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The True Native New Yorkers Can Never Truly Reclaim Their Homeland

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The True Native New Yorkers Can Never Truly Reclaim Their Homeland

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When the Dutch arrived in the 17th century in what's now New York City, their encounters with the indigenous peoples, known as the Lenape, were, at first, mostly amicable, according to historical records. They shared the land and traded guns, beads and wool for beaver furs. As the myth goes, the Dutch even "purchased" Manahatta island from the Lenape in 1626. The transaction, enforced by the eventual building of wall around New Amsterdam, marked the very beginning of the Lenape's forced mass migration out of their homeland.

The wall, which started showing up on maps in the 1660s, was built to keep out the Native Americans and the British. It eventually became Wall Street, and Manahatta became Manhattan, where part of the Lenape trade route, known as Wickquasgeck, became Brede weg, later Broadway. The Lenape helped shape the geography of modern-day New York City, but other traces of their legacy have all but vanished. In one of the most diverse cities in the United States, there are tellingly few native New Yorkers. Some Lenape today, however, are working to bring their heritage back to the city.

"We love New York. We have a history there before the white man ever showed up, but the Lenape are forgotten because they haven't had a presence there in decades, centuries," says Curtis Zunigha, co-director of the Manhattan-based Lenape Center. The center's mission is to promote Native American arts and humanities, environmental stewardship and Lenape identity.

Zunigha, however, lives in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where he also works as the director of cultural resources for the Delaware Tribe of Indians. Like many Lenape, he uses the term "Delaware" - the federally recognized name for the Lenape - interchangeably with the group's own name for itself. None of the three co-directors of the Lenape Center live in New York City, but they decided to base their organization there because of its ties to their ancestry.

The area the Lenape occupied before the Europeans arrived was known to them as Lenapehoking, and it covered roughly the area between New York City and Philadelphia, including all of New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and part of the state of Delaware. Like Zunigha, most Lenape today don't live in New York City or the surrounding area. There are only two federally recognized Delaware tribes in the U.S., and both of them are in Oklahoma, where large groups of the Lenape ended up due to forced migration.

According to Zunigha, his people agreed to move out of Lenapehoking, giving up lands they were promised in treaties, and first migrated to Pennsylvania. From there, they settled in Ohio, then Indiana, then St. Louis, and then elsewhere in Missouri before purchasing a reservation in Kansas in 1830 using funds from previous treaties. After the Civil War, the U.S. government forced the Lenape in Kansas to sell their land so railroad companies could build tracks on it. They then purchased a reservation from the Cherokee in Oklahoma, where they reside today, in Bartlesville and Anadarko. Their kinfolk also reside in Ontario, Canada: the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown and the Munsee Delaware Nation. Smaller bands of Lenape still live in New England and the mid-Atlantic, but most are self-recognized, one exception being the Ramapough Lenape Nation, recognized by the state of New Jersey but not the U.S. government.*

The Lenape who remained in their native lands still have descendants in the area, even if they aren't part of an official tribe. Margaret Boldeagle of Staten Island is one of them-her grandfather was a Lenape who married an Irish woman.

"In this area you'd be very hard-pressed to find anybody that will tell you that they are full-blood Lenape," says Boldeagle.

Boldeagle's family was typical of many Native American families who were pressured to assimilate in order to avoid discrimination. Growing up, she said her grandmother wouldn't allow her to tell people she was part Native American. When her grandfather gave her some traditional Lenape clothing, her grandmother took it away.

"Back in the day, there was a stigma to being native," says Boldeagle. "So, a lot of families did not admit to it, would say they're of another culture."

As an adult, Boldeagle works to combat some of that stigma. With the help of New York state Sen. Andrew Lanza, Boldeagle resurrected the fight for a national monument to Native Americans at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. The land was granted for the monument by an act of Congress in 1911, but it was never built. At that time, department store magnate Rodman Wanamaker came up with the idea to build the National American Indian Memorial, which would feature a 165-foot statue of a Native American - taller than the Statue of Liberty - sitting atop a museum. President William Howard Taft traveled to Staten Island in 1913 to break ground on the project, but the outbreak of World War I in Europe, and the U.S. subsequent involvement, meant the project would soon be abandoned.

Today, two memorials in New York City acknowledge the Lenape, and both contain historical inaccuracies. A monument in Battery Park in lower Manhattan and a bronze plaque in Inwood Hill Park, located far uptown, both commemorate the "sale of Manhattan," perpetuating a myth that won't die. Zunigha calls the story an outright "fabrication."

The Battery Park monument was gifted by the Dutch government to the city of New York in 1926. It depicts a Dutch man and a Native American standing together, but the Native American's dress is typical of a Plains Native American rather than the Lenape, says David Penney, associate director of museum scholarship at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and curator of a 2020 exhibit on "native New Yorkers."

The plaque in Inwood Hill Park reads: "According to legend, on this site of the principal Manhattan Indian village, Peter Minuit in 1626 purchased Manhattan island for trinkets and beads then worth about 60 guilders." The deal was most likely made at Fort Amsterdam, located in lower Manhattan, according to Penney. The Lenape, however, did live in that area, and visitors can still view caves they allegedly used for shelter.

The Lenape likely viewed the "sale" of Manhattan as a deal to share the land, but not to sell it, both Penney and Zunigha say. The Dutch, however, viewed it as a proper sale, and they wanted the indigenous people to leave what they considered as "their" land. Letters and notes from the time document the Dutch frustration with the indigenous who would not leave the land, including one complaint logged from a New Amsterdam council meeting on May 25, 1660, that "the savages would not remove from the land that they had bought" to which the indigenous responded that they had only sold the grass on the land, not the land itself.

The never-built monument on Staten Island would have been the largest and most visible monument to Native Americans in the area, but it would have portrayed them as a "vanishing race," as Wanamaker viewed them. The Congressional record of the land grant even speaks of the monument as dedicated to "the memory of the North American Indian," as if they're already gone.

But while memorials might commemorate the history - or myth - of the Lenape people, their culture remains alive in modern-day tribal communities. In Bartlesville, where Zunigha lives, the Delaware Tribe of Indians hosts summer camps for children to learn Lenape spiritual practices, dances and songs. They have also secured grants to help revitalize the endangered Lenape language, of which there are only a few fluent speakers left in Canada and the United States.

Jim Rementer has studied the Lenape language for more than 50 years. Originally from Pennsylvania, where he first learned about the Lenape, he moved to Oklahoma in the 1960s and learned the language from tribal elders in Bartlesville. Since then, he's taught classes and helped create the Lenape Talking Dictionary, which includes online lessons with audio. There are no native Lenape language speakers in Oklahoma today, but Rementer says interest in learning the language remains.

"It has a lot of the cultural ties to the Lenape people," Rementer said. "It at least gives them a basic knowledge of not only the language but also the religious beliefs and so on. And it's always nice to be able to pray in their native language."
*Editor's note, October 8, 2018: This story has been edited to reflect that the Ramapough are recognized by New Jersey, not the state of Delaware.

Zunigha considers himself "barely a partial speaker" of the Lenape language, but he does know how to pray. He admits a lot of the ancestral knowledge has been lost over time, as the Lenape were killed or forced to assimilate or migrate, but he insists the culture has never been lost, partly due to the survival of the language.

"A way is always shown because we're still here," Zunigha said. "We have people, including myself, that can pray in our language, conduct ceremonies and remember the ancestors. When we do that we're blessed with the gift of the creator, with the continuance of our culture for yet another generation. We just try to learn and practice."

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The True Native New Yorkers Can Never Truly Reclaim Their Homeland

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Nearly 400 years after the alleged "sale of Manhattan," some Lenape strive to reawaken their cultural heritage on the islands where their ancestors thrived

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Student Center

American Nativism, 1830-1845

Sean Baker/WVU Undergraduate
During the 1830s and 1840s Americans with nativist sentiments made a concerted effort to enter into the local and national political arenas. Nativism's political relevance grew out of the increase of immigrants during the '20s and '30s and the anti-foreign writings that abounded during these decades. While pivoting between anti-foreign and anti-catholic appeals, nativism became both practical and ideological in nature: platforms for the movement ranged from extending the length naturalization to protecting the sacredness of the Protestant Republic. In New York city's 1844 elections, the nativist movement formed the American Republican Party, which allied with the Whigs and resulted in the defeat of the Democratic Party. This political advancement, although local and short lived, presented a glimpse of the national nativist power later found in the know- nothings. Clearly, early nineteenth-century nativism participated in significant political changes, and the goal of this paper is to summarize nativism between 1830 and 1845 while analyzing these major political developments.

With its first edition appearing January 2, 1830, The Protestant represented one of the earliest publications of nativist literature. George Bourne edited the publication, and he conveyed his mission clearly: the goal of the paper centered around the denunciation of the Catholic faith. Bourne understood the belittling of the "popish" belief to be the only way in which to warn the Republic of the Catholic danger. In his book, The Protestant Crusade, Ray Billington includes a portion of a prospectus for The Protestant, in which Bourne stated, "The sole objects of this publication are to inculcate Gospel doctrines against Romish corruptions." Although a large portion of Protestant America held some anti-foreign tendencies, Bourne's blunt attack on Catholicism did not reach the moderate Protestant. Bourne resigned and the editor's position went to Reverend William Craig Brownlee

The Protestant moved from degrading attacks on the Catholic faith to more of a theological discussion. Brownlee's disparaging tactics proved to be no more appealing to moderate Protestant than Bourne's, and The Protestant's shrinking list of subscribers forced ownership to a private group individuals. To avoid a connection with Bourne's and Brownlee's extreme attacks, the name of the paper changed in 1882 to The Reformation Advocate, but the paper still could not find a method to support a large audience. In 1883 the paper changed a third time, replacing the weekly publication with the monthly Protestant Magazine. Here, the magazine questioned theological issues of the Catholic faith, and avoided the "sensationalism which had characterized The Protestant." Finally, those who wished to promote the nativist cause through publication found a position that moderate-Protestant America found accepting.

As the early nativist publication efforts became accepted, the need for a formal organization developed. The New York Protestant Association (formed in 1831) gave the cause a structured environment and allowed individuals with the same view to interact on a large scale. By early 1832, the popularity of the association drew many nativists to the formal meetings. With meetings being open to the public, Catholics also attended, and the mixing of both Catholics and nativists inevitably resulted in debate. Many times a Catholic in the audience would respond to a malicious or inaccurate statement made by a member of the association. In May of 1832, these potentially explosive conditions produced a riot at a New York Protestant Association meeting. Further, while addressing a Baltimore Baptist audience in 1834, a group of Catholics attacked a Baptist speaker. These early Catholic aggressions–although, possibly warranted due to the nativists' antagonism–captured moderate America's attention. By 1833, a variety of mainstream papers followed these events, and some moderate Protestants viewed Catholics as a danger.

Although Catholics occasionally reacted to the nativist movement with violence, nativists produced one of the greatest violent acts of the 1830s. On August 10, 1834 a mob of forty to fifty people gathered outside of the Ursulines Convent school and burned it to the ground. Although there is agreement as to the underlying causes, there is disagreement regarding the events directly leading up to the burning. Most authors agree that the stories surrounding the convent's problems with two nuns–Rebecca Reed and Elizabeth Harris–offered a target for anti- Catholic hostility just waiting to manifest. Although Rebecca Reed's stories of immoral behavior in the convent were proven to be false, when Elizabeth Harrison broke down and briefly left the convent, the public understood this act as validating Reed's accusations. Although Harrison returned to the convent and publically commented that she had been working too hard, the public saw her explanation as a cover-up. Authors disagree as to whether Lyman Beecher's three anti-catholic speeches triggered the burning. For example, Ira Leonard, author of American Nativism, 1830-1860, notes that the three anti-catholic speeches "by Lyman Beecher" ultimately "ignited the spark. This statement implies that some of the individuals involved in the burning attended one of Beecher's three sermons. Conversely, Ray Billington understands the two events to be more coincidental. Billington notes that, although the convent burned the evening of Beecher's sermons, the group of working-class men who organized the burning met on three separate occasions, two of which proceeded the Beecher's sermons. Furthermore, Beecher spoke at upper-class churches which the workers would not have attended. "In all probability," Billington comments, "the covenant would have been attacked whether or not these sermons were delivered."

The Ursuline convent burning marked a underlying national acceptance of the anti- Catholic movement. Almost unanimously the press condemned the burning, and conservative America showed its disapproval. Even Lyman Beecher and the religious press condemned the act, but a deep prejudice against Catholics became obvious in the trial of the thirteen involved. The trial demonstrated anti-Catholic biases from the beginning. Billington states, "The Attorney general was denied the right to ask jurors whether they were prejudice against Catholics." Moreover, when the jury acquitted the first individual, John Buzzell, the audience of a thousand applauded, and as Buzzell exited the courtroom, people mobbed him in an effort to congratulate him. Furthermore, the Boston legislature turned Bishop Fenwick's petition for funds to rebuild over to a special committee which denied the Catholics the "right" to be reimbursed, but "recommended" to a lower committee to reimburse the money. In the end, the lower committee chose not to reward any monies. Although initially condemned by the press, the acquittal of all those tried for the burning and the legislative decision to award no compensation demonstrated a lack of concern over the incident.

