World Trade Center.

How did the Erie Canal affect the Haudenosaunee?

The canal’s route through the Mohawk Valley crossed the heart of Haudenosaunee territory. Combined with post-Revolutionary land cessions, it accelerated settler development of Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca lands and permanently altered the region’s Indigenous economies and land base.

Where can the public learn more about this history in New York City today?

The George Gustav Heye Center of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, housed in the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House at Bowling Green, presents rotating exhibitions drawn from one of the world’s most extensive collections of Indigenous material culture.

Concluding Synthesis: Cultural Legacy and Modern Preservation

The 1940s city of newsreels and neon was, like every American metropolis, a layered landscape: Lenape shores beneath Brooklyn Bridge cables, Haudenosaunee valleys carved by canal commerce, Mohawk walkers on high steel above Manhattan streets. Repatriation under NAGPRA (1990) and the ongoing curation of Indigenous collections have made institutions more accountable to tribal nations, while Lenape and Haudenosaunee communities continue language revitalization and cultural education in and around the region. The engineering marvels still stand—but so do the nations whose lands hold them up.