The First Patrons of Broadway

As we learned the other day, the modern day street you and I know as Broadway was once the Wickquasgeck Road, a formidable dirt path cut through the woods that the Native Americans would use to walk from one end of the island to the other. That’s why Broadway, at some points, doesn’t quite run in the same block pattern as the other streets in New York City and accounts for the famous Time Square scene- Broadway intersects 7th Avenue at an acute angle. If Broadway was just a regular old street, it would intersect at right angles with the other city streets.

You were probably interested in learning about the Native Americans who used to travel along Broadway back before the Dutch and English settlers came and build a road there and started singing and dancing in venues lined along the Wickquasgeck Road. Well, the native people of the area were known as the Lenape, or the Delaware Indians. If you’ve seen the movie Last of the Mohicans, you’ll have seen people closely related to the Lenape. Even though they were the inhabitants of Manhattan at the time of it’s sale to the Dutch, they were not involved in the negotiations. Another tribe in the region sold Manhattan to the Dutch West India Company for an amount that, as tradition holds, was worth approximately 24 dollars in today’s terms. The actual amount was more like 1,000, but it was still a pretty good bargain, hindsight being 20-20.

To get Broadway tickets, go to StubHub.com.

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