Seneca Village: NYC’s First Settlement of Black Landowners
“If you walk through Central Park on the western side, around the 85th Street entrance, you’ll come across a very wordy sign commemorating “Seneca Village.” It was a community, founded in 1825, of mostly African Americans, along with some Irish immigrants. It was also one of several villages on land that’s now part of Central Park.
But in the 1820s, the park didn’t exist. It was just open space.
“You had animals running, roaming in the area,” said Cynthia R. Copeland, who’s one of the co-directors of the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History. “Sheep, goats, pigs in that time period were the original sanitation systems for New York, eating up the trash.” In 2011, her group won permission from New York City to excavate parts of the park around the former community.
“They recognized that having their ownership of their own homes and their land would afford them the right to vote and they would have a voice in the political process,” Copeland said. “But it also just gave them a sense of freedom and safety.”
By the 1850s, as the city was growing, there were calls to repurpose the land around Seneca Village to create a new park. And to build a strong case for it, the city — led by the mayor — and the media ran a smear campaign, of sorts.”
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Basu, Shumita. WNYC News 22 February 2018.