The works of Samuel F. B. Morse and Lyman Beecher represented a fear of a Catholic conspiracy to control the nation. The Usurline convent burning and the handling of the trial acted as a barometer, measuring the country's foreign resentment. With Irish and German immigration reaching record high numbers many feared this growing foreign body could possibly take control of the country (Ireland produced one-third all immigrants between 1830 and 184.), and the majority of people who subscribed to this fear saw the Catholics, with their Pope, as the main concern. Samuel F.B. Morse and Reverend Lyman Beecher both wrote commentaries warning "their fellow countrymen" of "the foreign Catholic menace" plotting to take control. In 1834 Morse, a distinguished professor of sculpture and painting at New York University, wrote The Foreign Conspiracies Against the Liberties of the United States and in 1835 wrote The Imminent dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States. I n 1835, Beecher, the president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, wrote the speech A plea for the West. Morse's and Beecher's ultimate message centered around protecting the "American birth right of liberty." This concern over foreign communities developed out of many different factors, but mainly from the Protestant fear of Catholicism's monarchial tendencies. Furthermore, as the urban areas grew, many nativists misunderstood enclaves as defiance or insurrection against the country. Ira Leonard notes, "the newcomers tendency to cluster together in religious or nationality communities was branded clannish and regarded as a deliberate effort to resist 'Americanization.'" Many nativists, like Morse and Beecher, saw "clannishness" as proof of the immigrants' resistance to "Americanization," but in all actuality they saw the natural response of a foreign community in hostile environment.

With the success of Morse and Beecher, the nativist movement reached a point where the audience began to accept near fictional work. In 1836, Maria Monk published Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal. In this work, Monk told of her experiences with Catholicism, which involved forced sexual intercourse with priests and the murdering of nuns and children. The book concludes with her escape in order to save her unborn child, and its success immediately produced a sequel. In the second work, Monk described two suicide attempts with each followed by her rescue. When she is saved the second time, she understands the act to be one of divine intervention and recognizes her need tell others of her story. Monk's mother denies the legitimacy of her work, stating that Maria never belonged to the nunnery and that a brain injury her daughter received as a child could be the cause of her stories. Although the work consisted of many unlikely happenings, by the civil war it sold over 3,00,000 copies. The large popularity of Maria Monk's work testified to the popularity of Nativist thought in 1836. Essentially, people appreciated the topic so much, they followed even the most questionable works.

The McGuffey Readers also began publication in 1836 and functioned as the basic reading material for both primary and secondary education throughout the country. The goal of the series centered around the conveying of moral behavior. The series incorporated religious topics into the stories, and McGuffy emphasized the importance of Christianity in his work. Jerome Ozer, author of The Foundation of Nativism in American Textbooks, notes that McGuffy understood the Bible to be a "school book." Furthermore, McGuffy viewed his extracts from the Bible as not involving "any questions of debate among the various denominations." Ozer understands McGuffy's last statement as an attempt to secure his readers in public schools regardless of the school controversy outcome

The public school controversies of the 1840s questioned New York city's handling of public school funds. Starting in 1805, Dewitt Clinton formed the Public School Society with the goal of educating children not wealthy enough to afford private education. Clinton pioneered publically supported primary education, and his successful efforts resulted in the Common Council of New York contributing state support to his program. The Common Council faced its first school controversy in 1831 when they deviated from their typical routine and allotted funds to the Protestant Orphanage Society. Immediately, the Catholic Benevolent Society responded with a request for their orphanage, and they received the request. But the decade to follow developed many additional tensions, specifically dealing with the Public School Society's use of the King James Bible and its use of an ecclesiastical history book which belittled the Catholic faith. Eventually, Governor William H. Seward, who sympathized with the Catholics came to their aid. Seward felt that education was crucial in incorporating the youth into American society, and expressed these views in a legislative message calling for the foreign born to be taught in their own language, with their own faith. A group of Catholics churches petitioned the Common Council for a share of the Common School fund. Conversely, the Public School Society petitioned against the Catholics' request, noting that this act would set a precedent by which any group could call for its share of state educational funds. Ultimately, the Common Council denied the Catholics' request and with the committee's favoring of the Public School Society, Catholics began to organize politically.

The rejection of the Catholic petition for state funds pushed this educational issue into the state political arena. After the Common Council decided to reject the Catholics' petition, the Catholics felt their citizenship meant nothing. As citizens of the state, the state funds for public education were as much theirs as any Protestant organization. Consequently, the group of Catholic churches urged Bishop John Hughes to assist in their request. In a petition to the Common Council, Hughes stated that the Public School Society was "filling the minds of Catholic children with errors of fact" through "books and teachings" noticeably "opposed to Catholicism." In response to this claim, the Public School Society responded to Hughes's statement, noting that they were "non-sectarian," and their only goal was to convey the truth of the Bible. These conversations between the two groups produced a meeting in which both sides would present their positions publically. On October 29, 1840 both groups gathered in front of a committee which concluded that the Catholic organizations would not receive any public funds.

Shortly after the committee's decision to deny funds, Hughes organized a petition calling for a "completely secular, state controlled religion." Hughes recognized this as the only way in which the Catholic church could remove the anti-Catholic teachings of the public schools. Although Hughes urged the issue to be removed from religious controversy--calling it one of education rather than religion--the press immediately stressed the Catholic-verses-protestant aspect of the issue. Despite Hughes efforts, religion overshadowed the whole discussion and regardless of the merit of the Catholic position, the press conveyed the problem to be one of religion rather than education. This petition appealed beyond local political agencies to the state legislature, and the New York state legislature found itself between the plea of the governor, calling for public funding of Catholic schools, and the discouragement of the Public School Society, warning of the precedent this act would set. Legislature decided to undertake a study of the situation and called on John C. Spenser, the Secretary of State and the Superintendent of State Common Schools, to analyze the problem and suggest a solution.

Hughes's voting tactics reaffirmed the Protestant fear of the Catholic danger to America. Spencer analyzed the issue and concluded that "the general laws of the state" should be "extended to New York city." Therefore, the Public School Society, a private organization, should relinquish its control of common schools. But legislature postponed making any official decision, and subsequently, the 1841 elections centered around the public school controversy. The Whig party, not appealing to the foreign vote, positioned itself against any changes in the existing school system; the democratic party, which usually relied on the foreign vote, tried to avoid the issue completely. Essentiality , the democratic party faced a dismal situation. Typically they needed the Catholic vote to defeat the Whigs, but because the school controversy positioned Protestants against Catholics, a platform sympathetic to the Catholics would lose all Protestant support. In an attempt to scare the Democratic party, Hughes urged the formation of a alternative ticket in which Catholics would follow by religious affiliation. Although Hughes probably intended to give the Catholic vote to the Democratic party when it pledged its support, the Democratic support never came: the Democratic party announced its position would call for no change in the school system. Consequently, the Catholic ticket remained, and Whig party defeated the Democrats. Although the Catholics succeeded in demonstrating their political power, the public saw Catholicism as a danger–the same danger that the works of Morse and Beecher warned of. With the faith of Catholicism uniting the Catholic vote, many moderate Protestants felt the this act threatened the liberty of the country–a liberty John Higham recognizes as our nation's "chief national attribute and supreme achievement.

One of the most detrimental elements of the Catholic cause came from the press misrepresenting the Catholic position. From the beginning of the controversy, the majority of the secular press stood against the Catholic call for equal funds. Although the Catholic church called for the removal of Bible reading as a way to keep its children from the misrepresentations of their faith, the press tried to show that the Catholic church stood against religious education. Moreover, some papers went so far as to say that the Catholic church stood against education entirely. Furthermore, when the appeal for state school funds failed twice, some Catholics began to disrupt hearings, and rather than presenting the unfairness of the hearings, the press focused attention onto the Catholics tendency to disrupt the American political process. Unfortunately, these misrepresentations acted as proof to many Protestants that the Catholic faith could not fit inside of the United States. When in 1842, legislature followed Spencer's suggestion and passed the Maclay act, the press portrayed this as proof of the Catholic destruction of the country.

The passing of the Maclay act moved many nativists to enter into the local political arena. Many Protestants understood the Maclay act as a complete victory for the Catholic cause and therefore passionately worked for an appeal of the law. Although the Whig party won the 1841 elections, the Democratic party still dominated state legislature, and the passing of the Maclay act returned Catholic support to the Democrats. The nativists were aware of the dangers of partisan politics, and from this concern, nativism began to build a political platform. The first official group called itself the Native Americans and understood all of New York's political and social problems to be the result of two-party corruptions. The Native Americans saw the immigrant vote, especially the Catholic vote, as a tool which certain parties competed for. The main platform of the party centered around the extension of naturalization laws. In 1844, the Native Americans reorganized into the American Republican party led by James Harper. In his book, American Party in Politics, the nineteenth-century historian John Hancock Lee witnessed the formation of the American Republican party and called it "uncontaminated" by the motives of "aspiring politicians." Essentially Lee understood the American Republican party to be the only party based on a sincere platform rather than a goal of political success The party allied with the Whigs which resulted in the defeat of the Democratic party. From this victory, the American Republican party demonstrated the local political relevance of the nativist movement which would later manifest on the national level through know-nothings.

In conclusion, nativism has relevance inside of both religious and political discussions of nineteenth-century America. The movement is responsible for acts ranging from the tragic burning of a convent to the formation of a political party geared towards restoring sincere political affairs. Furthermore, nativism represents the dangers of a cultural identity gone too far, a nationalism which refuses to accept those of a different faith or place. Finally, the past effects of nativism should urge any national or cultural identity to ask itself this question: can a group have the ability to balance its cultural pride with the importance of respect ing and accepting those who are different?

Endnotes

1. Ray A. Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 (New York: Macmillian Co. 1938) 53-55.

2. Ibid., 56.

3. Ibid., 58-60

4. Ira M. Leonard and Robert D. Parmet, American Nativism, 1830-1860 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1971) 57.

5. Billington, 73.

6. Ibid., 86-90.

7. David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear (Chapel Hill: The University of Carolina Press, 1988) 29-30.

8. Ibid., 40-41.

9. Leonard, 54-56.

10. Billington, 99-108.

11. Jerome S. Ozer, The Foundations of nativism in American Textbooks, 1783-1680(Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of American Press, 1941) 77-91.

12. Leonard, 66-69.

13. Billington, 144-158.

14. Ibid., 147.

15. Ibid., 149.

16. Ibid., 150-153.

17. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1963) 6.

18. Billington, 155.

19. John Hancock Lee, The Origin and the Progress of the American Party in Politics (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970) 29.

20. Leonard, 71-75.

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During the 1830s and 1840s Americans with nativist sentiments made a concerted effort to enter into the local and national political arenas. Nativism's political relevance grew out of the increase of immigrants during the '20s and '30s and the anti-foreign writings that abounded during these decades.

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Like Fight Club, there were rules about joining the secret society known as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB). An initiation rite called "Seeing Sam." The memorization of passwords and hand signs. A solemn pledge never to betray the order. A pureblooded pedigree of Protestant Anglo-Saxon stock and the rejection of all Catholics. And above all, members of the secret society weren't allowed to talk about the secret society. If asked anything by outsiders, they would respond with, " I know nothing."

So went the rules of this secret fraternity that rose to prominence in 1853 and transformed into the powerful political party known as the Know Nothings. At its height in the 1850s, the Know Nothing party, originally called the American Party, included more than 100 elected congressmen, eight governors, a controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California, and thousands of local politicians. Party members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation's highest values.

Know Nothings were the American political system's first major third party. Early in the 19th century, two parties leftover from the birth of the United States were the Federalists (who advocated for a strong central government) and the Democratic-Republicans (formed by Thomas Jefferson). Following the earliest parties came the National Republicans, created to oppose Andrew Jackson. That group eventually transformed into the Whigs as Jackson's party became known as the Democrats. The Whig party sent presidents William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor and others to the White House during its brief existence. But the party splintered and then disintegrated over the politics of slavery. The Know Nothings filled the power void before the Whigs had even ceased to exist, choosing to ignore slavery and focus all their energy on the immigrant question. They were the first party to leverage economic concerns over immigration as a major part of their platform. Though short-lived, the values and positions of the Know Nothings ultimately contributed to the two-party system we have today.

Paving the way for the Know Nothing movement were two men from New York City. Thomas R. Whitney, the son of a silversmith who opened his own shop, wrote the magnum opus of the Know Nothings, A Defense of the American Policy. William "Bill the Butcher" Poole was a gang leader, prizefighter and butcher in the Bowery (and would later be used as inspiration for the main character in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York). Whitney and Poole were from different social classes, but both had an enormous impact on their chosen party-and their paths crossed at a pivotal moment in the rise of nativism.

In addition to being a successful engraver, Whitney was an avid reader of philosophy, history and classics. He moved from reading to writing poetry and, eventually, political tracts. "What is equality but stagnation?" Whitney wrote in one of them. Preceded in nativist circles by such elites as author James Fenimore Cooper, Alexander Hamilton, Jr. and James Monroe (nephew of the former president), Whitney had a knack for rising quickly to the top of whichever group he belonged to. He became a charter member of the Order of United Americans (the precursor to the OSSB) and used his own printing press to publish many of the group's pamphlets.

