{"id":25564,"date":"2020-03-03T13:23:32","date_gmt":"2020-03-03T13:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ihbconline.co.uk\/newsachive\/?p=25564"},"modified":"2020-03-03T13:17:34","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T13:17:34","slug":"ihbcs-cpd-boost-lost-neighbourhood-discover-the-one-buried-under-new-york-citys-central-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=25564","title":{"rendered":"IHBC\u2019s CPD Boost: \u2018Lost Neighbourhood\u2019?\u00a0 Discover the one buried under New York City\u2019s Central Park"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"New York City is in a constant state of flux writes Open Culture<\/em>, and there are dozens of local residents who remember what\u2014and who\u2014was displaced to pave the way for progress, including in the creation of Central Park itself!<\/h3>\n
image:<\/em>\u00a0Dietmar Rabich<\/a>\u00a0\/\u00a0Wikimedia Commons<\/a>\u00a0\/\u00a0\u201cNew York City (New York, USA), Central Park — 2012 — 6728\u201d<\/a><\/span>\u00a0\/\u00a0CC\u00a0BY-SA\u00a04.0<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/h6>\n

<\/p>\n

Plans for a peaceful green expanse to rival the great parks of Great Britain and Europe began taking shape in the 1850s, driven by well-to-do white merchants, bankers, and landowners looking for temporary escape from the urban pressures of densely populated Lower Manhattan.<\/p>\n

It took 20,000 workers\u2014none black, none female\u2014over three years to realize architects\u00a0Frederick Law Olmsted<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Calvert Vaux<\/a>‘s sweeping pastoral design.<\/p>\n

A hundred and fifty years later, Central Park is still a vital part of daily life for visitors and residents alike.<\/p>\n

But what of the vibrant neighborhood that was doomed by the park\u2019s construction?<\/p>\n

As\u00a0historian Cynthia R. Copeland<\/a>, co-director of\u00a0the Seneca Village Project<\/a>, points out above, several communities were given the heave ho in order to clear the way for the park\u2019s creation.<\/p>\n

The best established of these was\u00a0Seneca Village<\/a>, which ran from approximately 82nd to 89th Street, along what is known today as Central Park West. 260-some residents were evicted under\u00a0eminent domain\u00a0and their homes, churches, and school were razed.<\/p>\n

This physical erasure quickly translated to mass public amnesia, abetted, no doubt, by the way Seneca Village was framed in the press, not as a community of predominantly African-American middle class and working class homeowners, but rather a squalid shantytown inhabited by squatters.<\/p>\n

As Brent Staples recalls in a\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>op-ed<\/a>, in the summer\u00a0of 1871, when park workers dislodged two coffins in the vicinity of the West\u00a085th Street\u00a0entrance,\u00a0The New York Herald<\/em>\u00a0treated the discovery as a baffling mystery, despite the presence of an engraved plate on one of the coffins identifying its occupant, an Irish teenager, who\u2019d been a parishioner of Seneca Village\u2019s All Angels Episcopal Church.<\/p>\n

According to historian Leslie Alexander\u2019s\u00a0African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861<\/em><\/a>, All Angels\u2019 congregation was unique in that it was integrated, a reflection of Seneca Village\u2019s population, 2\/3 of whom were African American and 1\/3 of European descent, mostly Irish and German.<\/p>\n

Copeland and her colleagues kept Alexander\u2019s work in mind when they began\u00a0excavating Seneca Village in 2011<\/a>, focusing on the households of two African-American residents, Nancy Moore and William G. Wilson, a father of eight who served as sexton at All Angels and lived in a three-story wood-frame house. The dig yielded 250 bags of material, including a piece of a bone-handled toothbrush, an iron tea kettle, and fragments of clay pipes and blue-and-white Chinese porcelain:<\/p>\n

Archaeologists have begun to consider the lives of middle class African Americans, focusing on the ways their consumption of material culture expressed class and racial identities. Historian Leslie Alexander believes that Seneca Village not only provided a respite from discrimination in the city, but also embodied ideas about African pride and racial consciousness.<\/p>\n

Owning a home in Seneca Village also bestowed voting rights on African American male heads of household.<\/p>\n

Two years before it was torn down, the community was home to 20 percent of the city\u2019s African American property owners and 15 percent of its African American voters.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the efforts of historians like Copeland and Alexander, Seneca Village is once again on the public\u2019s radar, though unlike\u00a0Pigtown<\/a>, a smaller, predominantly agricultural community toward the southern end of the park, the origins of its name remain mysterious.<\/p>\n

Was the village named in tribute to the\u00a0Seneca people of Western New York<\/a>\u00a0or might it, as Alexander\u00a0suggests, have been a nod to\u00a0the\u00a0Roman philosopher<\/a>, whose thoughts on individual liberty would have been taught as part of Seneca Village\u2019s African Free\u00a0Schools\u2019 curriculum?<\/p>\n

For now, there is little more than a sign to hip Park visitors to the existence of Seneca Village, but that should change in the near future, after the city erects a planned\u00a0monument to abolitionists and former Seneca Village residents Albro and Mary Joseph Lyons and their daughter Maritcha<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Learn more about this bygone community in Copeland\u2019s interview with\u00a0the New York Preservation Archive Project<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0New York Historical Society\u2019s Teacher\u2019s Guide to Seneca Village<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Read more….<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York City is in a constant state of flux writes Open Culture, and there are dozens of local residents who remember what\u2014and who\u2014was displaced to pave the way for progress, including in the creation of Central Park itself! image:\u00a0Dietmar … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ihbc-newsblog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25566,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25564\/revisions\/25566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}