Seneca Village, cleared for Central Park

Seneca Village began in 1825, when Andrew Williams bought three lots on what is now the west side of Central Park and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church bought six more. Over thirty years it grew into a settlement of about 225 people, roughly two-thirds of them African American, with around fifty houses, three churches, a school and two cemeteries.

Property mattered for more than shelter. New York had abolished slavery in 1827 but required Black men to own $250 in property to vote, a requirement it did not impose on white men. A substantial share of the Black New Yorkers eligible to vote in the 1850s lived in Seneca Village. It was, in the most literal sense, where Black political standing in the city was held.

In 1853 the state authorised the taking of the land for a great park. Residents contested the valuations and lost; the newspapers described the village as a shantytown and its people as squatters, which the property records show they were not. By 1857 everyone had been removed and the buildings were gone. No comparable Black landowning community re-formed in Manhattan, and the village itself was effectively forgotten until archaeologists excavated it in 2011.