Whitney believed in government action, but not in service of reducing social inequality. Rather, he believed, all people " are entitled to such privileges, social and political, as they are capable of employing and enjoying rationally." In other words, only those with the proper qualifications deserved full rights. Women's suffrage was abhorrent and unnatural, Catholics were a threat to the stability of the nation, and German and Irish immigrants undermined the old order established by the Founding Fathers.

From 1820 to 1845, anywhere from 10,000 to 1000,000 immigrants entered the U.S. each year. Then, as a consequence of economic instability in Germany and a potato famine in Ireland, those figures turned from a trickle into a tsunami. Between 1845 and 1854, 2.9 million immigrants poured into the country, and many of them were of Catholic faith. Suddenly, more than half the residents of New York City were born abroad, and Irish immigrants comprised 70 percent of charity recipients.

As cultures clashed, fear exploded and conspiracies abounded. Posters around Boston proclaimed, "All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are...vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats." Convents were said to hold young women against their will. An "exposé" published by Maria Monk, who claimed to have gone undercover in one such convent, accused priests of raping nuns and then strangling the babies that resulted. It didn't matter that Monk was discovered as a fraud; her book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The conspiracies were so virulent that churches were burned, and Know Nothing gangs spread from New York and Boston to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Louisville, Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis and San Francisco.

At the same time as this influx of immigrants reshaped the makeup of the American populace, the old political parties seemed poised to fall apart.

"The Know Nothings came out of what seemed to be a vacuum," says Christopher Phillips, professor of history at University of Cincinnati. "It's the failing Whig party and the faltering Democratic party and their inability to articulate, to the satisfaction of the great percentage of their electorate, answers to the problems that were associated with everyday life."

Phillips says the Know Nothings displayed three patterns common to all other nativist movements. First is the embrace of nationalism-as seen in the writings of the OSSB. Second is religious discrimination: in this case, Protestants against Catholics rather than the more modern day squaring-off of Judeo-Christians against Muslims. Lastly, a working-class identity exerts itself in conjunction with the rhetoric of upper-class political leaders. As historian Elliott J. Gorn writes, "Appeals to ethnic hatreds allowed men whose livelihoods depended on winning elections to sidestep the more complex and politically dangerous divisions of class."

No person exemplified this veneration of the working class more than Poole. Despite gambling extravagantly and regularly brawling in bars, Poole was a revered party insider, leading a gang that terrorized voters at polling places in such a violent fashion that one victim was later reported to have a bite on his arm and a severe eye injury. Poole was also the Know Nothings' first martyr.

On February 24, 1855, Poole was drinking at a New York City saloon when he came face to face with John Morrissey, an Irish boxer. The two exchanged insults and both pulled out guns. But before the fight could turn violent, police arrived to break it up. Later that night, though, Poole returned to the hall and grappled with Morrissey's men, including Lewis Baker, a Welsh-born immigrant, who shot Poole in the chest at close range. Although Poole survived for nearly two weeks, he died on March 8. The last words he uttered pierced the hearts of the country's Know Nothings: "Goodbye boys, I die a true American."

Approximately 250,000 people flooded lower Manhattan to pay their respects to the great American. Dramas performed across the country changed their narratives to end with actors wrapping themselves in an American flag and quoting Poole's last words. An anonymous pamphlet titled The Life of William Poole claimed that the shooting wasn't a simple barroom scuffle, but an assassination organized by the Irish. The facts didn't matter; that Poole had been carrying a gun the night of the shooting, or that his assailant took shots to the head and abdomen, was irrelevant. Nor did admirers care that Poole had a prior case against him for assault with intent to kill. He was an American hero, "battling for freedom's cause," who sacrificed his life to protect people from dangerous Catholic immigrants.

On the day of Poole's funeral, a procession of 6,000 mourners trailed through the streets of New York. Included in their number were local politicians, volunteer firemen, a 52-piece band, members of the OSSB-and Thomas R. Whitney, about to take his place in the House of Representatives as a member of the Know Nothing Caucus.

Judging by the size of Poole's funeral and the Know Nothing party's ability to penetrate all levels of government, it seemed the third party was poised to topple the Whigs and take its place in the two-party system. But instead of continuing to grow, the Know Nothings collapsed under the pressure of having to take a firm position on the issue the slavery. By the late 1850s, the case of Dred Scott (who sued for his freedom and was denied it) and the raids led by abolitionist John Brown proved that slavery was a more explosive and urgent issue than immigration.

America fought the Civil War over slavery, and the devastation of that conflict pushed nativist concerns to the back of the American psyche. But nativism never left, and the legacy of the Know Nothings has been apparent in policies aimed at each new wave of immigrants. In 1912, the House Committee on Immigration debated over whether Italians could be considered " full-blooded Caucasians" and immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe were considered " biologically and culturally less intelligent."

From the end of the 19th century to the first third of the 20th, Asian immigrants were excluded from naturalization based on their non-white status. "People from a variety of groups and affiliations, ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the Progressive movement, old-line New England aristocrats and the eugenics movement, were among the strange bedfellows in the campaign to stop immigration that was deemed undesirable by old-stock white Americans," writes sociologist Charles Hirschman of the early 20th century. "The passage of immigration restrictions in the early 1920s ended virtually all immigration except from northwestern Europe."

Those debates and regulations continue today, over refugees from the Middle East and immigrants from Latin America.

Phillips's conclusion is that those bewildered by current political affairs simply haven't looked far enough back into history. "One can't possibly make sense of [current events] unless you know something about nativism," he says. "That requires you to go back in time to the Know Nothings. You have to realize the context is different, but the themes are consistent. The actors are still the same, but with different names."

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How the 19th-Century Know Nothing Party Reshaped American Politics

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From xenophobia to conspiracy theories, the Know Nothing party launched a nativist movement whose effects are still felt today

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The refugees seeking haven in America were poor and disease-ridden. They threatened to take jobs away from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime. They were accused of being rapists.

These undesirables were Irish.
WATCH: America: Promised Land on HISTORY Vault
A Famine Forces an Unprecedented Migration.

Fleeing a shipwreck of an island, nearly 2 million refugees from Ireland crossed the Atlantic to the United States in the dismal wake of the Great Hunger. Beginning in 1845, the fortunes of the Irish began to sag along with the withering leaves of the country's potato plants. Beneath the auld sod, festering potatoes bled a putrid red-brown mucus as a virulent pathogen scorched Ireland's staple crop and rendered it inedible.

While the potato blight struck across Europe, no corner of the continent was as dependent on tubers for survival as Ireland, which was mired in extreme poverty as a result of centuries of British rule. Packed with nutrition and easy to grow, potatoes were the only practical crop that could flourish on the minuscule plots doled out by wealthy British Protestant landowners. The Irish consumed 7 million tons of potatoes each year. They ate potatoes for dinner. They ate them for lunch. They even ate them for breakfast. According to Irish Famine Facts by John Keating, the average adult working male in Ireland consumed a staggering 14 pounds of potatoes per day, while the average adult Irish woman ate 11.2 pounds.

Through seven terrible years of famine, Ireland's poetic landscape authored tales of the macabre. Barefoot mothers with clothes dripping from their bodies clutched dead infants in their arms as they begged for food. Wild dogs searching for food fed on human corpses. The country's legendary 40 shades of green stained the lips of the starving who fed on tufts of grass in a futile attempt for survival. Desperate farmers sprinkled their crops with holy water, and hollow figures with eyes as empty as their stomach scraped Ireland's stubbled fields with calloused hands searching for one, just one, healthy potato. Typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis and cholera tore through the countryside as horses maintained a constant march carting spent bodies to mass graves.

British Neglect Exacerbates the Irish Plight

More than just the pestilence was responsible for the Great Hunger. A political system ruled by London and an economic system dominated by British absentee landlords were co-conspirators. For centuries British laws had deprived Ireland's Catholics of their rights to worship, vote, speak their language and own land, horses and guns. Now, with a famine raging, the Irish were denied food. Under armed guard, food convoys continued to export wheat, oats and barley to England while Ireland starved.

British lawmakers were such adherents to laissez-faire capitalism that they were reluctant to provide government aid, lest it interfere with the natural course of free markets to solve the humanitarian crisis. "Great Britain cannot continue to throw her hard-won millions into the bottomless pit of Celtic pauperism," sneered the Illustrated London News in March 1849. Charles E. Trevelyan, the British civil servant in charge of the apathetic relief efforts, even viewed the famine as a divine solution to Hibernian overpopulation as he declared, "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated."

Ireland's population was nearly halved by the time the potato blight abated in 1852. While approximately 1 million perished, another 2 million abandoned the land that had abandoned them in the largest-single population movement of the 19th century. Most of the exiles-nearly a quarter of the Irish nation-washed up on the shores of the United States. They knew little about America except one thing: It had to be better than the hell that was searing Ireland.
READ MORE: When Irish-Americans Attacked Canada-With the White House's Blessing
A Mass Exodus Begins

A flotilla of 5,000 boats transported the pitiable castaways from the wasteland. Most of the refugees boarded minimally converted cargo ships-some had been used in the past to transport slaves from Africa-and the hungry, sick passengers, many of whom spent their last pennies for transit, were treated little better than freight on a 3,000-mile journey that lasted at least four weeks.

Herded like livestock in dark, cramped quarters, the Irish passengers lacked sufficient food and clean water. They choked on fetid air. They were showered by excrement and vomit. Each adult was apportioned just 18 inches of bed space-children half that. Disease and death clung to the rancid vessels like barnacles, and nearly a quarter of the 85,000 passengers who sailed to North America aboard the aptly nicknamed "coffin ships" in 1847 never reached their destinations. Their bodies were wrapped in cloths, weighed down with stones and tossed overboard to sleep forever on the bed of the ocean floor.

Although most certainly tired and poor, the Irish did not arrive in America yearning to breathe free; they merely hungered to eat. Largely destitute, many exiles could progress no farther than within walking distance of the city docks where they disembarked. While some had spent all of their meager savings to pay for passage across the Atlantic, others had their voyages funded by British landlords who found it a cheaper solution to dispatch their tenants to another continent, rather than pay for their charity at home.

And in the opinion of many Americans, those British landlords were not sending their best people. These people were not like the industrious, Protestant Scotch-Irish immigrants who came to America in large numbers during the colonial era, fought in the Continental Army and tamed the frontier. These people were not only poor, unskilled refugees huddled in rickety tenements. Even worse, they were Catholic.

The influx heightens religious tensions.

Conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the United States had already broken out in violence before the first potato plant wilted in Ireland. Anti-Catholic, anti-Irish mobs in Philadelphia destroyed houses and torched churches in the deadly Bible Riots of 1844. New York Archbishop John Hughes responded by building a wall of his own around Old St. Patrick's Cathedral in order to protect it from the native-born population, and he stationed musket-wielding members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians to guard the city's churches. Wild conspiracy theories took root that women were held against their will in Catholic convents and that priests systematically raped nuns and then strangled any children born as a result of their union.

The maltreatment of newcomers to the United States was, of course, hardly a cross for the Irish to bear on their own. However, while the number of German immigrants entering the United States nearly matched that of the Irish during the 1850s, the Irish were particularly vilified by the country's Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose ancestors had explicitly made their exodus across the ocean to find a refuge from papism and ensure their worship was cleansed of any remaining Catholic vestiges. Feelings toward the Vatican had softened little in the two centuries following the sailing of the Mayflower. The country's oldest citizens could still personally remember when America was an English colony and papal effigies were burned in city streets during annual Guy Fawkes Day celebrations.

Certainly, many Protestants reacted with Christian charity to the refugees. It was a Boston Brahman-Captain Robert Bennet Forbes-who spearheaded America's first major foreign disaster relief effort by delivering food and supplies to Ireland aboard a government warship during "Black '47." In the new Irish exiles, however, many Protestants saw a papal plot at work. According to "Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia," some Protestants feared the pope and his army would land in the United States, overthrow the government and establish a new Vatican in Cincinnati. They believed the Irish would impose the Catholic canon as the law of the land.

With immigration controls left primarily to the states and cities, the Irish poured through a porous border. In Boston, a city of a little more than 100,000 people saw 37,000 Irish arrive in the matter of a few years. Naturally, it was difficult to integrate the newcomers in such sheer numbers. The Irish in Boston were for a long time "fated to remain a massive lump in the community, undigested, undigestible," according to historian Oscar Handlin, author of "Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation."

The Irish filled the most menial and dangerous jobs, often at low pay. They cut canals. They dug trenches for water and sewer pipes. They laid rail lines. They cleaned houses. They slaved in textile mills. They worked as stevedores, stable workers and blacksmiths. Not only did working-class Americans see the cheaper laborers taking their jobs, some of the Irish refugees even took up arms against their new homeland during the Mexican-American War. Drawn in part by higher wages and a common faith with the Mexicans, some members of the St. Patrick's Battalion had deserted the U.S. Army after encountering ill-treatment by their bigoted commanders and fought with the enemy. After their capture, 50 members of the "San Patricios" were executed by the U.S. Army for their treasonous decisions.

A nativist backlash begins.

The discrimination faced by the famine refugees was not subtle or insidious. It was right there in black and white, in newspaper classified advertisement s that blared "No Irish Need Apply." The image of the simian Irishman, imported from Victorian England, was given new life by the pens of illustrators such as Thomas Nast that dripped with prejudice as they sketched Celtic ape-men with sloping foreheads and monstrous appearances.

