Most events are fleeting and temporary, but not so are the places where they occur and leave their traces, if only in memory. As a child in the sixties touring Boston’s historical sites, that which left the deepest impression was neither a statue nor a church, but a circle of cobblestones, maybe a dozen feet in diameter, set on a traffic island at a busy downtown intersection.
On May 24, 1626, one of the most famous real estate transactions in history took place: the director-general of New Netherland, a colony of the United Provinces of the Netherlands located in the northeast of America, bought the island called Manhattan from the Lenni-Lenape Indians for sixty florins.