Three churches, a school, and dozens of homes were demolished
^^^^Prominent abolitionist Albro Lyons and Mary Joseph Lyons were residents of Seneca Village.
The community, called Seneca Village, began in 1825 and eventually spanned from 82nd Street to 89th Street along what is now the western edge of Central Park. By the time it was finally razed in 1857, it had become a refuge for African Americans. Though most were nominally free (the last slave wasn’t emancipated until 1827) life was far from pleasant. The population of African Americans living in New York City tripled between abolition and complete emancipation and the migrants were derided in the press. Mordecai Noah, founder of The New York Enquirer, was especially well-known for his attacks on African Americans, fuming at one point that “the free negroes of this city are a nuisance incomparably greater than a million slaves.”
More than three-fourths of the children who lived in Seneca Village attended Colored School №3 in the church basement. Half of the African Americans who lived there owned their own property, a rate five times higher than the city average. And while the village remained mostly black, immigrant whites had started to live in the area as well. They shared resources ranging from a church (All Angels Episcopal), to a midwife (an Irish immigrant who served the entire town).
But in 1857, it was all torn down.
Even as the church was being built on 86th street, then painstakingly painted white, the original settlers fought for their lands in court. Andrew Williams was paid nearly what his land was worth, after filing an affidavit with the state Supreme Court. Epiphany Davis was not as fortunate, losing hundred of dollars.
By 1871, Seneca Village had largely been forgotten. That year, The New York Herald reported that laborers creating a new entrance to the park at 85th Street and 8th Avenue had discovered a coffin, “enclosing the body of a Negro, decomposed beyond recognition.” The discovery was a mystery, the paper reported, because “these lands were dug up five years ago, when the trees were planted there, and no such coffins were there at the time.” That’s unlikely, as the site was the graveyard of the AME Zion church.
Researchers from Columbia, CUNY, and the New York Historical Society have been working on excavating the site of Seneca Village since the early 2000s. The work has been slow, with excavation starting in 2011.
The only official artifact that remains intact on the site is a commemorative plaque, dedicated in 2001 to the lost village.
People didn’t know about this? We learned about this in school bc the village welcomed and sheltered Irish immigrants during the Famine.
The authorities hated the place because the residents were highly politically active and had ties to the Underground Railroad.
A lot of people assume, because Manhattan was in The North[tm], that it must have been an abolitionist-friendly place (and that its residents then would have had as favorable view of Lincoln as residents today have of Obama).
But the truth is: much of the money flowing through Wall Street was profits from the cotton, sugar, rum and slave trade. The Power Brokers of NYC were solidly on the side of the slaveholders in the South.
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