The Village New York City Erased
The hidden history beneath Central Park
If you stand near the West 85th Street entrance to Central Park, on the slope above the ballfields, you will be on top of a town that New York City tried to erase. Before the famous green lawn, there were houses, three churches, a school, garden plots, and more than 200 residents, most of them free Black New Yorkers who owned that very land. The land would later come to be known as Seneca Village, though the origins of that name — and whether the residents themselves used it — remains uncertain. In 1857, the city took all of it, and it took it three times: the land, the people’s identity, and then the memory.
Let’s start with the land. In 19th-century New York, land was power. In 1825, John and Elizabeth Whitehead, a white farming couple who owned a swath of rocky, hilly land on what is now Manhattan’s Upper West Side between about 82nd and 89th Streets, broke their farm into 200 parcels and began selling. A Black 25-year-old shoeshiner, Andrew Williams, paid $125 for the settlement’s first three lots; Epiphany Davis, who clerked at a store, took 12; the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church took six. Within that larger tract, the village itself would occupy only about five acres, laid out in small lots that free Black New Yorkers and their churches could afford.
Map showing gardens and houses in Seneca Village. Detail of Egbert Viele, Map of the lands included in the Central Park, 1856 (NYC Municipal Archives)
In 1821, the state rewrote its constitution so that Black men could vote only if they owned at least $250 in property and had lived in New York for three years. White men faced no such requirements. For Black New Yorkers, a deed was access to the ballot. That is why Seneca Village mattered so much to the people who built it. African Americans like Andrew Williams and Epiphany Davis and a Black congregation, the AME Zion Church, were staking out a community where about two‑thirds of the residents were Black and property ownership gave them a foothold in both political life and everyday security.
Regardless, in 1853, the state legislature set aside the land between 59th and 106th Streets for the country’s first great public park (as a Bostonian, I must say that the Boston Common is America’s oldest public park — and not built on a Black town). But that meant disrupting what had become a thriving community. By the 1850s, roughly half the villagers owned their homes, and ten of the hundred Black New Yorkers eligible to vote in the entire state that decade lived in this one settlement, which held about 225 people (about one‑third being Irish, with a few German families as well). By the surviving evidence, families tended vegetable plots, kept animals, and drew their water from a spring on the property, building the kind of settled, self-supporting life that a deed made possible. A farm or garden in Seneca Village, as one history of early Black settlements in New York puts it, offered both “community-building and enfranchisement.” So when the village was taken, a rare concentration of Black political power was taken as well.
Before that could happen, though, the city had to attack the dignity of the people there. As plans for the park advanced, newspapers and politicians began calling the settlements “shantytowns“ and the residents “squatters,” “vagabonds,” and “scoundrels.” The words turned well-to-do neighbors into trespassers and made removing them sound like a form of necessary social improvement. The reality, however, was that most Seneca Village residents lived in two-story homes, not shanties; census takers found them employed, and found their children in school. The community supported three churches and a burial ground on less than five acres.
The city acquired the land through eminent domain, the legal power that allows governments to take private property — like a park — for public use as long as they pay what the law deems “just compensation” to the owners. Mayor Fernando Wood invoked that power against Seneca Village in the mid-1850s.
The residents did not go quietly. For two years they ignored the eviction orders and fought the police sent to remove them, until in 1857 the last of them were scattered across the city. A newspaper of the day approved: “The supremacy of the law,” it wrote, “was upheld by the policeman’s bludgeons.” Clearing the full park site — not only Seneca Village but also Irish enclaves like “Pigtown,” German settlements, farmsteads, and a convent — displaced about 1,600 people, and many owners insisted the payouts fell short of what their property was worth. Andrew Williams asked $3,500 for the property he had built over three decades. The city, by one account, paid him $2,335.
Then came the third taking, the slowest one. Once the houses were gone, Seneca Village disappeared from the memory of New York itself. For more than a century, the town under the lawn had no marker, no mention, nothing. The men who cleared it had erased not only a place but the fact that the place had ever existed. Central Park became a democratic masterpiece, and the village became nothing.
The reason to tell this now is that the sequence is not unique to 1857. Devalue the land, slander the people, scrub the record: that is the pattern one can see across a hundred removals, from Boston’s West End, cleared in the name of urban renewal, to the Black and immigrant blocks of Southwest Washington, DC, leveled for freeways and federal office towers. Central Park is the sharpest case precisely because almost everyone loves it.
The last taking can still be reversed. In 2001, more than 140 years after the village fell, the city finally placed a historical marker at the site. Archaeologists from City College, Columbia, and NYU dug there in 2004, 2005, and 2011, and pulled from the soil a child’s shoe, a stoneware bottle, and an iron tea kettle, the ordinary evidence of an ordinary, thriving town.
They also found the foundation of the three-story home of William Godfrey Wilson, the Black sexton of All Angels’ Church, restored to the record a century and a half after the city tried to paint his people in a very different light. Andrew Williams never received the true compensation for what he owned, but now the city can no longer pretend he didn’t exist. The city took the land in 1857, and the story of the people in that process. Restoring the memory is the main part of the theft we can still reverse.
 | A guest post by
|
WOW, WOW, WOW! That is fascinating and horrifying. Thank you for a part of history I never knew and am greatly ashamed of.