In 1849, a clandestine fraternal society of native-born Protestant men called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner formed in New York. Bound by sacred oaths and secret passwords, its members wanted a return to the America they once knew, a land of "Temperance, Liberty and Protestantism." Similar secret societies with menacing names like the Black Snakes and Rough and Readies sprouted across the country.

Within a few years, these societies coalesced around the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party, whose members were called the "Know-Nothings" because they claimed to "know nothing" when questioned about their politics. Party members vowed to elect only native-born citizens-but only if they weren't Roman Catholic. "Know-Nothings believed that Protestantism defined American society. From this flowed their fundamental belief that Catholicism was incompatible with basic American values," writes Jay P. Dolan in The Irish Americans: A History.

Buoyed by the war-cry "Americans must rule America!", the Know-Nothings elected eight governors, more than 100 congressmen and mayors of cities including Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago in the mid-1850s. They found their greatest success in Massachusetts where in 1854 the American Party captured all state offices, the entire State Senate and all but a handful of seats in the House chamber. According to Dolan, once in power in Massachusetts the Know-Nothings mandated the reading of the King James Bible in public schools, disbanded Irish militia units while confiscating their weapons and deported nearly 300 poor Irish back to Liverpool because they were a drain on the public treasury. They also barred naturalized citizens from voting unless they had spent 21 years in the United States.

Millard Fillmore, the former president most notable for being un-notable, ran on the American Party's 1856 presidential ticket. Throughout his political career, the 13th president had persistently courted the votes of nativist Yankees fearful of the changes brought by the Great Hunger refugees, and he blamed "foreign Catholics" for his defeat in the 1844 New York gubernatorial election. Although Fillmore finished third behind Democrat James Buchanan and Republican John C. Fremont, who had to swat down rumors that he was both a Catholic and a cannibal, the American Party received more than 20 percent of the popular vote and eight electoral votes.

Nativists use violence to further an agenda.

In 1854, an anti-Catholic mob in Ellsworth, Maine, dragged Jesuit priest John Bapst-who had circulated a petition denouncing the use of the King James Bible in local schools-into the streets where they stripped him and sheltered his body in hot tar and feathers. That same year, the Know-Nothings in Bath, Maine, smashed the pews of a church recently purchased by Irish Catholics before hoisting an American flag from the belfry and setting the building ablaze. When the bishop of Portland returned to the city a year later to lay a cornerstone for the church's replacement, another mob chased him away and beat him.

The violence turned deadly in Louisville, Kentucky, in August 1855 when armed Know-Nothing members guarding polling stations on an election day launched street fights against German and Irish Catholics. Immigrant homes were ransacked and torched. Between 20 and 100 people, including a German priest fatally attacked while attempting to visit a dying parishioner, were killed. Thousands of Catholics fled the city in the riot's aftermath, but no one was ever prosecuted for crimes committed on "Bloody Monday."

A Know-Nothing mob even seized a marble block gifted by Pope Pius IX for construction of the Washington Monument and tossed it in the Potomac River. A pamphlet published by Baltimore's John F. Weishampel suggested that the stone could be used as a signal from the pope to launch an immigrant uprising to take over America. "The effects of this block, if placed in the monument, will be a mortification to nearly every American Protestant who looks upon it," he warned, "and its influence upon the zealous supporters of the Roman hierarchy will be tremendous-especially with foreigners."

Abraham Lincoln was among the many Americans disturbed at the rise of the nativist movement as he explained in an 1855 letter: "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

The good news for Lincoln and those Americans with similar views is that the Know-Nothing Party cratered quickly after reaching its high-water mark, although nativism has proven to be stubbornly persistent. The party splintered as the slavery question superseded the immigrant menace with flashpoints such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision and the uprising at Harper's Ferry steering the country to armed conflict.

Although stereotyped as ignorant bogtrotters loyal only to the pope and ill-suited for democracy, and only recently given political rights by the British in their former home after centuries of denial, the Irish were deeply engaged in the political process in their new home. They voted in higher proportions than other ethnic groups. Their sheer numbers helped to propel William R. Grace to become the first Irish-Catholic mayor of New York City in 1880 and Hugh O'Brien the first Irish-Catholic mayor of Boston four years later.

A generation after the Great Hunger, the Irish controlled powerful political machines in cities across the United States and were moving up the social ladder into the middle class as an influx of immigrants from China and Southern and Eastern Europe took hold in the 1880s and 1890s. "Being from the British Isles, the Irish were now considered acceptable and assimilable to the American way of life," Dolan writes.

No longer embedded on the lowest rung of American society, the Irish unfortunately gained acceptance in the mainstream by dishing out the same bigotry toward newcomers that they had experienced. County Cork native and Workingmen's Party leader Denis Kearney, for example, closed his speeches to American laborers with his rhetorical signature: "Whatever happens, the Chinese must go."

Kearney and the other Irish failed to learn the lesson of their own story. Yes, the Irish transformed the United States, just as the United States transformed the Irish. But the worst fears of the nativists were not fulfilled. The refugees from the Great Hunger and the 32 million Americans with predominantly Irish roots today strengthened the United States, not destroyed it. A country that once reviled the Irish now wears green on St. Patrick's Day. That's something to raise a glass to.

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When America Despised the Irish: The 19th Century's Refugee Crisis | HISTORY

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Forced from their homeland because of famine and political upheaval, the Irish endured vehement discrimination before making their way into the American mainstream.

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anchoring capitalism thru white supremacist designation of what is surplus land, what can be taken

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anchoring capitalism thru white supremacist designation of what is surplus land, what can be taken

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Seneca Village and Eco Gentrification: story map resource

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Seneca Village and Eco Gentrification: story map resource

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Thinking about the theme of property and the first pillar of anti-blackness. Property, starting from the body, enslavement. Property, needed to own property to have the ability to vote. Seneca village provided this, the collective ownership of property allowed for agency within a community, self sufficiency (schools, churches, etc). This property is then taken by force, people are not fairly compensated, displacement. The creation of the park increases property value of the surrounding area, further displacement.

Now central park is surface level accessible, a salvation...

zooming out and mapping how eminent domain has been used in the US to further disenfranchise the other while bolstering the wellbeing of white supremacy.

also: https://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2019-02-26/how-racist-property-laws-formed-the-neighborhoods-we-live-in-today

** CRITICAL
space to talk about and celebrate resurgence work in "othered" communities

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When Manhattan Was Mannahatta: A Stroll Through the Centuries

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When Manhattan Was Mannahatta: A Stroll Through the Centuries

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Credit... Eric Mehl/Hypothetical, Inc.; Eric Sanderson/Wildlife Conservation Society

Critic's Notebook

From lush forest to metropolis, the evolution of Lower Manhattan. Our critic walks with Eric W. Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Credit... Eric Mehl/Hypothetical, Inc.; Eric Sanderson/Wildlife Conservation Society

Before the first Dutch colonists sailed through the Narrows into New York Harbor, Manhattan was still what the Lenape, who had already lived here for centuries, called Mannahatta. Times Square was a forest with a beaver pond. The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, at Foley Square, was the site of an ancient mound of oyster middens.

Eric W. Sanderson is a senior conservation ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo. In 2009 he published " Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. " The book geolocated old maps onto the modern city to reimagine a cornucopia of hills, beaches, fields and ponds.

This is the latest in a series of (edited, condensed) virtual walks with architects and others. I spoke with Mr. Sanderson by phone. Our "stroll" explored Lower Manhattan. We "met" where the Staten Island Ferry docks at Whitehall Terminal.

Except that we imagined it was the September afternoon in 1609 when Henry Hudson arrived, and we were standing near the shore, gazing at the water.

Michael Kimmelman Aside from Hudson's ship, what do we see?

Eric W. Sanderson Whales and porpoises. One of the earliest sketches we have of Manhattan shows a whale in the Hudson River. The charter of Trinity Church includes a provision specifically saying dead whales found on beaches in the province of New York are property of the church, which could use them to make oil and whale bone. So whales were clearly a meaningful part of the local economy and ecosystem.

What was the ecosystem?
Ecosystems, actually. Manhattan is something like one percent the size of Yellowstone. Yellowstone is 2.2 million acres and it has 66 ecosystems. Mannahatta had 55.

It's an interesting thought exercise to imagine what might have happened had the United States been colonized from the West, instead of from the East. We might have decided to make Manhattan a national park. We would be coming to New York for an entirely different sort of wildlife.
The Dutch and English, of course, saw the island as a commercial paradise.
It had vast forests of timber. There were otter, beavers, mink, oysters, brook trout, bears. We have historical records of a black bear being shot in the vicinity of Maiden Lane during the 1630s. We know wolves lived on Manhattan until the 1720s.

The Dutch left behind these almost overwrought descriptions of how beautiful and abundant the landscape was - how, sailing here, they could smell the flowers all the way out into the ocean.
And they saw?
Sailing into the harbor they saw what the Lenape called Pagganck, or Nut Island. Today we call it Governors Island. Back then, it was covered with walnut trees, hickory, chestnuts. And from the ocean they could already see Todt Hill on Aquehonga Manacknong, which was the Algonquin name for Staten Island.

That's really hard to say. Forgive me. I'm not a linguist.

Image

The "stroll" begins where the Staten Island Ferry docks at Whitehall Terminal. Credit... Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

A view from the area near the South Ferry. Credit... Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

Over time Avalonia slammed into the craton, geologically speaking. The east side of the East River is pretty much the edge of the old continent. Most of Queens and Brooklyn are what used to be Avalonia.
Translation for older New Yorkers: Katz's deli on Houston Street was the craton, Junior's on Flatbush Avenue was Avalonia.
More or less. Then there's an extensive glacial history - at least seven glaciation events over the last 620,000 years. The glacial event that matters most peaked about 21,000 years ago. It was called the Wisconsin glaciation. The glacier stopped in Brooklyn and Queens, giving us what are now Brooklyn Heights and the hills of Bay Ridge, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights.
If the Wisconsin glaciation buried Manhattan, how much ice would we have been standing under here?
How tall are these skyscrapers?
Well, One State Street Plaza, facing the ferry terminal, is 42 stories, about 450 feet high.
The ice was more than three times that thick.

The glacier that once covered Manhattan was more than three times taller than One State Street Plaza. Credit... Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

So we're talking the Empire State Building.
Then as the climate changed, the glacier retreated and a whole series of giant glacial lakes formed. We would have been at the bottom of Lake Albany, which extended all the way up to New York's state capital. About 13,500 years ago the lakes gave way in a cascade that brought billions and billions of cubic feet of water roaring down from upstate, breaking through the dam that had separated Lake Albany from the coastal plain and forming the Verrazzano Narrows.

And that's when we got the harbor and the topography we now know?
There were lots of steps in between. But by about 5,000 years ago, we had the oak and hickory forests that Henry Hudson would have seen when he arrived. He would have seen another island, too, Kioshk, as the Lenape called it - we call it Ellis Island, which was called Gibbet Island during the 1700s because the English hanged pirates and criminals there.

It became known as one of the oyster islands because geological events had turned the harbor into an ideal home for oysters and a superhighway for the sort of fish that swim from saltwater upstream to breed in freshwater, like shad or sturgeon. We know from historical records that people caught hundreds and hundreds of fish in a few hours just casting their nets off Ellis Island during the 18th and 19th centuries - before the harbor became polluted and dams were built that closed off streams upriver where the fish had gone to breed.

Credit... Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

I moved here in 1998, and one day I went to the Strand bookstore and was flipping through books on New York and saw "Manhattan in Maps" by Paul Cohen and Robert Augustyn, two map dealers. They had taken a photograph of the British Headquarters Map.
Which British cartographers drew up in the early 1780s.
I realized that if I could geolocate that map and fit it to Manhattan today, I could figure out what was here centuries ago.

From there north, around where Nassau Street reaches Fulton Street, there were tulip trees, 100 or 150 feet high.
The skyscrapers of the 1600s.
With soft, very straight trunks, which is why the Lenape dug giant canoes out of them. Then, where Broadway approaches what's now City Hall Park, the forest probably opened up onto fields, where we think the Lenape may have tended corn, beans and squash: Three Sisters gardens, they're called. The land was relatively flat with the right soils. And it was south of what was called the Collect Pond. We think a community of Lenape probably lived just north of City Hall Park, on an inlet of the pond where the New York State Supreme Court building is now.

A community of Lenape may have lived just north of City Hall Park, where they tended Three Sisters gardens. Credit... Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

How big a community?
Maybe 15 people. Maybe 100. No one knows for sure. You have to imagine this was a community that, before the Dutch and English came, would have pretty much spent their entire lives with each other, encountering maybe the occasional trader from Northern Manhattan or Brooklyn, or farther afield, like New Jersey.

In your book it's clear that the history of Manhattan is in many ways the story of the Collect Pond. Where was it?
Well, where the Javits building is today was roughly the west edge of the pond - that was a hill named Kalck Hoek by the Dutch, because of the mounds of oyster shells the Lenape had left on it. Kalck means "chalk or lime," from the shells. To the north of the Collect Pond, Bayard's Mount was the tallest hill around, from the top of which you could see to the Verrazzano Narrows.

Imagine the Collect Pond sitting within this amphitheater of hills, protected from the winter winds. The water was fresh, very deep - maybe 80 feet deep - fed by springs. An outlet stream flowed north from the pond to the Hudson River, along what's now Canal Street. Another stream, Wolfert's Brook, flowed southeast to the East River, along Pearl Street, past 1 Police Plaza.
Continuing the old-school restaurant theme: south of Chinatown's Nom Wah Tea Parlor and the Great NY Noodletown.

