Story Highlights
- Historical event
- 24 May 1626
- The island of Manhattan has an area of 59.5 square kilometers. The name Manhattan supposedly comes from the Indian word for "island with many hills".
On this day back in 1626 one of the most famous transactions in history was made. Dutch sailor Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from a local Indian tribe in exchange for goods worth 60 Dutch guilders.
One historian later calculated that those 60 guilders were worth about $24. Today’s historians believe that the value was slightly higher, but, in any case, it was a relatively small amount considering the value of the land on which today lies the center of New York.
The island of Manhattan has an area of 59.5 square kilometers. Approximately 1.6 million people live on the island today, but on a workday the population grows to more than 4 million, so the island employs around two-thirds of the New York City population. GDP of the entire New York annually amounts to about 1,200 billion dollars.
The name Manhattan supposedly comes from the Indian word for “island with many hills”. The mentioned buyer of Manhattan, Peter Minuit, was at the head of the colony called “New Holland”.
The main center of the colony was Fort Amsterdam, on the southern tip of Manhattan. Around this fort later grew New Amsterdam settlement, which changed its name to New York when taken over by the British from the Dutch in 1665.
