The land on which Madison Square Garden stands was once owned by a Black woman named Annie d’Angola. In the mid 1600s, the Dutch, who were having major skirmishes with the Indians, freed some of their slaves and granted them land in exchange of a yearly allotment of crop supplies. The land these freed blacks owned stretched from Wall Street to 34th Street. The first land grant in Brooklyn was issued by Dutch Governor Willem Kieft on May 27, 1643 to a Black man named Antonie Jansen Van Salee. The British eventually took the land from them after they took over New Netherland. New Netherland were Dutch territories that included New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut, with small areas in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.