A Visit to Seneca Village

My old friend, historian and educator Cynthia Copeland now works at NYU and is co-director of the Seneca Village Project, and we have her to thank for a pleasant and informative outing last week. Readers of Kevin Baker's Paradise Alley know of this bygone hamlet, formerly located between 82nd and 87th Streets between 7th and 8th Avenues. The town of about 260 people, the first area in New York where African Americans owned property, was razed to make way for Central Park. (Atlantic Yards opponents should be both comforted and discomfited to know that eminent domain struggles have been going on forever in this town, almost always ending in defeat for the previous property owners). At any rate, this summer, archaeologists from the project have been excavating on the site, locating the foundation of the home of the sexton of one of the settlement's three churches, and all kinds of detritus, such as the remnants of clay pipes and meat bones. The team held an open house on the site last week to display their finds, and my boys and I went up to check it out and learned much. (My main takeaway: though the town was 2/3 African American, and the rest mostly Irish, the inhabitants were mostly middle class. For some illogical reason, I anachronistically picture a shantytown, even though the area preceded Central Park. Instead, it was actually what the name implies: a nice little village in what was then the rural landscape above New York City.)

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