Here’s a deal to write home about.
Proof positive of the world’s most famous real-estate transaction is now on display at the South Street Seaport Museum. Visitors can take a look at a 1626 letter from Dutchman Pieter Schaghen confirming the famous purchase of Manhattan by Dutch Gov. Peter Minuit from the Lenape tribe for $24 worth of trinkets.
“It’s called the best business deal ever,” said Martine Gosselink, a curator at the National Archives of the Netherlands. “For us, the idea you can buy Manhattan is crazy, but for them, it was just another piece of land.”
Schagehn’s missive, called by historians “New York’s birth certificate,” is the first written document confirming the sale. To date, no written contract for the 1626 deal negotiated by New Amsterdam founder Minuit has been recovered.
Historians still debate if the $24 figure is accurate, with some people saying the actual value of the trade would be closer to $1,000 — still one heck of a bargain.
The letter is just one of 60 artifacts — including maps, paintings and records — from the Dutch settlement of the Big Apple on loan from the Netherlands to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York.
The exhibit, called New Amsterdam: The Island at the Center of the World, opens to the public Sunday and runs through Jan. 3.
One map of lower Manhattan in 1660, called the Castello Plan, shows Wall Street and Broadway clearly marked.
“The street pattern is still the same, and you could use the map today,” Gosselink said.
“Broadway was an Indian trail, and the Dutch reused it, made it Broadway, and it extended all the way to Albany,” she said, noting the map is the only remaining street plan from the Dutch period.
Other records from the 17th century document the daily interactions between all of New Amsterdam’s residents, which included the Dutch, the English, Native Americans, freed and enslaved Africans, Jews and Quakers.
“These are the pearls of the National Archives,” Gosselink said.
Additional reporting by Chuck Bennett