SENECA VILLAGE: OUR FIRST CENTRAL PARK
THE HISTORY AND LIVES OF SENECA VILLAGE BEFORE CENTRAL CAME TO BE
By Ebun Ajao
This story is based on extensive reporting and research on the lives of Seneca Village residents. Maritcha Lyons’ life is documented through her memoir “Memories of Yesterdays” (1928) and Carla Peterson’s “Black Gotham” (2011). Details on Seneca Village draw from the Central Park Conservancy’s archaeological research and Leslie Alexander’s “African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City” (2008). The Croton Aqueduct’s relationship to Seneca Village is documented in Gerard Koeppel’s “Water for Gotham” (2000). Eminent domain proceedings and compensation records are discussed in Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar’s “The Park and the People: A History of Central Park” (1992). The Great Lawn’s maintenance history is documented through Central Park Conservancy annual reports.
Central Park is one of the most famous parks in the world. Located in the heart of Manhattan, the park boasts 843 acres with hundreds of thousands of trees planted. In 1858, the boggy, swamp-like terrain was plowed down to create an ideal, smooth environment for wealthy residents to enjoy as downtown Manhattan became increasingly populous and dangerous. Over twenty-thousand workers came to create this green space, which sits between 5th and 8th Avenues, with a later extension from 106th street to 110th from 59th.
Central Park’s history has been lauded time and time again as an impressive feat of human creation—hosting over 800 various species of animals and plants while serving as a green third space for those in the city. What remains acknowledged but deprioritized is the displaced community that sat within what is now Central Park’s borders: Seneca Village.
For over three decades, Seneca Village was home to majority freed African Americans and Irish and German immigrants. This community began when free African Americans moved uptown to remove themselves from racial discrimination and violence found downtown while getting to own property and start building wealth. What started as a few families and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in the late 1820s bloomed into a multicultural hub that boasted several churches, a school, and over 200 families. Half of the residents were property owners, giving them access to voting rights, wealth creation, and relative protection from racial discrimination.
Behind the displacement of Seneca Village lies a deeper conversation on the American Lawn, how it is pitted against marginalized communities in American society, and the role of Frederick Olmsted as the first landscape architect.
***
I was six years old the first time I understood what it meant to own something.
It was not a grand realization. It came quietly, the way most important things do, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. I was watching my papa, Albro, tend to the garden behind our home on the edge of the Village, his hands dark with soil, his movements deliberate and unhurried. He was not rushing. He had nowhere to be that the land did not already hold for him. My ma, Mary Joseph, was inside, her voice carrying through the open window as she spoke with Mrs. Thompson from down the road, two women talking the way women talk when they are not afraid of who might be listening. My little sister Pauline sat nearby in the dirt, unbothered, pulling at the grass while calling out “Maritcha!” to bring my attention to the worms and salamanders her excavations unearthed.
This was ours. All of it.
Papa was a man who wore his activism the way he wore everything else: practically, without performance. He and Ma, over hushed conversations, had brought me and Paulina to Seneca Village because downtown Manhattan, according to Papa, “did not tolerate us.” Paulina cried over leaving her friends and I was sad I couldn’t go upstairs to Nina’s apartment and play with her dollies anymore.
But up in Seneca Village, the air was different. Ma didn’t get that frantic look in her eye if I was even a little bit late from school and now me and Paulie could play past dark. Papa got some papers allowing him to vote and Ma started humming while doing laundry. It was quiet at night, allowing Paulie and I to dream about going on cool adventures through the forest instead of huddling together while people yelled outside our window.
Our neighbors seemed different too. I could run between houses, in and out of yards where families kept small gardens and chickens and the kind of organized, purposeful life that outsiders would later refuse to see. Clara’s mama kept the most impressive vegetable plot on the north end of the Village, and the twins Ruth and Essie were always bragging about their father working to maintain the Croton aqueduct right outside the neighborhood. They got mean when I asked why he worked for them when we weren’t allowed to drink from it.