Right. The Collect Pond was the freshwater source for early New York. In the American period, commercial businesses started to settle along the shore of the pond and by the late 18th century it was becoming polluted. As the city grew, tanneries, which were essential but stank and used toxic chemicals, kept getting pushed farther north, because no one wanted to live near a tannery. They ended up at the pond, dumping their waste in it.

Credit... Markley Boyer/The Mannahatta Project, via Wildlife Conservation Society

Credit... Stephen Amiaga/Wildlife Conservation Society

Which was Burr's real ambition. He, I think, argued for the water company after the city suffered an outbreak of yellow fever. Then the company built a system so poor it provoked a series of cholera epidemics.
Which in turn led to the construction of the Croton Aqueduct, a remarkable engineering feat to bring water by gravity 41 miles south to reservoirs in the city, which in turn had its own ripple effects on the rest of the island. Why do we have the flat Great Lawn in Central Park? Because that was originally the site of a receiving reservoir called Lake Manahatta. Why is the Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue? Because it replaced another massive reservoir on Murray Hill.
Edgar Allan Poe described the views from the top of the 42nd Street reservoir, where he said he could see "the whole city to the Battery, and a large portion of the harbor." Then, of course, we got the library building by Carrère & Hastings.

All traceable to the Collect Pond. I have this friendly bet with an urban geographer whose theory of cities is that they only change through crises - like the one we're experiencing right now. There's certainly the historical case for that.

But, knowing our history, we also have the capacity to make better decisions, to do the right thing.
That doesn't mean we will.
We can hope.

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When Manhattan Was Mannahatta: A Stroll Through the Centuries

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Critic's Notebook From lush forest to metropolis, the evolution of Lower Manhattan. Our critic walks with Eric W. Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society. Credit... Eric Mehl/Hypothetical, Inc.; Eric Sanderson/Wildlife Conservation Society Before the first Dutch colonists sailed through the Narrows into New York Harbor, Manhattan was still what the Lenape, who had already lived here for centuries, called Mannahatta.

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Welcome to New York City, 1609

Have you ever wondered what New York was like before it was a city? Find out here, by navigating through the map of the city in 1609. You can find your block, explore the native landscape of today's famous landmarks, research the flora and fauna block by block, and help our team continue to rediscover 1609. Launch the application below.

"The goal of the Mannahatta Project has never been to return Manhattan to its primeval state. The goal of the project is discover something new about a place we all know so well, whether we live in New York or see it on television, and, through that discovery, to alter our way of life. New York does not lack for dystopian visions of the future.... But what is the vision of the future that works? Might it lie in Mannahatta, the green heart of New York, and with a new start to history, a few hours before Hudson arrived that sunny afternoon four hundred years ago?"
- from Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

Why 'Welikia'? And Where's Mannahatta?

We're going beyond Mannahatta, launching the Welikia Project to encompass all of New York City, including the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and surrounding waters. Welikia means "my good home" in Lenape, the original Native American language of the region. But Mannahatta hasn't gone anywhere. For all who have come to love Mannahatta, the same block-by-block data is available above by clicking anywhere on Manhattan Island after pressing the "Launch the Map Explorer" button above. For those who want to know more about Welikia , press the button, then click on any block in the other four boroughs on the map, where you can support Welikia.

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Have you ever wondered what New York was like before it was a city? Find out here, by navigating through the map of the city in 1609. You can find your block, explore the native landscape of today's famous landmarks, research the flora and fauna block by block, and help our team continue to rediscover 1609.

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How the Landscape of Seneca Village Can Reveal its History

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How the Landscape of Seneca Village Can Reveal its History

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The site of Seneca Village in Central Park resembles many other Park landscapes, with rolling hills, winding paths, trees, playgrounds, and rock outcrops. The area-between 82nd and 89th Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues-reveals no discernable clues that this was once a place where people lived, and that by 1856 it was a predominately African-American community with three churches, a school, and over 50 houses.

This absence of clear signs of Seneca Village's existence has been noted by many who have studied its history, and is compounded by the lack of Black history in the physical and archival record. During a symposium in February 2020 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture focused on 19th-century Black communities in New York, the historian Leslie Harris spoke about the challenges of researching these places and how she had learned that it was important to "read the archive with informed imagination."

As part of the ongoing study of Seneca Village, we've realized it's also possible and valuable to read the existing landscape with informed imagination. Through this process, we can see that this place is, in fact, not totally lost. Natural features such as rocks, water, hills, and plants-many of which still exist in the Park today from the time of Seneca Village-can help us to imagine its residents' lives as well as understand its history.

Rocks Throughout History

While rocks and hills are somewhat ubiquitous in Central Park, they are a particularly distinguishing feature of the Seneca Village site. There are many impressive outcrops in this area, including one of the largest in the Park, known as Summit Rock. It reaches 140 feet, making it the highest point in Central Park.

These rocks are remarkable because they have been around for a very long time, connecting us to not only a deeper sense of historical time but the much, much longer timescale of geologic forces. The rocks in Central Park originated around 500 million years ago, formed through volcanic activity and further shaped relatively recently (14,000 years ago) by glacial activity. They defined the land traversed and inhabited by the Lenape, who called the island Manahatta, meaning "island of many hills." The rocks in the West 80s became prominent features in the Seneca Village landscape-even depicted on maps of the area-and part of the daily lives of its residents. It's possible to imagine these rocks as landmarks, picnic spots, and places for children to play. Archaeological excavations have revealed the significance of these rocks in the community, uncovering the remains of buildings that showed that residents built houses on this rock and with this rock. It provided them with a foundation.

That these ancient rocks are present throughout the Park illustrates how its creation was complex. Building the Park involved a combination of destruction, construction, and preservation. In many cases, the rocks remain in Central Park because they were too difficult to remove, but the Park's designers also endeavored to keep them. Co-designer Frederick Law Olmsted saw beauty in the rocks and value to the Park. He was concerned that New York would eventually be entirely built up, anticipating the time when the "picturesquely varied, rocky formation of the island will have been converted into foundations for rows of monotonous straight streets, and piles of rectangular buildings." As part of the vision of Central Park as an oasis of nature and landscape in the midst of the rapidly growing metropolis, the designers preserved some of Manhattan's original rocks, hills, and streams-a natural history that was in danger of complete erasure. In the process, they inadvertently preserved some of Seneca Village.

A Remote Refuge

The landscape of Seneca Village gives us a glimpse of the island's natural history, as well as the intentions of Park builders, and can also help us imagine the motivations and activities of the area's residents. Historians speculate that Black New Yorkers living downtown began moving to Seneca Village in part to escape the racist climate and unhealthy conditions of Lower Manhattan. In the 1820s, when they first began settling in this area of the West 80s, the built-up part of the City ended at around Washington Square and the population was approximately 150,000. Although it's hard to imagine now, the West 80s was far from downtown.

The area consisted of farmland, and its location and some of its features seemed to make it well-suited for the development of a small community. To the west was the Hudson River, a place for fishing and swimming. A more local and extremely vital feature was a natural spring that supplied residents with fresh water. (This is still present in the Park today, known as Tanner's Spring, near the base of the south side of Summit Rock.) Open space was also likely a draw. Most houses in Seneca Village were small by today's standards, but unlike the crowded conditions downtown, residents could have yards and gardens and access to the surrounding open spaces. Even though Seneca Village was remote, it wasn't totally isolated. Other settlements were nearby, including Harsenville to the southwest and the larger Yorkville to the east, which was developing around a stop on the new railroad line and may have been a source of supplies and even employment.

The Plant Life of Seneca Village

A map shows that Seneca Village residents used some of this open space to create gardens, which was a common use of land in this area. Many contemporary commentators characterized the approximately 750 acres slated for the Park as a barren wasteland, while others mentioned gardens and orchards scattered throughout the relatively undeveloped site, with some residents in the southern part of the land growing vegetables to sell at markets downtown. The known accounts do not contain specific references to Seneca Village's gardens, but in addition to the map, census records indicate that a few residents identified themselves as gardeners. One of them, John P. Haff, a man of German descent, was a noted horticulturalist. One map also shows a tantalizing detail: on property owned by the African Episcopal Zion Church was a small greenhouse. Although information about the gardens and greenhouse is scarce, it does appear that raising vegetables for consumption and perhaps even for sale was a significant use of land in Seneca Village.

The same map that shows the gardens also shows some trees scattered throughout the site. Although the representation of trees appears generalized, it suggests that trees and other vegetation were also present in the landscape. Analysis of pollen samples found during an archaeological excavation organized by the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History in 2011 provides some indication of the types of vegetation in the area, helping us to further envision this landscape. (Because the pollen remains were not all that well-preserved, this analysis is not definitive and often plants could only be identified to the genus level.) Researchers identified pollen from trees such as maples, chestnut, birch, hickory, oak, and beech, all common to the regional forest community. Pollen from mosses and ferns suggests the presence of a moist wetland nearby, and maps show that just to the north was a low-lying swampy area. (This area became the site of the current Reservoir in the Park.) Pollen was also identified from common weeds that are typical in human-disturbed areas, such as ragweed, Queen Anne's lace, goldenrod, and plants from the mustard family. (Many of these are currently in the Park.) Although the lack of specificity of these samples makes it difficult to speculate how residents used these plants, they were probably an important source of food and medicine-just as the Hudson River was a source of fish and the nearby spring a source of water.

A Vantage Point

A natural spring was located at the base of Summit Rock. Maps show that no one lived on the hill-likely because of its rocky irregularity-but it's easy to imagine it as destination for residents, a place to survey the scene and look out for visitors. The ever-fixed vantage point provided perspective on the forces of urban growth and the daily life of the community. Looking south from Summit Rock was evidence of the City's march northward: by the 1850s, its built-up sections reached streets in the 40s, with its population at over half a million. Looking east, one could observe the multi-year construction and then hulking presence of the receiving reservoir, a massive public works project. To the north was 86th Street, a major throughfare, which was constructed in the 1830s. It's possible to imagine, like a time-lapse movie, the progression of signs that this refuge was becoming less and less remote. Looking out to the north and west was an expansive view of the houses, churches, and gardens, which continued to grow-until plans for the Park, itself a response to unrelenting urban growth, changed everything. Then, from this high point the scene shifted: residents moving out, a church being relocated, and ultimately the destruction of all the buildings.

After the community was gone and the Park constructed, some of this landscape remained. It's remarkable that in one of the most intensely developed places in the world, features like Summit Rock and Tanner's Spring still exist, the last vestiges of the over 500 hills and 300 natural springs that once defined the island's landscape. The other villages in the area were almost completely erased by urban growth, but archaeological excavations show that the ground surface of Seneca Village is only about one foot below the surface of the Park in some places. And while the original gardens and vegetations are long gone, the Park remains a place that is focused on plants and includes some of the same species that were likely in Seneca Village-creating a connection to the past.

From Summit Rock the views of the surrounding landscape are impressive, particularly in the winter. The City still looms, with the wall of skyscrapers at the Park's south end that continues to grow. The Hudson River is still visible, albeit now just a sliver at the end of the canyon of 83rd Street. To the north and east are still mostly open views, showing the Park with its rocks, playgrounds, and trees-where a community once lived.

In social historian Dolores Hayden's well-known book about public history, The Power of Place, she writes about how "identity is tied to memory," both personal and collective or social memories, and how these can be discovered and revealed in our urban landscapes and other public spaces. She writes, "Urban landscapes are storehouses for these social memories, because natural features such as hills or harbors, as well as streets, buildings and patterns of settlement, frame the lives of many people and often outlast many lifetimes." As we continue to research the history of Seneca Village and begin to consider its permanent commemoration in the Park, analysis of the landscape shows that Seneca Village is still present, and this can help inform an approach to honoring its history and memory.

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How the Landscape of Seneca Village Can Reveal its History

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The site of Seneca Village in Central Park resembles many other Park landscapes, with rolling hills, winding paths, trees, playgrounds, and rock outcrops. The area-between 82nd and 89th Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues-reveals no discernable clues that this was once a place where people lived, and that by 1856 it was a predominately African-American community with three churches, a school, and over 50 houses.

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The following map comes from the David Rumsey Map Collection. We recently asked David Rumsey, a map expert who has been collecting maps since the 1980s, to describe the nature of the map to us. His personal map collection currently contains more than 150,000 maps and is one of the largest private collections in the United States. (Interactive courtesy of Esri; Text by Natasha Geiling.)
Zooming out to view this 1836 map of New York in full, the map's artistic merit immediately becomes apparent - the scrolled border and detailed views speak to a gentle use for this map. Unlike other, smaller maps, this map was less functional and more aesthetic: it was a wall map, used to adorn the walls of people's private homes and offices. Rumsey remains struck by its beauty, explaining that it's one of his favorite maps. "There's a historian named Stokes who wrote six volumes on the history of Manhattan, and he called this map perhaps one of the most beautiful maps of Manhattan in the 19th century. It's artistically quite amazing."

