 | Below are answers to frequently asked questions about the corresponding page New York City. They address concerns, questions, and misconceptions which have repeatedly arisen on the talk page. Please update this material when needed. |
1. Was Manhattan Island really bought for a very small amount of currency (be it $24, one string of wampum, etc.)?
No. Charles Gehring, Director of the New Netherland Project, explains this myth in a video (skip ahead to 3:03) by the New York State Museum. In it, he says, "This is one of the biggest myths...pure fabrication. It says in the records that it was 60 guilders worth of goods. 60 guilders worth of goods would have been a lot of hard goods that the Indians couldn't produce themselves. You couldn't place a price on the...things that they were unable to make, the things they didn't have the technology for. The $24 figure was attached to the document when it was translated in the 1880s. The translators looked up the rate of exchange at the time and 60 guilders was $24. Nobody has ever even adjusted that for inflation over the years, so you not only have an incorrect rate of exchange, but the whole idea of what 60 guilders would have been worth to the Indians at the time is totally wrong."
Keepin' it real: The greatest deal in history never actually was.
2. Why is New York City classified as having a humid subtropical climate?
According to NOAA's 1981–2010 normals, Central Park in Manhattan has a January daily average temperature of 32.6 °F (0.3 °C) and in July, this figure is 76.5 °F (24.7 °C). This, in combination with its generous annual precipitation of 49.9 inches (1,270 mm) means the city itself falls under the humid subtropical regime of the Köppen climate classification (see this map). Locations in this regime in general do not have winter snow cover that is reliable enough to augment cold air masses; the "subtropical" designator is only part of the climate type's name and does not mean that the city (or the surrounding region) is in the subtropics, nor that winters here are mild.