Father Donahue ran the church on the corner and had a greenhouse attached to the back of it, small but serious, where he grew herbs and seedlings he said were for the congregation but everyone knew he simply loved watching things grow. He was Irish and believed, loudly and often, that the church had an obligation to the poor that it frequently chose to ignore. He shook hands with my father after every service and called him brother without hesitation—I’d never seen other fair skinned people do that downtown. He kept the greenhouse running through every season and the church smelled faintly of rosemary and wet soil even in January, which I always thought was the best possible thing a church could smell like. But most of all, I liked Father Donahue’s stories of his childhood in Ireland, and how much he missed it.
Miss Eleanor taught at the colored school nearby and had opinions about everything, especially the education of girls, which she pursued with a ferocity that made some of the fathers sneer at her and got her some extra stew during holidays from the mamas. She taught me that language was the one thing no one could repossess. She made me read aloud, made me argue, made me write in complete sentences when I would have preferred to speak in fragments. Years later, when I became one of the first Black students admitted to a Providence high school, I thought of Miss Eleanor every single time someone underestimated me.
***
Frederick Law Olmsted seemed to be a perfect case study of the right place at the right time. From gentleman farming and journalism to time spent in the Antebellum South and overseas, Olmsted navigated various roles that set him up for his impact on the landscapes across the United States.
Before he made the Greensward Plan—the proposed design for building Central Park—with Calvert Vaux, he spent time in the South. The several trips he took to the South were observations on the lives of enslaved people and their owners. While a lot of his records focused on day to day observations, the main purpose of these trips was to determine if the claim that “Cotton is king” was economically viable for the South.
In his work, Olmsted argued the idea that even if political ideology divided the northern and southern states, there was still “communitiveness”; the idea that emotional ties, trade, relationships, and concepts of morality crossed those invisible boundaries often. His observations of the cruelty enslaved people faced, however, were still dehumanizing. After nearly a year with southern plantation owners, he concluded that that cotton was limiting and would leave the South stuck in the past compared to the “innovative and industrial” North.
So while Olmstead did argue for the removal and abolishment of slavery, it was less so for the sake of enslaved people and more of an economic proposition so that communication between the South and northern states was not hindered by mismatched economic goals.
Olmstead was someone who proclaimed to have no love for money. Supported by his wealthy merchant father for a good part of his life, he was able to to accrue experiences that landed him as superintendent for Central Park, and eventually, its landscape architect.
***
The land we lived on was not just property in the legal sense. It was a working landscape, tended with the kind of care that comes from knowing exactly what you have and exactly what it cost to get it.
Papa kept a kitchen garden that ran along the south side of our house, where he grew collard green and sweet potatoes and herbs that my mother used all winter. In a little section underneath the main garden, he also grew some tobacco that Ma pretended not to know about. The plot was not large but it was serious, laid out in deliberate rows that reflected his belief that disorder was a luxury he could not afford. Clara’s mother grew tomatoes, pole beans, and squash in a garden that wrapped around three sides of her house, and in a good summer she had enough to share with the other families on the street and still put up preserves for the cold months. Ruth and Essie’s family kept a small orchard of apple trees along the back of their property that dropped fruit every September and made the Village linger with their scent no matter where you went.
Father Donahue’s greenhouse supplied seedlings to half the village in the spring. He kept a careful record of what he gave and to whom, not for repayment but because he believed that knowing what was growing and where was a form of stewardship. He had trays of herbs lined up along the church windows, parsley and thyme and oregano. I remember the sprawling rosemary bush that had outgrown its container years ago and been transferred to a large clay pot that he dragged outside every May with great ceremony, declining any of the teenage boys’ offer to help. The greenhouse became a gathering point in the cold months when outdoor work slowed. People would stop in under the pretense of picking up seedlings and end up staying for hours, talking in the warm damp air while frost ran down the windows outside. I spent more afternoons in that greenhouse than I could count, doing homework on an upturned crate while Paulie helped Father Donahue prune things that did not need pruning. He just liked having something to do with his hands.
