From Village Preservation:

To mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of New Amsterdam, we welcome Sara Cedar Miller, historian emerita of the Central Park Conservancy for an online discussion of the connection between tobacco and what is today Greenwich Village, Central Park, Harlem, and the famed Village residents, the DeForest family. Once known as “Sapokanikan,” today’s Village was New Amsterdam’s first downtown tobacco bouwerie (“farm” in Dutch), soon followed by Hendrick and Isaac DeForest and their brother-in-law Johannes de la Montagne, who established the first uptown bouwerie in what is today Central Park and Harlem. The famed DeForests of Greenwich Village all descend from the Park’s first farming family.