Monuments of Colonial New York: The Tulip Tree and 'Signal'

This week Gotham presents a six-part series on monuments, statues, and commemorations in / about colonial New York City. 

Recognizing that one of the more recent debates over public memory has been the conflict over Columbus / Indigenous People’s Day, we begin with Lisa Blee and John C. Winters, who examine monuments of and by Native peoples in Manhattan. Revisiting Peter Minuit’s 1626 “purchase” and the resulting dispossession the Lenape people, Blee examines the Tulip Tree plaque in upper Manhattan and sketches how generations of Americans projected narratives of progress, civilization, and modernity on the Tulip Tree itself. Winters turns our attention to Signal, an art installation in a lower Manhattan subway station by Mel Chin, that not only testifies to Indigenous presence and power but also serves as a monument of Iroquoian reclamation of a decolonized space.

Tulip Tree
By Lisa Blee

The plaque in Inwood Hill Park, dedicated in 1954 to the site of the supposed “purchase” of Manhattan.

Most New Yorkers are familiar with the legend of Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan in 1626 for a few “trinkets and beads.” The narrative blithely ignores how Lenape villagers did not conceive of land as private property that could be transferred from one person to another. But this is not history; it’s a story that uses Native people as a foil for “rational” colonists destined to create wealth by commodifying the land itself. The obviously lopsided exchange paints Native people as fools for under-valuing the island. The assumption that colonial settlers could use “civilized” methods to “improve” land — make a profit from resources Indians appeared to underutilize or use irrationally — served as justification for the dispossession of Indigenous homelands across the continent.

“The Old Tulip Tree,” n.d. by Ernest Lawson (1873-1939). Source: https://myinwood.net/tulip-tree-of-old-inwood/

At first blush the plaque in Inwood Hill Park appears as just another iteration of the legend. But the majority of the plaque text is devoted not to the land sale, but rather to the tulip tree that later sprouted up beside a Lenape camp at the northern tip of Manhattan. The plaque commissioners understood the tree to be a solid anchor for settler memory; Minuit’s exchange is “according to legend,” yet the tree was deeply rooted in American scientific, cultural, and legal regimes. The tulip tree was described in the preserved papers of early settlers, could be seen in watercolor paintings in city galleries and historic photographs held in a city archive, and its precise location confirmed on land deeds from the point of sale to the Parks Department in 1916.[1] The plaque emphasizes Enlightenment understandings, noting its proper taxonomic place in the Linnaean system and measuring the tree’s dimensions (at what mid-century conservationists would call its “apex”). The tree was, in more ways than one, a man-made memorial to Western progress and justification for colonialism in its own right.

Early settlers and their descendants routinely embraced specific trees as witnesses to indigenous land transfer and “disappearance.” Colonial America provides us with numerous examples of celebrated “treaty trees” whose memorialization shores up the narrative of peaceful colonization.[2] By memorializing a supposedly peaceful economic exchange, the more complex and violent history of colonialism fades from view. The Inwood Hill Park tulip tree was selected as a witness to the transformation from Lenape homeland to bustling American city by two accidents of fate: its survival to an old age just as the preservation movement gripped the region, and its existence in what became a public park.

Progressive elites and planners believed in the civic virtue of monuments in public parks, and Americans had long associated Native people with “wilderness” (simultaneously ignoring their humanity and their role in shaping historic landscapes).  The Inwood Hill plaque made these association explicit: the tulip tree served as the “last link” to the Lenape villagers who had disappeared as the place transformed into civilization. This memorial maintains the narrative erasure of Indigenous people from modernity and the city while celebrating the dispossession of Native people as a measure of progress.

Cavity filled with cement after “tree surgery” and surrounded by metal fence. November 1912. Source: http://dcmny.org/islandora/object/nyhs%3A1252/compound-parent-metadata

As a living memorial to the success of civilization, the ancient tree itself became the concern of preservationists and scientifically trained foresters who attempted to save it from decay. In 1912 the Forestry Bureau erected a metal perimeter fence, trimmed dead branches and filled cavities “with cement according to modern methods of tree surgery.” But by 1930, the cement had cracked and the science had changed, prompting the application of a new cavity filling accompanied by steel rods and a stabilizing cable.[3] Nevertheless, the tree came down in a storm a few years later. The living monument to Progress would by its very nature decay and die.  

The Inwood Hill tulip tree provided metaphorical roots in a place for settlers to nurture their faith in progress and narratives of peaceful colonization. The fallen tree’s absence necessitated the rock-mounted plaque. These memorial practices can easily distract from the material reality of dispossession that has denied generations of Lenape people the opportunity to sustain themselves from and with their land. The history of this tree as monument – its position in urban parkland, the donations for tree surgery and a metal plaque, and even the museum and archive that preserve images of this tulip tree – obscures how the original acquisition of indigenous land made the scaffolding of memorialization possible in the first place.