The map was drawn by Joseph Colton, who one of the most prominent map publishers in New York City, with a career spanning three decades from the 1830s to the 1850s. Colton's production was prodigious: in addition to publishing maps of New York City, he published atlases, wall maps and pocket maps. Rumsey looks to the map's delicate shading to tell much of its story, noting that the heavily shaded areas represent the most densely populated portions of the city at the time of the ma's drawing. "Pretty much everything past 14th St. is country," he explains, adding that much of what is considered Manhattan today wasn't yet settled. In addition to the population shading, the hills of Manhattan are shown by hachures, an antiquated method of showing relief on drawn maps. "A lot of the history of Manhattan is the destruction of its hills," Rumsey says. "Basically that topography was obliterated, except for Central Park."

The park wasn't in the original plan for the city; in 1853, the state of New York empowered the city to acquire more than 700 acres of land under eminent domain to create the expanse. "There's no Central Park yet, and you can see, they're not planning on the park because the grid is drawn in in very light lines," Rumsey explains, hinting at the city's imminent desire for expansion. "Even though the streets haven't been built yet, they were planning."

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This Interactive Map Compares the New York City of 1836 to Today

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The following map comes from the David Rumsey Map Collection . We recently asked David Rumsey, a map expert who has been collecting maps since the 1980s, to describe the nature of the map to us. His personal map collection currently contains more than 150,000 maps and is one of the largest private collections in the United States.

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HISTORY OF THE FEDERAL USE OF EMINENT DOMAIN

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HISTORY OF THE FEDERAL USE OF EMINENT DOMAIN

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Early Evolution of Eminent Domain Cases

The federal government's power of eminent domain has long been used in the United States to acquire property for public use. Eminent domain ''appertains to every independent government. It requires no constitutional recognition; it is an attribute of sovereignty." Boom Co. v. Patterson, 98 U.S. 403, 406 (1879). However, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution stipulates: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Thus, whenever the United States acquires a property through eminent domain, it has a constitutional responsibility to justly compensate the property owner for the fair market value of the property. See Bauman v. Ross, 167 U.S. 548 (1897); Kirby Forest Industries, Inc. v. United States, 467 U.S. 1, 9-10 (1984).

The U.S. Supreme Court first examined federal eminent domain power in 1876 in . This case presented a landowner's challenge to the power of the United States to condemn land in Cincinnati, Ohio for use as a custom house and post office building. Justice William Strong called the authority of the federal government to appropriate property for public uses "essential to its independent existence and perpetuity." Kohl v. United States, 91 U.S. 367, 371 (1875).

The Supreme Court again acknowledged the existence of condemnation authority twenty years later in United States v. Gettysburg Electric Railroad Company. Congress wanted to acquire land to preserve the site of the Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania. The railroad company that owned some of the property in question contested this action. Ultimately, the Court opined that the federal government has the power to condemn property "whenever it is necessary or appropriate to use the land in the execution of any of the powers granted to it by the constitution." United States v. Gettysburg Electric Ry., 160 U.S. 668, 679 (1896).

Condemnation: From Transportation to Parks

Eminent domain has been utilized traditionally to facilitate transportation, supply water, construct public buildings, and aid in defense readiness. Early federal cases condemned property for construction of public buildings (e.g., Kohl v. United States) and aqueducts to provide cities with drinking water (e.g., United States v. Great Falls Manufacturing Company, 112 U.S. 645 (1884), supplying water to Washington, D.C.), for maintenance of navigable waters (e.g., United States v. Chandler-Dunbar Co., 229 U.S. 53 (1913), acquiring land north of St. Mary's Falls canal in Michigan), and for the production of war materials (e.g. Sharp v. United States, 191 U.S. 341 (1903)). The Land Acquisition Section and its earlier iterations represented the United States in these cases, thereby playing a central role in early United States infrastructure projects.

Condemnation cases like that against the Gettysburg Railroad Company exemplify another use for eminent domain: establishing parks and setting aside open space for future generations, preserving places of historic interest and remarkable natural beauty, and protecting environmentally sensitive areas. Some of the earliest federal government acquisitions for parkland were made at the end of the nineteenth century and remain among the most beloved and well-used of American parks. In Washington, D.C., Congress authorized the creation of a park along Rock Creek in 1890 for the enjoyment of the capitol city's residents and visitors. The Department of Justice became involved when a number of landowners from whom property was to be acquired disputed the constitutionality of the condemnation. In Shoemaker v. United States, 147 U.S. 282 (1893), the Supreme Court affirmed the actions of Congress.

Today, Rock Creek National Park, over a century old and more than twice the size of New York City's Central Park, remains a unique wilderness in the midst of an urban environment. This is merely one small example of the many federal parks, preserves, historic sites, and monuments to which the work of the Land Acquisition Section has contributed.

Land Acquisition in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

The work of federal eminent domain attorneys correlates with the major events and undertakings of the United States throughout the twentieth century. The needs of a growing population for more and updated modes of transportation triggered many additional acquisitions in the early decades of the century, for constructing railroads or maintaining navigable waters. Albert Hanson Lumber Company v. United States, 261 U.S. 581 (1923), for instance, allowed the United States to take and improve a canal in Louisiana.

The 1930s brought a flurry of land acquisition cases in support of New Deal policies that aimed to resettle impoverished farmers, build large-scale irrigation projects, and establish new national parks. Condemnation was used to acquire lands for the Shenandoah, Mammoth Cave, and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. See Morton Butler Timber Co. v. United States, 91 F.2d 884 (6th Cir. 1937)). Thousands of smaller land and natural resources projects were undertaken by Congress and facilitated by the Division's land acquisition lawyers during the New Deal era. For example, condemnation in United States v. Eighty Acres of Land in Williamson County, 26 F. Supp. 315 (E.D. Ill. 1939), acquired forestland around a stream in Illinois to prevent erosion and silting, while Barnidge v. United States, 101 F.2d 295 (8th Cir. 1939), allowed property acquisition for and designation of a historic site in St. Louis associated with the Louisiana Purchase and the Oregon Trail.

During World War II, the Assistant Attorney General called the Lands Division "the biggest real estate office of any time or any place." It oversaw the acquisition of more than 20 million acres of land. Property was transformed into airports and naval stations (e.g., Cameron Development Company v. United States 145 F.2d 209 (5th Cir. 1944)), war materials manufacturing and storage (e.g., General Motors Corporation v. United States, 140 F.2d 873 (7th Cir. 1944)), proving grounds, and a number of other national defense installations.

Land Acquisition Section attorneys aided in the establishment of Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida and the enlargement of the Redwood National Forest in California in the 1970s and 1980s. They facilitated infrastructure projects including new federal courthouses throughout the United States and the Washington, D.C. subway system, as well as the expansion of facilities including NASA's Cape Canaveral launch facility (e.g., Gwathmey v. United States, 215 F.2d 148 (5th Cir. 1954)).

The numbers of land acquisition cases active today on behalf of the federal government are below the World War II volume, but the projects undertaken remain integral to national interests. In the past decade, Section attorneys have been actively involved in conservation work, assisting in the expansion of Everglades National Park in Florida (e.g., U.S. v. 480.00 Acres of Land, 557 F.3d 1297 (11th Cir. 2009)) and the creation of Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Land Acquisition Section attorneys secured space in New York for federal agencies whose offices were lost with the World Trade Towers. Today, Section projects include acquiring land along hundreds of miles of the United States-Mexico border to stem illegal drug trafficking and smuggling, allow for better inspection and customs facilities, and forestall terrorists.

Properties acquired over the hundred years since the creation of the Environment and Natural Resources Section are found all across the United States and touch the daily lives of Americans by housing government services, facilitating transportation infrastructure and national defense and national security installations, and providing recreational opportunities and environmental management areas.

For information on the history of the Land Acquisition Section, click here. To learn more about the range of projects undertaken by the Land Acquisition Section, click here to view the interactive map titled Where Our Cases Have Taken Us. And for more on the procedural aspects of eminent domain, click here to read about the Anatomy of a Condemnation Case.

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History Of The Federal Use Of Eminent Domain

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Early Evolution of Eminent Domain Cases The federal government's power of eminent domain has long been used in the United States to acquire property for public use. Eminent domain ''appertains to every independent government. It requires no constitutional recognition; it is an attribute of sovereignty." Boom Co. v. Patterson, 98 U.S.

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President Donald Trump says he's willing to use "the military version of eminent domain" to build his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. It's not exactly clear what he means by that.

Addressing reporters from the Rose Garden today, Trump kept pushing for his ill-advised border wall. But what if Congress refuses to acquiesce to his demand for $5 billion in funding? Why, he'd declare a national emergency "and build [the wall] very quickly," he said.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that he can do that, he'd run into another problem right away: The federal government owns less than one-third of the land on the southern border. The rest belongs to other entities, including states, Native American tribes, and private individuals. Most of the border land in Texas is private property.

Not a problem, said Trump: "You have to use eminent domain," he declared. That's when the government forces a property owner to sell, at a price set by the government. "If we had one person that wouldn't sell us...then we wouldn't be able to build proper border security because we'd have that big opening."

"I think it's a fair process," he added.

And what happens if Trump can't seize people's land with normal eminent domain? That's where the "military version" comes in:

Trump floats the idea of using "the military version of eminent domain" to immediately seize privately owned land along border to build the wall

- Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews) January 4, 2019

As explained, "[Lawsuits are] not going to hold [the wall] up because under the military version of eminent domain and under, actually, homeland security we can do it before we even start."

Hopefully it doesn't look anything like this:

Hey, look! It's "the military version of eminent domain"! pic.twitter.com/JQbk4eQHml

- Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) January 4, 2019

In all seriousness, federal law does allow for military department secretaries to "acquire any interest in land" if "the acquisition is needed in the interest of national defense." But defining building a wall on the southern border as an issue of national defense is a stretch.

It's also worth noting that calling for a "military version of eminent domain" may not be the best way for Trump to sell his wall to the American people. Polls already show that a majority of Americans oppose the project. Further reducing the due process available to border property holders is unlikely to increase that number.

At least it made for some great Twitter reactions from Reps. Jim Hines (D-Conn.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.), among others:

Can I use the "military version of eminent domain" to borrow my neighbor's snow shovel? @justinamash @RepThomasMassie ??

- Jim Himes (@jahimes) January 4, 2019

I am not aware of any "military version" of eminent domain. I am aware of executive overreach, and this sounds like it.

- Justin Amash (@justinamash) January 4, 2019

Today Trump claimed he will seize large swaths of land from private citizens at gunpoint and declare a "state of emergency" to build a wall without Congressional approval.

In the face of tyranny, Republicans are outraged ... by a freshman Member of Congress using profanity.

- Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) January 4, 2019

Also the "military version of eminent domain" would be... invasion.

- Jane Coaston (@cjane87) January 4, 2019

But the president's fondness for eminent domain in all of its forms should be no surprise. Trump has benefited from eminent domain for decades as a real estate developer. Why would he stop now?

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What the Hell Is the 'Military Version of Eminent Domain'?

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President Donald Trump says he's willing to use "the military version of eminent domain" to build his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. It's not exactly clear what he means by that. Addressing reporters from the Rose Garden today, Trump kept pushing for his ill-advised border wall.

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10 U.S. Code § 2663 - Land acquisition authorities

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10 U.S. Code § 2663 - Land acquisition authorities

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(b) Acquisition by Purchase in Lieu of Condemnation.-

The Secretary of the military department concerned may contract for or buy any interest in land, including temporary use, needed for any purpose named in subsection (a), as soon as the owner fixes a price for it and the Secretary considers that price to be reasonable.

(e) Survey Authority; Acquisition Methods.- Authority provided the Secretary of a military department by law to acquire an interest in real property (including a temporary interest) includes authority-

(g) Exception to Advance Notice Requirement.-

If the Secretary of a military department determines that the use of condemnation, eminent domain, or seizure to acquire an interest in land is required under subsection (a) to satisfy a requirement vital to national security, and that any delay would be detrimental to national security or the protection of health, safety, or the environment, the Secretary may have proceedings brought in the name of the United States to acquire the land in advance of submitting the report required by subsection (f)(1)(B). However, the Secretary shall submit the report not later than seven days after commencement of the legal proceedings with respect to the land.

(h) Land Acquisition Options in Advance of Military Construction Projects.-

(Aug. 10, 1956, ch. 1041, 70A Stat. 147; Pub. L. 85-861, § 33(a)(14), , 72 Stat. 1565; Pub. L. 109-163, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2821(a), , 119 Stat. 3511; Pub. L. 109-364, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2821(b), , 120 Stat. 2474; Pub. L. 110-181, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2822(a), , 122 Stat. 544; Pub. L. 111-383, div. A, title X, § 1075(g)(6), , 124 Stat. 4377; Pub. L. 115-91, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2811(b), (c), , 131 Stat. 1848.)

In subsection (a), the words "brought * * * in a court of proper jurisdiction" are substituted for the words "instituted * * * in any court having jurisdiction of such proceedings". The words "any interest in land, including temporary use" are substituted for the words "any land, temporary use thereof or other interest therein, or right pertaining thereto". The words "relating to suits for the condemnation of property" are omitted as surplusage. The last sentence is substituted for 50:171 (words between semicolon and first proviso). The Act of July 2, 1917, ch. 35, as restated by the Act of April 11, 1918, ch. 51 (last 77 words), are not contained in 50:171. They are also omitted from the revised section as executed.

In subsection (a)(1), the word "location" is omitted as surplusage. The words "operation of" are substituted for the words "prosecution of works for".

