Destruction of Seneca Village

People

Andrew Williams

On October 1, 1857, New York City officials announced that the last residents of Seneca Village, a predominantly African American community on the west side of Manhattan, had been forcibly removed to make way for the construction of Central Park. The village, which had stood from 1825 to 1857, stretched from approximately 82nd to 89th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. At its peak it was home to roughly 225 residents, three churches, two schools, and three cemeteries. It was Manhattan's first significant community of Black property owners. More than half of its Black residents owned their homes, a rate five times higher than the citywide average for African Americans, and that property ownership carried an additional consequence: under an 1821 New York law that imposed a $250 property requirement on Black men (while imposing no such requirement on whites), Seneca Village was one of the only places in the city where Black men could meet the threshold to vote. Of the approximately 100 Black people eligible to vote in all of New York City in 1845, 10 lived in Seneca Village. The community was founded on September 27, 1825, when Andrew Williams, a 25-year-old African American bootblack, purchased three lots from John and Elizabeth Whitehead for $125. That same day, Epiphany Davis, a store clerk and trustee of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, purchased 12 lots for $578, and the AME Zion Church itself purchased six lots. Within a single week, 21 lots had been sold to Black buyers, two years before slavery was fully abolished in New York State on July 4, 1827. Over the following three decades, Seneca Village grew into a thriving, multi-ethnic community of Black, Irish, and German residents with three churches (AME Zion, African Union, and the racially integrated All Angels' Episcopal), a public school (Colored School No. 3), and a network of property owners, tradespeople, and community institutions. Families raised livestock, cultivated gardens, relied on nearby Tanner's Spring for water, and built a stable, self-sustaining community far from the overcrowded, discriminatory conditions of lower Manhattan. In 1853, the New York State Legislature authorized the seizure of over 700 acres of land between 59th and 106th Streets to create the nation's first major landscaped public park. The city invoked eminent domain to acquire the land, displacing approximately 1,600 people across the entire park footprint, including the residents of Seneca Village. In the years leading up to eviction, newspapers and park advocates launched a deliberate campaign to delegitimize the community, describing Seneca Village as a "shantytown" populated by "squatters," "vagabonds," and "scoundrels." One park engineer described the residents as "stubborn insects." The New York Times stated openly that the sole object of the park was "to procure their expulsion." Although property owners received compensation through the legal process, many contested the amounts as far below market value. Andrew Williams, who had valued his land at $4,000, was forced to accept $2,335. Those who refused to leave were beaten by police. A contemporary newspaper noted that "the supremacy of the law was upheld by the policeman's bludgeons." By the end of 1857, every structure in Seneca Village had been demolished, and Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux began constructing Central Park. In a bitter irony, many of the evicted Irish residents were subsequently hired to landscape the park, while Black residents were not permitted to do so. The community was almost entirely erased from public memory for over a century. No photographs of Seneca Village are known to exist, and no personal papers or diaries from residents have been found. The settlement was largely forgotten until the 1992 publication of Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar's book The Park and the People. In 1998, the Seneca Village Project was formed to raise awareness about the community's significance. Archaeological excavations conducted in 2011 by Columbia University professors Diana diZerega Wall and Nan Rothschild uncovered the stone foundation of the William Godfrey Wilson house, household artifacts including dishes, an iron tea kettle, a toothbrush handle, Chinese export porcelain, and the leather sole of a child's shoe, evidence of a middle-class community that bore no resemblance to the "shantytown" narrative the press had used to justify its destruction. In 2022, a permanent historical marker was installed in Central Park, and the city has announced plans for a monument honoring the Lyons family, prominent Seneca Village property owners who operated an Underground Railroad station.