Seneca Village connected to nearby towns through these exchanges. I loved trading our sweet potatoes for wool that helped keep Ma warm and gave Paulie some socks to wear—extra crops (no matter how small), shared tools, passed seeds switching hands across the churches and markets and the simple connections that existed between people who knew each other. The aqueduct workers who lived among us were known throughout the surrounding area, their labor connecting Seneca Village to the broader infrastructure of a city that would eventually decide it had no room for us. The land we tended and the networks we maintained were not separate from who we were. They were who we were. You could not extract the community from the landscape it had shaped, any more than you could pull the groundwater up from the hills and call the hills the same.
***
But how did Olmsted become superintendent after years across the pond, or in the South, or on a farm?
It started with debt. After a failed venture at Dix and Edwards, a publishing house that was quickly wiped out with an economic downturn, Olmsted owed many relatives and friends large sums of money with no income to pay them back. But through his time as a journalist, he met a member of the superintendent committee who encouraged him to apply. With his extensive network and some favors, he was able to have many people put in a good word for him despite having no prior experience in architecture. In the end, he won the majority vote and became superintendent, and unbeknownst to him, future lead architect of Central Park.
When the competition came about for the rebuilding of Central Park, Olmsted and Vaux began their planning process. At the time, he did not want to change the craggy, swampy landscape and only wanted to add roads, dthe reservoir and the lake. While many accounts exist of the planning process of the Greensward Plan, there are hardly any on how the architects felt about Seneca Village and the impending displacement the community faced.
***
The laws that would eventually hollow all of what we built had been in place for years before any of us felt its full weight. It started with the superintendent that was suddenly poking around the church, asking probing questions with a small smile that never quite met his eyes.
Eminent domain—the government’s right to seize private property for public use—required compensation but did not require consent. In New York, the process moved through the courts with the slow grinding certainty of something that has already been decided. The city would file a petition. A commission would be appointed to assess the value of the land. That assessed value, almost always lower than what the property was actually worth to the people living on it, would become the settlement. There was no mechanism in this process for arguing that the land was not for sale. There was only the question of how much it would cost the city to take it. I remember the chilling feeling when Paulie showed me the highlighted section of one of the books on Papa’s desk. She was grown now, a smart but mischievous teen whose curiosity often landed her on the other end of Ma’s wooden spoon and Papa’s belt. I dismissed her frantic whispers for us to do something, trying to tamp down the now pressing weight of dread that had settled over both of us.
For our village, the proclamation came under Mayor Wood in 1855. The legal argument was straightforward; the city “needed” the land for a public park, the public benefit outweighed private interest, and therefore the private interest would be compensated and removed. What the legal argument was not required to to account for, and did not, was that the private interest in question was a functioning community of property owners who had built something specific and irreplaceable on land they had legally purchased. It was a community of Mas and Papas just like mine, who had left downtown to build something for themselves and were still not left alone. The law was technically satisfied by compensation. It was not designed to concern itself with what compensation could not replace.
Papa understood the legal architecture better than the commissioners likely expected him to. He had spent years navigating systems that were not built for him and had developed a precise understanding of where the levers were and who was allowed to pull them. He knew that the commission’s assessment would undervalue the property. He knew that the city’s newspapers had made this blooming, vibrant community seem like a shanty town. He knew that the framing would shape the commission’s perception, that the commission’s perception would shape the assessment, and that the assessment would shape the settlement. He knew all of this and he organized anyway, because what else do you do?
***
Central Park boasted diverse plant species and a new third space for New York City residents, but introduced the Great Lawn decades after Olmsted’s work. It replaced the reservoir that existed there before, and was known as the Great Dust Bowl for a while. The biodiversity had been stripped because of overuse and poor maintenance. Currently, maintaining the great lawn requires an estimated 310,000 gallons, specialized landscaping, and regular closure to avoid going back to a barren, dusty terrain.
Large gatherings, unregulated sports events, and improper maintenance were the main causes of its deterioration. This lack of care went on for decades, with half the Great Lawn only having hard-packed dirt and the rest, dying, muddy grass.