In subsection (b), the words "That when such property is acquired" are omitted as surplusage. The words "under subsection (a)" are substituted for the words "of any land, temporary use thereof or other use therein or right pertaining thereto to be acquired for any of the purposes aforesaid". The words "take and use" are substituted for the words "possession thereof may be taken * * * and used for military purposes".

In subsection (c), the words "as soon as the owner fixes a price for it" are substituted for the words "That when the owner of such land, interest, or rights pertaining thereto shall fix a price for the same". The word "considers" is substituted for the words "which in the opinion". The words "contract for or buy" are substituted for the words "purchase or enter into a contract". The words "without further delay" are omitted as surplusage.

In subsection (d), the words "a gift of any interest in land * * * for any purpose named in subsection (a)" are substituted for 50:171 (last 15 words of 2d proviso).

The deletion of the last sentence of section 2663(a) and the last sentence of section 2664(a) reflects their implied repeal by Rule 71A of the Rules of Civil Procedure for the United States District Courts (see 28 U.S.C. 2072). (See letter from Assistant Attorney General (Lands Division), Department of Justice, August 1957, to General Counsel, Department of Defense.) The other changes conform section 2664 to section 2663, both of which were based on the same source statute (sec. 8 of the Act of July 9, 1918, ch. 143, subch. XV, 40 Stat. 888) and both of which include the temporary use of the kinds of property respectively covered.

Codification

The text of section 2672, part of which was transferred to this section, redesignated subsec. (c), and amended by Pub. L. 109-163, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2821(a)(2)-(5), was based on Pub. L. 85-861, § 1(51), , 72 Stat. 1459; amended Pub. L. 87-651, title I, § 112(a), , 76 Stat. 511; Pub. L. 92-145, title VII, § 707(2), (3), , 85 Stat. 411; Pub. L. 96-418, title VIII, § 806(a), , 94 Stat. 1777; Pub. L. 99-167, title VIII, § 810(a), (b)(1), , 99 Stat. 989, 990; Pub. L. 99-661, div. A, title XIII, § 1343(a)(16), , 100 Stat. 3993; Pub. L. 100-456, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2804, , 102 Stat. 2115; Pub. L. 105-85, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2811(a), (b)(1), , 111 Stat. 1991; Pub. L. 108-136, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2811(a)-(b)(2), , 117 Stat. 1724, 1725; Pub. L. 108-375, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2821(d)(1), , 118 Stat. 2130.

The text of section 2672a of this title, which was transferred to this section, redesignated subsec. (d), and amended by Pub. L. 109-163, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2821(a)(6)-(9), was based on Pub. L. 94-107, title VI, § 607(8), , 89 Stat. 566; amended Pub. L. 98-525, title XIV, § 1405(39), , 98 Stat. 2624; Pub. L. 104-106, div. A, title XV, § 1502(a)(1), , 110 Stat. 502; Pub. L. 106-65, div. A, title X, § 1067(1), , 113 Stat. 774; Pub. L. 108-136, div. A, title X, § 1031(a)(29), , 117 Stat. 1599; Pub. L. 108-375, div. A, title X, § 1084(d)(23), , 118 Stat. 2062.

The text of section 2676(b) of this title, which was transferred to this section, redesignated subsec. (e), and amended by Pub. L. 109-163, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2821(a)(10), (11), was based on Pub. L. 85-861, § 1(51), , 72 Stat. 1460; amended Pub. L. 97-214, § 5, , 96 Stat. 170.

Amendments

2017-Subsec. (d)(2). Pub. L. 115-91, § 2811(b), inserted ", in an electronic medium pursuant to section 480 of this title," after "submit" and substituted "a notice" for "written notice".

Subsec. (f)(2). Pub. L. 115-91, § 2811(c), struck out "or, if over sooner, the end of the 14-day period beginning on the date on which a copy of the report is provided" after "received by the committees".

2011-Subsec. (a)(1). Pub. L. 111-383 made technical amendment to directory language of Pub. L. 109-364, § 2821(b)(1). See 2006 Amendment note below.

2008-Subsec. (h). Pub. L. 110-181 added subsec. (h).

2006- Pub. L. 109-163, § 2821(a)(1)(A), substituted "Land acquisition authorities" for "Acquisition" in section catchline.

Subsec. (a). Pub. L. 109-163, § 2821(a)(1)(B), (C), inserted "Acquisition of Land by Condemnation for Certain Military Purposes.-(1)" before "The Secretary" in introductory provisions, redesignated former pars. (1) to (3) as subpars. (A) to (C), respectively, of par. (1), in subpar. (C), substituted "subparagraph (B)" for "clause (2)", redesignated subsec. (b) as par. (2) and substituted "paragraph (1)" for "subsection (a)".

Subsec. (a)(1). Pub. L. 109-364, § 2821(b)(1), as amended by Pub. L. 111-383, substituted "Subject to subsection (f), the Secretary" for "The Secretary" in introductory provisions.

Subsec. (b). Pub. L. 109-163, § 2821(a)(1)(D), redesignated subsec. (c) as (b) and inserted heading.

Pub. L. 109-163, § 2821(a)(1)(C), redesignated subsec. (b) as subsec. (a)(2).

Subsec. (c). Pub. L. 109-163, § 2821(a)(2)-(5), redesignated pars. (1) and (2) of subsec. (a) and subsecs. (b) and (d) of section 2672 of this title as pars. (1), (2), (3), and (4), respectively, of subsec. (c) of this section, inserted subsec. heading, in par. (3), substituted "This subsection" for "This section", "paragraph (1)" for "subsection (a)(1)", and "paragraph (2)" for "subsection (a)(2)", in par. (4), substituted "this subsection" for "this section", and struck out headings for former subsecs. (a), (b), and (d) of section 2672.

Pub. L. 109-163, § 2821(a)(1)(D), redesignated subsec. (c) as (b).

Subsec. (d). Pub. L. 109-163, § 2821(a)(6)-(9), redesignated subsecs. (a), (c), and (b) of section 2672a of this title as pars. (1), (2), and (3), respectively, of subsec. (d) of this section, inserted subsec. heading, in par. (1), redesignated former pars. (1) to (3) as subpars. (A) to (C), respectively, in par. (2), substituted "this subsection" for "this section", and in par. (3), substituted "this subsection" for "this section" in first sentence and struck out second sentence which read as follows: "The authority to acquire an interest in land under this section includes authority to make surveys and acquire interests in land (including temporary use), by gift, purchase, exchange of land owned by the United States, or otherwise."

Pub. L. 109-163, § 2821(a)(1)(E), struck out subsec. (d) which read as follows: "The Secretary of the military department concerned may accept for the United States a gift of any interest in land, including temporary use, for any purpose named in subsection (a)."

Subsec. (e). Pub. L. 109-163, § 2821(a)(10), (11), redesignated subsec. (b) of section 2676 of this title as subsec. (e) of this section and inserted heading.

Subsecs. (f), (g). Pub. L. 109-364, § 2821(b)(2), added subsecs. (f) and (g).

1958-Subsec. (a). Pub. L. 85-861 struck out provisions requiring proceedings under this subsection to be in accordance with the law of the State in which the suit is brought.

Pub. L. 109-364, div. B, title XXVIII, § 2821(a), , 120 Stat. 2473, provided that:

"It is the sense of Congress that the Secretary of Defense, when acquiring land for military purposes, should-

make every effort to acquire the land by means of purchases from willing sellers; and

employ condemnation, eminent domain, or seizure procedures only as a measure of last resort in cases of compelling national security requirements or at the request of the seller."

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10 U.S. Code § 2663 - Land acquisition authorities

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(b) Acquisition by Purchase in Lieu of Condemnation.- The Secretary of the military department concerned may contract for or buy any interest in land, including temporary use, needed for any purpose named in subsection (a), as soon as the owner fixes a price for it and the Secretary considers that price to be reasonable.

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The history of African-American settlements and neighborhoods which once existed in New York City

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The history of African-American settlements and neighborhoods which once existed in New York City

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PODCAST The history of African-American settlements and neighborhoods which once existed in New York City

Today we sometimes define New York City's African-American identity by the places where thriving black culture developed - Harlem, of course, and also Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, neighborhoods that developed for groups of black residents in the 20 th century.

But by no means were these the first in New York City. Other centers of black and African-American life existed long before then. In many cases, they were obliterated by the growth of the city, sometimes built over without a single marker, without recognition.

This is the story of a few of those places. From the 'land of the blacks' - the home to New Amsterdam and British New York's early black population - to Seneca Village, a haven for black lives that was wiped away by a park.

From Little Africa - the Greenwich Village sector for the black working class in the late 19th century - to Sandy Ground, a rural escape in Staten Island with deep roots in the neighborhood today.

And then there's Weeksville, Brooklyn, the visionary village built to bond a community and to develop a political foothold.

In this collection of short historical stories, Greg welcomes Kamau Ware (of the Black Gotham Experience) and Tia Powell Harris of the Weeksville Heritage Center to the show.
The episode is a rebroadcast of a show which first aired on June 9, 2017. Stay tuned to the end of this show for some newly written material and an update on the Black Gotham Experience and the Weeksville Heritage Center.
To get this week's episode, just find our show on Stitcher or your favorite podcast streaming service. Or listen to it here:

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Please visit our page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans.

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We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far.

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Our thanks to Weeksville Heritage Center and Black Gotham Experience. Visit their websites for further information about upcoming events and programs. In addition please check out the Sandy Ground Historical Society for information about this important site in Staten Island.

Weeksville is hosting a weekend of Juneteenth events. Please visit their website for further information:

Check out t he Black Gotham Experience website for information on online courses starting in July. And become a member to join in their work as BGX heads towards its 10th anniversary.

Three boys from Sandy Ground, Staten Island, circa 1912.

Staten Island Historical Society

More information about the Black Gotham Experience , including a list of walking tours. Check out the websites for Weeksville Heritage Center and the Sandy Ground Historical Society for more information about visiting hours and tours.

This map of Seneca Village was made by Andy Proehl illustrating what the settlement looked like in the years before its destruction.

Courtesy Andy Proehl/Flickr

The approximate area via Google Maps. The Great Lawn now sits on the spot where the reservoir is.

The approximate area of Little Africa. The map is from 1889.

NYPL via Greenwich Village Society of Historical Perseveration

Richard Hoe Lawrence and Jacob Riis's images of a "Black and Tan" dive bar on Broome Street near Wooster Street, 1890.

Courtesy Museum of the City of New York

Courtesy Museum of the City of New York

Minetta Lane, circa 1900.

MCNY

The approximate location of Weeksville, Brooklyn

Wikipedia

Brooklyn Public Library

Halloween party by photographer and Weeksville resident Alexander Moore. [PHOTO: PERCY F. MOORE COLLECTION, COURTESY OF THE 5TH OF JULY RESOURCE CENTER FOR SELF-DETERMINATION & FREEDOM, WEEKSVILLE HERITAGE CENTER]

The three surviving houses today

The picture at top features an African-American family posed in front of the John Brown Homestead in Torrington, Connecticut, circa 1890s-1900. I particularly love this picture because the house is reminiscent of the Weeksville houses and those that were in Sandy Ground.

Connecticut Historical Society

FURTHER LISTENING

After you've listened to this episode on Seneca Village and New York's forgotten black communities, check out these past Bowery Boys episodes about aspects of New York City history featured on this show:

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Seneca Village and Other Stories of New York's Forgotten Black Communities - The Bowery Boys: New York City History

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PODCAST The history of African-American settlements and neighborhoods which once existed in New York City Today we sometimes define New York City's African-American identity by the places where thriving black culture developed - Harlem, of course, and also Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, neighborhoods that developed for groups of black residents in the 20th century.

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An entire Manhattan village owned by black people was destroyed to build Central ParkThree churches, a school, and dozens of homes were demolished

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An entire Manhattan village owned by black people was destroyed to build Central ParkThree churches, a school, and dozens of homes were demolished

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by Heather Gilligan

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When Reverend Christopher Rush laid the cornerstone of the First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1853, he placed in it a time capsule, a box that contained a bible, a hymn book, and copies of two New York papers, The Tribune and The Sun. These were mementos for future New Yorkers.

Rush, who escaped slavery and became the second ordained bishop of the AME Zion Church, also delivered the church's first sermon. He read in part from the First Epistle of Peter, an address to the oppressed and persecuted, assuring the congregation that "although now for a little while you may have to suffer through various trials," salvation would reward those who kept the faith.

But even as he counseled hope, the church was doomed. What Rush didn't know was that the land where the Church would stand, part of a thriving African American community, had been condemned two weeks before as part of the plan to create New York's Central Park.

The community, called Seneca Village, began in 1825 and eventually spanned from 82nd Street to 89th Street along what is now the western edge of Central Park. By the time it was finally razed in 1857, it had become a refuge for African Americans. Though most were nominally free (the last slave wasn't emancipated until 1827) life was far from pleasant. The population of African Americans living in New York City tripled between abolition and complete emancipation and the migrants were derided in the press. Mordecai Noah, founder of The New York Enquirer, was especially well-known for his attacks on African Americans, fuming at one point that "the free negroes of this city are a nuisance incomparably greater than a million slaves."

