How a community of Black New Yorkers was destroyed to make room for Central Park

In 1825, a 25-year-old African American shoemaker named Andrew Williams purchased three lots of land near what today is 82nd street and Central Park West. While the landscape was rocky and unpopulated, it provided an escape from lower Manhattan, where overcrowding, violence, and racial discrimination created dangerous living conditions. Soon after, many others followed and migrated uptown and within just a few years, three churches, a school, and about 120 houses were built in the area between 82nd and 89th street. The community became known as Seneca Village and was inhabited mostly by African Americans, along with a few Irish and German immigrants. It thrived for 37 years as a political and social oasis until the city of New York demolished it to make room for an environmental oasis, Central Park.

The area between 82nd and 89th street where Seneca Village thrived from 1825 to 1857.

The territory stretching to the north of 42nd Street had been colonized by the British prior to the Revolutionary War. After they withdrew, only a handful of American men decided to purchase the land. One of them, John Whitehead, bought a stretch between 75th and 87th street, and in 1825 he parsed the land and sold individual plots to interested buyers.

Andrew Williams, the African American shoemaker, was the first to purchase property from Whitehead. He bought three plots for a total of $125. Later, on the same day, one of Williams’ friends, a store clerk named Epiphany Davis, bought twelve lots for $578. The following day, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Congregation bought land that would eventually host a church.

According to Leslie Alexander, a history professor at Cornell University and author of “African Or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861”, the simultaneous purchase of land in Seneca Village suggests a united effort among Black New Yorkers to create their own community.

“I obviously don’t have the ‘smoking gun’ evidence to prove it, but I do believe that Epiphany Davis, Andrew Williams, and other members of the African Society purchased the property as a collective effort,” Alexander said. “It’s hard to imagine that they didn’t know about each other's plan to purchase since they bought lots within days of each other. Also, the African Society had purchased land collectively before, so it's certainly likely that Seneca Village was part of the same pattern.”

Whitehead’s land was ideal for people who wanted to create their own neighborhood; it was cheap and offered better living conditions, especially compared to the experience many faced living in overcrowded attics and cellars in the Five Point district in lower Manhattan. Seneca Village also offered Black New Yorkers the right to vote at a time when new laws made voting increasingly difficult. In 1821, the New York State Constitution enforced a $250 property suffrage requirement for African Americans while, at the same time, property requirements for white voters were eliminated.

Within a few years, the village had expanded considerably. The New York Tribune noted the community had numerous homes “of various degrees of excellence … a number of these have fine kitchen gardens, some of the sidehill slopes are adorned with cabbage, and melon-patches, with hills of corn and cucumber, and bets of beets, parsnips, and other garden delicates.”

An 1855 census documented 264 residents. However, several maps and official reports showed 300 houses. Historians have wondered about this discrepancy. Alexander writes that the village might have been a safe haven for uncounted fugitive slaves since several residents played an active role in the Underground Railroad. However, Sara Miller, a park historian affiliated with Central Park Conservancy, said that it’s much more likely that people were buying land as an investment while continuing to live downtown.