The squat clapboard house overlooking the Hudson River in the West Village might not seem like an obvious place for a Native American prayer centre.
Its graffiti-strewn facade faces the busy West Side Highway, with a city bus stop out front. It once housed a series of bars, and the back of the building faces tiny Weehawken Street, which has traditionally been a popular gathering spot for gay and transgender people.
The house’s ground floor now sits directly on Manhattan soil, said Jean-Louis Goldwater Bourgeois, 76, a wealthy activist who bought the property in 2006. He says he is essentially donating it back to its original owners: the Lenape Indians.
Bourgeois wants the building to be a prayer house, to be owned and operated by the Lenape nation, which inhabited Manhattan before it was appropriated by European settlers.
Bourgeois pointed to a hole recently jackhammered through the thick concrete flooring of the house, which left black soil exposed underneath.
“You can actually touch Manhattan soil — the idea is to be in touch with Mother Earth,” he said, adding that the plan was to remove the concrete and simply have a dirt floor.
Anthony Jay Van Dunk, a former chief of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, a tribe based in Mahwah, N.J., is Bourgeois’s choice to start a prayer house, or a Pahtamawiikan, as it is known in one of the languages spoken by the Lenape.
Bourgeois said he had always been troubled by the well-known and not-quite accurate legend that, four centuries ago, the Lenape sold Manhattan to Dutch settlers for the equivalent of $24 worth of goods.
“It’s quite offensive,” he said. “It’s a form of conquest.”
Van Dunk, 54, a Brooklyn woodworker who is active in Native American issues, pointed out that, if such a transaction had taken place, the Lenape might have meant it as a goodwill exchange for sharing the land, and not as transferring ownership, especially because the tribe did not believe anyone could own land or water.
The Lenape “tried to embrace and share,” Van Dunk said. “And in return, they got everything taken, even their lives.”
Now, of course, Manhattan — whose name comes from the Lenape tongue, meaning roughly “the land of many hills” — has been developed to the hilt into a centre of global commerce.
“Manhattan is a capitalist rock; this is a quiet protest against that,” Bourgeois said of his gift. “I’m giving it back to whom the land was stolen from, and that’s really a joyful event.”
Bourgeois, a longtime Greenwich Village resident and an architectural historian, is a son of sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who died in 2010. His large inheritance, from the proceeds of her art, has financed his activism, which is aimed at social and environmental causes.
Bourgeois said that he bought the building, 392 West St., in 2006 for $2.2 million, and that it had probably appreciated in value to about $4 million. With three floors and less than 3,000 square feet, it is one of the last wood-frame buildings along the Hudson waterfront.
Though some documentation describes the house as being built in the 1830s, Bourgeois said he believed it may actually date to the 1770s.
The house was built on land that had been part of Newgate State Prison, a colonial jail, and then became part of the Greenwich Market, also known as the Weehawken Market, of which it is the last surviving segment.
Over the centuries, it has been home to a saloon, a gambling parlor, an oyster house and a pool hall, Bourgeois said, and in recent decades it housed bars. He said that when he bought it, there were peep show machines inside, which he had removed.
Bourgeois lives half a block from the house in an apartment filled with files and books related to his activism. He recently returned from several weeks in North Dakota protesting a proposed oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. He said that he donated about $1 million to the campaign against the pipeline, and that he hoped the prayer house would be a way to celebrate and promote Native American ideals and political empowerment.
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