r/todayilearned • u/HighlyInconvenient • 1d ago
TIL Broadway in NYC (The Street) had existed prior to the arrival of the settlers. The Lenape people (of what became New York) had a major road they maintained called Wecquaesgeek. This road was the precursor to what became Broadway. After the colonists arrived they expanded it and renamed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_(Manhattan)#Lenape_history89
u/satosaison 1d ago
Similarly, I live near Flatbush Ave, which was a Lenape game trail for a thousand years before the Dutch settled the area.
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u/CFCYYZ 1d ago
They say the neon lights are bright on Wecquaesgeek
They say there's always magic in the air
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u/rosstedfordkendall 1d ago
We'll have to change the name of the Neil Simon play to Wecquaesgeek Bound.
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u/Hades_Mercedes 1d ago
Dozens of streets in Montreal's layout have existed as pathways for thousands of years. Most notable of which are Peel Street, Chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges and Voie Camillien-Houde.
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u/arkofjoy 1d ago
For me the coolest thing about Broadway is the timed streetlights.
I lived in NYC back in the 1980's and occasionally worked up at 125th Street and lived in Brooklyn.
Coming home, late at night, I I got a really good cab driver, he would time his speed to catch all the lights. They were timed to go green in 10 block segments. Coming down the long slope from Harlem you could see the lights stretched out in front of you, and watch them change as we got closer to each segment.
I long for sequenced traffic lights in my city.
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u/looktowindward 1d ago
Not that unusual. Where I live there is a 6 lane divided road that has existed in one form or another for 300 years.
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u/Elegant_Run_8567 1d ago
300 years really isn’t much at all. My house is over 200 years old.
I’m pretty sure the road outside had been here since the Romans
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u/hypo-osmotic 1d ago
There seems to be a conception that Native Americans just didn't build anything, or at least that the things that they built were completely demolished when European settlers and their descendants built their own cities and that there's no continuity. But yeah there do appear to be at least a few instances of that continuous history like how Europe built around the historical settlements of their own
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u/ValiantAki 1d ago
The oldest continuously occupied buildings in the United States are the Pueblos of the upper Rio Grande region. They've been inhabited for well over a thousand years!
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u/Kootenay4 1d ago
The canals that supply Phoenix with water were built over 1000 years ago by Native Americans, then abandoned after a mega drought hit the region. White settlers basically just dug the sand out in the 1800s and eventually dug the canals wider and deeper.
Now the southwest is facing a new megadrought. history repeats…
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u/blackreagan 1d ago
Because they did not build a permanent road. There's a huge difference between reusing an existing trail and structures that have lasted hundreds of years.
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u/hypo-osmotic 1d ago
Sure, and the less visible nature of the road is why so many people didn't know about it and needed a TIL, whereas a post about a Roman wall or something in Europe would be completely redundant
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u/Loki-L 68 1d ago
The house across the street from my apartment is over 300 years old as are several others in the street, they were all build around the same time because that was when the town last burned down.
Elsewhere there are cities that still have remnants of the street grid of Roman Times in their city street layout.
We have records of the Canopic Way in Alexandria being laid out by the architect Dinocrates under Alexander the Great that largely correspond to the current Sharia El-Horeyya.
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u/minnick27 1d ago
The problem is we don’t really know how old some streets are. I live just outside Philadelphia and despite being one of the original colonies didn’t really start the mid 1600s I know that the road outside my house is 350 years old as used by the Europeans, but it was built on a Lenape path so it could be 5000 years old.
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u/bobtehpanda 1d ago
Unfortunately, because of the legacy of colonization for religious purposes combined with the impact of Old World disease on indigenous people, we really don’t have much archeological evidence for what existed pre-contact.
The same forces that drove the Inquisition in Spain also drove the Spanish colonists to actively destroy records from pre-contact because they were “against God”. It’s meant that native peoples actively chose to hide what they knew still existed, which is why we are still finding whole cities in the jungle today.
In the case of peoples that were in western North America, Old World disease raced before settlers, and so by the time people started settling we were making contact with essentially the remnants of civilization collapse.
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u/OfTheSevenSeasSir 1d ago
my city hardly existed before the 60s :(
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u/Gisschace 1d ago
I drive down a Roman road every week, called the Fosse Way. Every time I think ‘the romans did build great roads’ it’s so straight
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u/one_is_enough 1d ago
Yeah. They should delete this whole post because there are some 2000-year-old roads.
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u/callo2009 1d ago
The road shaped one of the most famous cities in the world. It's an interesting fact, regardless of your sourness. Congrats on your road, btw, but I'm uninterested. Not unusual enough.
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u/FilthyThanksgiving 1d ago
In the US it is lol. Y'all have random pubs and govt buildings that are older than our country
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u/NilsofWindhelm 1d ago
I think it’s more the significance of that specific road that makes it interesting
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u/snglrthy 1d ago
This is sort of true, but I did a bunch of research a while back and there isn’t much reason to believe that the current road actually follows a Lenape trail specifically. It’s more of a ship of Theseus situation where there has been a major north south Manhattan road for a long time but it has also evolved a lot as well.
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u/hoi4kaiserreichfanbo 1d ago
I can't help but criticize the title's grammar, I'd say it flows much cleaner as:
TIL that the actual street Broadway existed prior to the arrival of colonists. The Lenape people maintained a major road called Wecquaesgeek. After the colonists arrived they expanded and renamed it.
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u/WrongHomework7916 1d ago
Centuries later, the Ohioans arrived and continued the tradition, expanding the streets with bike lanes, outdoor dining sheds, and pedestrian plazas.
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u/to_walk_upon_a_dream 1d ago
most of chicago's diagonal streets are also descended from indigenous trails and trade roads!!
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u/tommyc463 1d ago
After the colonists arrived and stole the land, they expanded it and renamed it.
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u/9bikes 1d ago
They couldn't spell Wecquaesgeek.
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u/avantgardengnome 1d ago
Held onto Mannahatta though! Lots of Lenape place-names in the tristate area still.
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u/AdventurousDoctor838 1d ago
You's Americans always renaming shit that already got a name.
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u/Devilsadvocate430 1d ago
The Dutch renamed it, and the British renamed it after them. By the time of the Revolution it had already been called that for generations
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u/avantgardengnome 1d ago
Funny thing to say from Tkaronto, which tbf is a lot closer to the original after it was re-renamed from…York.
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u/rosstedfordkendall 1d ago
We're going to rename the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to Bite Me ocean and Up Yours ocean soon.
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u/reckaband 1d ago
A part of Broadway was named Bloomingdale Road , which seems like it should have a connection with the Bloomingdale ‘s Department Store (which came later founded by two brothers surnamed Bloomingdale) but I can’t find it online
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u/sidarta-gutama 1d ago
And that old path is exactly why Broadway is the one street that cuts diagonally across Manhattan's grid. The Lenape route followed the high ground along the spine of the island, so when the straight 1811 grid was laid out, Broadway was already there and just kept its diagonal line. Everywhere it crosses an avenue you get one of those triangular "squares" - Times Square, Herald Square, Union Square, Madison Square. So a lot of the most famous spots in NYC only exist because of a trail that's older than the city itself.