Lisa Blee is an Associate Professor at Wake Forest University and the author of Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit. Her research interests include American Indian and settler politics, historical narratives, and commemorations in the U.S. West.

“We Built the Bones of this City”
An Iroquoian Reclamation of Space and Memory
By John C. Winters

The speakers: Mel Chin is to the left in black, G. Peter Jemison next to him in yellow, and Oren Lyons is on the right in green. Photograph by John C. Winters.

On May 13, 2018, I attended a public rededication of Mel Chin’s 1993 art installation Signal at the Broadway/Lafayette Street subway station. The ceremony recognized G. Peter Jemison, the esteemed Seneca artist, author, and curator, and his role “on behalf of the Six Nations” designing and collaborating on the original project twenty five years earlier.[4]

After the dedication, Oren Lyons, Chief and Faithkeeper of the Seneca Turtle Clan, offered his interpretation of Signal. “We built the bones of this city,” he explained, referring first to the Iroquois “Skywalkers” who built the city’s iconic skyline in the early 20th century, but also to the ancient Iroquois Great Tree of Peace that made New York a place of intercultural exchange and potential peace long before Europeans stumbled on to American shores.[5] Speaking from a decolonized space in an imperial city, Lyons reclaimed a part of the city’s founding history for the Iroquois while expressing his hope for the future.

A closeup of a Masonic Compass and Square. Photograph by John C. Winters.

In that light, Signal invites us to reimagine the city’s history in the colonial and early national periods as an indigenous space. On the walls of the bustling subway station are stylized Free Mason Compasses and Squares, which were symbols adapted by the Iroquois, integrated into trade items, and became widely recognized as emblems of the Iroquois and their Council Fires.[6] These call to mind a growing city fueled by Native trade and inhabited by indigenous slaves and slaveholders, fur traders, leaders visiting the United States’ first capital city, whalers who fueled the American energy industry, families, and other long-hidden figures.

One of the figures wrapping the walls of the subway station that echo the 1794 Canandaigua Treaty Belt. Photography by John C. Winters.

Other aspects of Signal’s design also reveal Indian country’s historic influence on New York geopolitics. After all, the expansion of New York and its city was not an inevitability. It occurred in fits and starts, and often depended on forming alliances with indigenous powers like the Iroquois “empire” and other pan-Indian coalitions whose very existence on New York’s borders “threatened to fragment the nation [George] Washington was building.”[7] That history of “peace” and power lives on in Jemison’s stylized wampum belt design that echoes the famed 1794 Canandaigua Treaty Belt and is “loaded with the same cultural significance as the sacred belts” themselves.[8]  

Seen that way, we can think of Signal as an Iroquoian reclamation — indeed a monument — to public memory. It flips the script on other public sites that perpetuate faulty narratives of an “inevitable” Native decline after the “sale” of Manhattan to the Dutch, as well as those spaces that cultivate destructive Native stereotypes. For scholars, Signal connects to the familiar and important themes of indigenous decolonization, adaptation, and survival. But it also invites us to think beyond that and to consider the ways in which indigenous people themselves shaped aspects of New York’s history and culture in their own image.  

John C. Winters is the ITPS Research Associate in New York History at the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona College. As a public historian, John has served in various curatorial and supervisory capacities at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute and George Washington's Mount Vernon.

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[1] http://myinwood.wpengine.com/tulip-tree-of-old-inwood/

[2] See Jared Farmer, “Taking Liberties with Historic Trees,” Journal of American History, Volume 105, Issue 4, March 2019, Pages 815–842.

[3] https://www.archives.nyc/blog/2017/8/23/wo6ixy6rp3i7b3isbaeh12sux5nmdb.

[4] See Mel Chin’s website for more images/descriptions. Mel Chin, Signal http://melchin.org/oeuvre/signal/ (Accessed July 2020).

[5] Lyons’ speech was, unfortunately, not recorded. See a short edited video in https://www.nolongerempty.org/event/signal-rededication-ceremony-broadway-lafayette-subway-station/On the “Skywalkers,” see: “Walking the Steel: From Girder to Ground Zero,” https://www.iroquoismuseum.org/2017-feature-exhibition (accessed July 2020); “Skywalkers: A Portrait of Mohawk Ironworkers at the World Trade Center,” https://www.911memorial.org/visit/museum/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/skywalkers-portrait-mohawk-ironworkers-world-trade-center (accessed July 2020); and “Men of steel: How Brooklyn’s Native American ironworkers built New York,” 6sqft blog, July 25, 2018, https://www.6sqft.com/men-of-steel-how-brooklyns-native-american-ironworkers-built-new-york/ (accessed July 2020).

[6] Chin, Signal http://melchin.org/oeuvre/signal/.

[7] Colin Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 12.

[8] Chin, Signal http://melchin.org/oeuvre/signal/.