Thursday, March 28, 2024

History: NYC Pushed Out Black Land & Home Owners to Create Central Park

central park
*Did you know that in 1851, New York City’s then mayor, Ambrose Kingsland, agreed to create a park. A very large park.

By 1854, the city had chosen generous chunk of land in the center of Manhattan island between what is now 59th and 106th streets, and construction on the park began. (It was later extended four blocks further north).

The park, Central Park, is still there today of course and everyone loves it: despite centuries of urban development, the park has remained an anchoring chunk of green space among the ever-denser Manhattan streets, according to City Metric:

But there’s another side to the story. By the time the decision to create a park was made, there wasn’t enough empty space left in Manhattan. So the city chose a stretch of land where the largest settlement was Seneca Village, population 264, and seized the land under the law of eminent domain, through which the government can take private land for public purposes. Residents protested to the courts many times, against both the order and the level of compensation being offered for their land; eventually, though, all were forced to leave.

Two thirds of the population was black; the rest Irish. There were three churches and a school. And 50 per cent of the heads of households owned the land they lived on, a fact conveniently ignored by the media of the time, who described the population as “squatters” and the settlement as “n***er village”.

If you visited the park during its first 150 years of existence, you’d have no idea this village ever existed. It was only in 2001 that a small group called the Seneca Village Project pressured the city to install a small plaque; it describes the village as a “unique community”, which may well have been “Manhattan’s first prominent community of African American property owners.”

Get the rest of this story at City Metric.

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