Wouter Van Twiller News Today

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.

The oldest surviving structure in New York is so old, it even predates New York City.

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.

Get ready to take an adventure and journey in time. There is one New York State man made structure over 370 years old.

Get ready to take an adventure and journey in time. There is one New York State man made structure over 370 years old.

Get ready to take an adventure and journey in time. There is one New York State man made structure over 370 years old.

Peter (Pierre) Minuit (c. 1590-1638) was born in the German town of Wesel. His parents were Walloon (or French-speaking Protestant) refugees who had fled the southern Netherlands when the political situation had become unfriendly to Protestants under Catholic Spain.