Sapokanikan was the name of one of several Lenape villages that archaeologists have identified as existing on Manhattan Island prior to the coming of Europeans. It was located in the southwest portion of the island, on the shores of a trout stream the Indians called Minetta. Stretching things just a bit, one might say the members of this seasonal community were the first residents of Greenwich Village.

Dutch settlement of the area began in 1629, when the third director of New Netherland, Wouter Van Twiller, got a grant from the West India Company for a tobacco plantation. Surprisingly, tobacco was a genuine commodity on Manhattan during the Dutch period. It grew well enough in this corner of the island that the word “Sapokanikan” may in fact have meant “wild tobacco.” The most famous landowners in this area during the period were Everardus Bogardus, the Dutch Reformed minister of the colony, and his wife, Anneke Jans. In reality, it was Anneke who managed the estate, and grew it to considerable proportions.

This was also an area where the West India Company conveyed farm lots to freed African slaves. The records of the colony show the first of these African landholders on Manhattan—Antony Portuguese, Gratia Dangola, Manuel Gerrit de Reus—passing their property down through successive generations. It’s hard to picture the area of that time when walking in the Village today, but a small vestige remains. If you stand at the northeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Bleecker Street, you will see a tiny block that juts northward just a few dozen paces, curving like a stream. Minetta Street is a remnant of what in the English colonial era was known as the Negroes’ Causeway—the road that ran alongside Minetta Brook (which was forced underground in the nineteenth century) and connected the area of African farms with points south.