Most landowners at the time refused to sell to African Americans. A white couple who lived in what was then a distant northern outpost of Manhattan was an exception, subdividing and selling off their land first to Epiphany Davis and Andrew Williams, two prominent members of the The New York African Society for Mutual Relief, and then to the AME Zion Church. More members of the African Society, whose purpose was in part to build black communities, followed suit and purchased land too. Slowly, houses were built. Some of them were rather grand, two-story affairs, with barns and stables, and some were modest shacks. The area was eventually anchored by three churches and a school.

Seneca Village ran along the west side of what would become Central Park between 82nd and 89th streets. (NY Historical Society)

Owning land in Seneca Village meant more than finding a refuge from the slums and violence of Manhattan proper. Buying property meant voting rights (at least for men), as laws in New York at the time required that all voters own at least $250 worth of real estate. Seneca Village probably had a more radical purpose, too, as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Prominent abolitionists such as Albro Lyons, later recognized as a conductor on the railroad, owned land and lived there. In fact, the African Society so instrumental in founding the village was reputed to have a hidden basement for hiding runaway slaves. And the name of the village itself may have come from a philosophy tract called Seneca's Morals, a book that was popular with abolitionist activists.

As Seneca Village was building up, however, support for Central Park grew, driven by some of the same pressures that created the African American enclave. The tip of the island of Manhattan was overflowing with people. The slums were spilling over as more and more immigrants arrived, especially after the Irish potato famine started in 1845. None of these conditions appealed to well-off New Yorkers, who had already started migrating further uptown, or out of town, by the 1840s. Already, the Lennox family and other wealthy New York names owned swaths of land in the vicinity of the proposed park. Real estate developers easily foresaw the demand for an exclusive neighborhood bordering parklands.

More than three-fourths of the children who lived in Seneca Village attended Colored School №3 in the church basement. Half of the African Americans who lived there owned their own property, a rate five times higher than the city average. And while the village remained mostly black, immigrant whites had started to live in the area as well. They shared resources ranging from a church (All Angels Episcopal), to a midwife (an Irish immigrant who served the entire town).

But in 1857, it was all torn down.

Even as the church was being built on 86th street, then painstakingly painted white, the original settlers fought for their lands in court. Andrew Williams was paid nearly what his land was worth, after filing an affidavit with the state Supreme Court. Epiphany Davis was not as fortunate, losing hundred of dollars.

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An entire Manhattan village owned by black people was destroyed to build Central Park

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When Reverend Christopher Rush laid the cornerstone of the First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1853, he placed in it a time capsule, a box that contained a bible, a hymn book, and copies of two New York papers, The Tribune and The Sun. These were mementos for future New Yorkers.

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Opinion
An exhibition on Seneca Village, which was destroyed to build Central Park, pays homage to a forgotten chapter in New York City history.

Credit... Illustration by Nicholas Konrad; photograph by Central Park Conservancy

New York City embraced willful amnesia when landscapers working at the western edge of Central Park unearthed two coffins in August of 1871. An engraved plate on a richly appointed rosewood coffin identified the deceased as Margaret McIntay, buried two decades earlier at the age of "sixteen years, three months and fourteen days." A more modest box found not far away contained the remains of an unidentified black person described in the press as "decomposed beyond recognition."

The New York Herald pronounced the discovery a mystery, even though the location - near the West 85th Street entrance to the park - told what should have been a familiar story. Less than a decade and a half earlier, the city had cleared the way for its hallowed park by evicting 1,600 or so people who lived on the land. Among those displaced were the residents of Seneca Village, Manhattan's first significant settlement of black property owners and the epicenter of black political power in Manhattan during the mid-19th century. The village occupied land along what is now Central Park's western edge, between roughly 83rd and 89th Streets.

From its modest beginnings in 1825, the village had grown over three decades to include homes, gardens, a school, cemeteries and perhaps as many as 300 residents. By the time it was razed more than 30 years later, the settlement counted several distinguished citizens among its property owners. Nevertheless, real estate interests and their minions in the press set the stage for what the writer James Baldwin would later describe as " Negro removal " by defaming the flourishing enclave as a "shantytown" and a "nigger village."

Image

As the historian Leslie M. Alexander shows in her book on black activism in early New York City, defamation had done its work by the time the landscapers uncovered the forgotten dead in 1871. Less than 15 years after an eviction process that had been documented in the press and in the courts, few New Yorkers remembered that park construction had swept away a community. The story had been eclipsed by the cultural forgetting that often cuts black achievements out of history, Ms. Alexander writes, and "was effectively erased from the memory of New York City."

The Seneca Village story was essentially lost until 1992, when Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar resurrected it in their celebrated book "The Park and the People: A History of Central Park.'' Not long afterward, a New-York Historical Society exhibition on the life and death of the village caused such a stir that the society created a curriculum that brought the story into classrooms. Since then, archaeologists and historians have greatly expanded what we know about who lived in the village and why black residents fled Lower Manhattan for a rustic settlement that was a few miles outside the urban center at the time.

The Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit organization that manages Central Park, draws on this new history for an outdoor exhibition that identifies the sites of important buildings in the settlement while guiding visitors through a pastoral landscape that is essentially the same today as it was in the 19th century. Mayor Bill de Blasio has wisely seized on the Seneca Village revival to underscore the need for remaking the lily-white landscape of historical monuments in New York. The mayor's planned Central Park monument will celebrate the heroic Lyons family, charter members of the New York City free black elite who owned land in Seneca Village and ran a stop on the Underground Railroad in Manhattan that sheltered hundreds of escapees from slavery.

The successful businessman and racial justice advocate Albro Lyons had deep roots in the churches and voluntary associations that championed racial justice in 19th-century Manhattan. He graduated from the first African Free School founded by the New York Manumission Society, a wealthy group of white men that included people like Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. The school produced other members of the African-American elite, including the internationally renowned Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge, the abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet and James McCune Smith, the first African-American to receive a medical degree.

Albro Lyons and his wife, Mary Joseph Lyons - also from a free family - ran a boardinghouse for African-American sailors that served as the perfect cover for an Underground Railroad operation. Their daughter, Maritcha Remond Lyons, was a teacher, feminist and popular public speaker who chronicled the family's story in a memoir that provides a rare window into that era of black activism in the city.

By elevating this family, New York City is drawing an explicit connection between the aspirations that Seneca Village represented for the black families who invested in property there and the racial terrorism that African-Americans, including the Lyons family, often faced in crowded upstart Lower Manhattan.

New Yorkers who grew up with the fiction that slavery was limited to the South learned otherwise in 1991, when construction in Lower Manhattan unearthed hundreds of skeletons from a forgotten colonial-era cemetery that had served as the resting place of 15,000 Africans. The burial site, known since 2006 as the African Burial Ground National Monument, underscored the fact that New York City in the late 18th century was an epicenter of the slave trade, holding more Africans in chains than any other city in the country, with the possible exception of Charleston, S.C.

New York City's addiction to the immediate fruits of slave labor - and to the profits that it reaped from servicing the business needs of the South - made for a slow and tortured path to emancipation there. In 1799, New York State ratified gradual emancipation for enslaved offspring born after July 4 of that year but held them in indentured servitude until they were young adults. In 1817, the state passed yet another law that freed enslaved people born before 1799, with emancipation taking effect in 1827 - making New York one of the last Northern states to abolish slavery.

By this time, white New York had taken steps to cripple African-Americans politically and economically. Black men had largely been banished from lucrative skill trades and relegated to subsistence jobs. To short-circuit black political empowerment, the State Legislature made voting rights for black men contingent upon ownership of property valued at $250 or more - even as it rolled back the property ownership requirement for white men. As a result, only 16 black men in Manhattan had the right to vote.

Beyond that, white New Yorkers relentlessly attacked African-American institutions, torching churches and blocking efforts to build black schools. Racial terrorism worsened after the Legislature made it known in 1817 that all African-Americans would soon be legally free. Slave catchers who roamed the streets seeking to kidnap both free black people and fugitive slaves were a persistent hazard. No Negro was safe.

It was against this backdrop that a white Upper Manhattan couple, John and Elizabeth Whitehead, began selling the plots of land that formed the foundation of what would become Seneca Village.

In September of 1825, a young black man named Andrew Williams bought three lots. The trustees of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church bought six, near 86th Street, for use as a cemetery for the colored. (The need was particularly pressing, given that the potter's field where the church had buried its dead was soon to become Washington Square Park.) A biblically named church trustee, Epiphany Davis, purchased 12 lots at what was then the considerable sum of $578.

As the historian Alexander Manevitz said recently, the size, timing and location of A.M.E. Zion's land purchase showed that the church was committed to "a broader political project." That project was modeled on the teachings of church founders who had emphasized political activism and the formation of social organizations that could advance African-American rights.

The villagers learned the virtue of standing apart from the city proper in 1834, when their enclave was spared the three-day assault of white rioters who attacked the churches and businesses of both blacks and abolitionists in Lower Manhattan.

The historian Leslie M. Harris rightly describes this as the worst street violence of New York's antebellum period. The rioters claimed to be outraged at abolitionists because they promoted fraternization across racial lines. But, as Ms. Harris writes, the mob attacked "the political and economic power that blacks might gain through alliances with middle-class and elite whites."

Albro Lyons would clearly have taken note when abolitionists reacted to violence and intimidation by retreating into silence. When he purchased land uptown in Seneca Village, he might have done so as a hedge against Lower Manhattan becoming uninhabitable for African-American activists like himself.

Classical Philosophy in the Park

The question of how Seneca Village got its name remains unresolved. Nevertheless, the argument that villagers derived it from the Native American tribe seems unlikely, given that Manhattan was not Seneca territory. Leslie M. Alexander offers a more provocative suggestion - that the name of the village might refer to the Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca, who advocated for government founded on respect for individual liberty. Black residents who studied classical philosophy at the African Free Schools, she argues, may have adopted the Seneca name to reflect their aspirations for the new community.

By buying land, black villagers had satisfied the state law that made black voting rights contingent on property ownership. Mr. Manevitz estimates that by 1855, the village contained only 1 percent of the city's black population - but had 20 percent of its black property owners and 15 percent of its black voters.

Most Seneca Villagers owned modest plots, but lived expansive lives compared with other African-American New Yorkers, who were typically confined to attics and basements along the squalid streets of Lower Manhattan's Five Points district. The novelist Charles Dickens, who visited the area in the 1840s, wrote: "Poverty, wretchedness, and vice are rife enough where we go now. This is the place, these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth .... [A]ll that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here."

By the mid-1850s, the flourishing Seneca Village community had attracted three churches: A.M.E. Zion, African Union Methodist Church and an unusual racially integrated church called All Angels, where Irish parishioners who had moved into the area worshiped alongside African-Americans.

Leslie M. Alexander describes the interracial church as "a testament to a new social and political reality." Black parishioners and white parishioners not only sat side by side in the pews but also were apparently buried together, reflecting the hope that people of different races could one day coexist in mutual respect. That vision was swept away with the settlement.

The destruction of Seneca Village foreshadowed the urban renewal craze of the 1960s, when the country embraced an explicit policy of labeling vibrant working-class areas "slums" to justify tearing them down. Historians who are trying to reconstruct the full story of New York City's black utopia - and find descendants of the dispossessed - could yet tell us more about what the 19th-century city was really like.

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Opinion | The Death of the Black Utopia (Published 2019)

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Opinion An exhibition on Seneca Village, which was destroyed to build Central Park, pays homage to a forgotten chapter in New York City history. Credit... Illustration by Nicholas Konrad; photograph by Central Park Conservancy New York City embraced willful amnesia when landscapers working at the western edge of Central Park unearthed two coffins in August of 1871.

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"Seneca Village began in 1825, when landowners in the area, John and Elizabeth Whitehead, subdivided their land and sold it as 200 lots. Andrew Williams, a 25-year-old African-American shoeshiner, bought the first three lots for $125. Epiphany Davis, a store clerk, bought 12 lots for $578, and the AME Zion Church purchased another six lots. From there a community was born. From 1825 to 1832, the Whiteheads sold about half of their land parcels to other African-Americans. By the early 1830s, there were approximately 10 homes in the Village." (Central Park Conservancy )

https://assets.centralparknyc.org/media/images/_639xAUTO_crop_center-center_none/blog-square@1x-Seneca-Village-Map_2020-08-10-125902.jpg?mtime=20200810085902&amp;focal=none&amp;tmtime=20201216171751

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Seneca Village: The Black Enclave taken by Eminent Domain

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Seneca Village: The Black Enclave taken by Eminent Domain

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"Nearly 200 years ago, Central Park’s landscape near the West 85th Street entrance was home to Seneca Village, a community of predominately free African-American property owners." (Central Park Conservancy)

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"orientalism, which
anchors war"

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"genocide, which anchors colonialism"

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"slaveability/anti-black racism, which anchors capitalism"

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The Pillars of White Supremacy and Seneca Vilage

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What are questions that you have for Amir, with regard to how to begin staging / storyboarding your project?  Remember -- better to start sooner to avoid stress and rushing later.

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What are questions that you have for Amir, with regard to how to begin staging / storyboarding your project?  Remember -- better to start sooner to avoid stress and rushing later.

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Format: ArcGIS StoryMap

Description: This project will explore Andrea Smith’s Three Pillars of White Supremacy through an interactive StoryMap considering the history of Seneca Village.

This project will critically connect racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and US imperialism and militarization while pointing out violent structures to build better futures.