Seneca Village

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Seneca Village was a settlement in Manhattan . The majority were Afro-Americans , but also Irish and German immigrants. The first houses were built in 1825, they were demolished in 1857 to make way for Central Park , and the approximately 1,600 residents had to leave their village. It is not known where people moved to. The history of Seneca Village has been researched since the 1990s .

history

Map of Seneca Village (1857)

Seneca Village was founded in 1825 when John and Elizabeth Whitehead, the owners of the land there, sold their farmland divided into 200 lots. The first buyer was Andrew Williams, a 25-year-old African American shoeshine boy who bought three lots for $ 125. Epiphany Davis, a saleswoman, bought twelve lots for $ 578, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME Zion Church) bought another six lots. In 2020 the pastor of AME Zion Church , Audrey Williamson, described the church at the time as "the oldest black institution in all of New York State". Between 1825 and 1832, the Whiteheads sold about half of their land to other African Americans. At the beginning of the 1830s there were about ten houses in the village , in the mid 1850s the village consisted of 50 houses and three churches as well as a cemetery and a school. In 1855 around two thirds of the population were Afro-American, one third Irish immigrants , and there were a few German immigrants.

The Seneca Village was an opportunity in particular African-Americans, in an autonomous the densely populated downtown New York community to live far away. Despite the abolition of slavery in New York State in 1827, discrimination was commonplace in New York City and severely restricted the lives of African-Americans: "Seneca Village's remote location likely provided a refuge from this climate" ("The remote location of Seneca Village probably offered a refuge from this climate. ")

Compared to other African Americans living in New York, Seneca Village residents appear to have been wealthier and more stable. In 1855 about half of them owned their own house, some of them two-story; this property gave them the right to vote. Of the 100 black New Yorkers who were eligible to vote in 1845, ten lived in Seneca Village . Most of the children in Seneca went to school. The Lyons family was among the residents of the village. They were well-known abolitionists and ran a boarding house for black sailors that served as a cover for a Union Railroad meeting point . There are plans by the City of New York to erect a memorial near the former Seneca Village for Albro Lyons, his wife Mary and their daughter Maritcha Remond Lyons .

There is evidence that the residents horticulturalists , kept livestock, and fished fish in the nearby Hudson River . A spring, later called Tanner's Spring , which can still be seen in Central Park today, provided drinking water. Interested real estate speculators vilified the settlement in the press as "Negro village" and "slums", a common tactic that the African-American writer James Baldwin described in the 1960s as "Negro Removal" (analogous to "Urban Renewal") .

In the early 1850s, the city began planning a large city park, Central Park . In 1853, New York State passed a law providing 775 acres in Manhattan for the creation of this first major public landscape park in the country, from 59th to 106th Streets, between Fifth and Eighth Avenues . The terrain came close to today's Arthur Ross Pinetum . To this end, the city expropriated the land, and the 1,600 or so residents of Seneca had to leave their homes by 1857. Legal appeals by the residents were unsuccessful. They received compensation, which, in the opinion of the residents, was set too low. Their whereabouts after the destruction of their village is unknown. It is believed that some of them moved to other African American communities such as Sandy Ground on Staten Island or Skunk Hollow in New Jersey . When in 1871, almost 15 years later, landscape gardeners found two coffins on the former site of the settlement, Seneca Village was so forgotten that the New York Herald found this discovery “puzzling”.

There is little historical evidence of the life and people in Seneca Village . Scientists and archaeologists have been working to research the history of the settlement since the 1990s . In 2011, a group of scientists from Columbia University and the City University of New York called the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History excavated the site. Stone foundations and thousands of artifacts were uncovered. A board in Central Park has been providing information about Seneca Village since 2019 .

literature

  • Roy Rosenzweig / Elizabeth Blackmar: The Park and the People: A History of Central Park . Cornell University Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-8014-9751-3 (English).

Web links

Commons : Seneca Village  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dan Mannarino: Hidden New York: Seneca Village unearthed. In: pix11.com. February 21, 2020, accessed on July 24, 2020 .
  2. ↑ a b c d The Story of Seneca Village. In: Central Park Conservancy. June 19, 2020, accessed June 25, 2020 .
  3. ^ Julia Jacobs: Their Land Became Part of Central Park. They're Coming Back in a Monument. In: nytimes.com. October 20, 2019, accessed on August 29, 2020 .
  4. ^ Tanner's Spring. In: centralpark.org. January 3, 2020, accessed on August 18, 2020 .
  5. ↑ a b c Brent Staples: Opinion - The Death of the Black Utopia. In: nytimes.com. November 28, 2019, accessed on August 5, 2020 .
  6. ↑ a b Seneca Village Site. In: Central Park Conservancy. June 19, 2020, accessed on July 24, 2020 .

Coordinates: 40 ° 47 ′  N , 73 ° 58 ′  W