The reservoir that once sat in the Great Lawn’s place was actually part of the Croton aqueduct system that served many communities nearby and employed several residents of Seneca Village. Despite dozens of families also being employed to maintain the aqueduct, no one in the Village had access to the water in this reservoir. Instead, they relied on the natural landscape, which had groundwater and streams for them to use. Luckily, the pollution had not yet reached this then-rural area of New York, so they were able to survive on this water.
***
It was my sixteenth birthday when the men with papers started coming.
They arrived with the authority that comes from believing, deeply and without examination, that they are doing something necessary. They were not cruel in the theatrical way. They were worse: they were bureaucratic. They spoke in the language of public good and civic improvement and the “future” of New York City, and behind all of those words was the simpler truth that the land we lived on had been decided to belong to something else now.
The magistrates came on a Tuesday. I remembered because Miss Eleanor had assigned an essay due that Wednesday and I had not yet started it. There were two of them, both white, both carrying the posture of men who had never been told no in any way that mattered. They stood at the edge of our property and spoke to Papa the way people speak to someone they have already decided is an obstacle rather than a person. They referenced proclamations. They referenced Mayor Wood. They referenced eminent domain as though it were a law of nature rather than a decision made by men very much like themselves.
My father listened without moving. I remember Paulie gripping my hand tightly in our room while Ma pretended to wipe down the kitchen. She stayed stiff in one spot for the 30 minutes the men talked at Papa. I had never seen him look like that before. Papa did not look afraid or angry or confused. He looked like someone calculating the precise distance between dignity and futility.
Our community fought for two years. Papa and the other property owners organized, argued, submitted paperwork, demanded fair compensation, and did every legal thing available to people who had been given just enough access to the law to understand how comprehensively it could be used against them. Ma organized the women to begin discussing and negotiating with nearby neighborhoods on our options. Clara’s mother kept a record of every meeting in a notebook with a cloth cover. Ruth and Essie’s father helped draft a letter to the city that was received and apparently filed somewhere no one ever looked. Father Donahue gave sermons that stopped just short of calling the mayor a thief and then gave it again the following Sunday, only slightly less short. His seed bags to each family became heavier, and our greenhouse flourished even more under his fervent efforts to keep it. Even Miss Eleanor assigned her students essays on property rights and read the best ones aloud in class. It seemed to be the only form of protest available to a schoolteacher in 1855, and she used it without apology.
None of it mattered in the way it needed to.
When the removal came, it came with the same bureaucratic efficiency as everything else. The newspapers called us squatters. They called us vagabonds. Not a single article mentioned that half of these supposed vagabonds owned the land they were being removed from, that we paid taxes on it, that we had built churches and a school and greenhouses and orchards on it over thirty years. The compensation, if it came at all, arrived in amounts that rubbed more salt into the open wound of our home, our livelihoods, our future.
The removal was not gentle. I remember Ma and Papa’s arguments on when to truly leave. Ma wanted to stand her ground, but Pa feared for me and Paulina. The city responded with the kind of force it reserves for people it has already decided do not fully count. The village that had taken thirty years to build was cleared in a fraction of that time. Now, the rolling hills, quiet brooks, and steady households were leveled to prepare for a landscape that would be called democratic and public and for everyone, which was an interesting set of words for something built on top of a community that was never asked.
***
The city of New York, under Mayor Fernando Wood, claimed eminent domain when pursuing the removal of Seneca Village. City records show that the residents stayed on their land for two years after the proclamation, fighting tooth and nail to get proper compensation. Eventually, they were removed violently, and portrayed as vagabonds and squatters. There was little to no mention of them being property owners or any effective conversation about working with the Village to avoid displacement of its residents.
There are no properly maintained records of how the residents of Seneca Village were compensated for their property. In the 1850s, Central Park was valued at around seven million dollars—equivalent to about 300 million dollars in today’s value. Estimates made by scholars put their compensation for the land around 250 to 700 dollars per property owner, depending on proximity to the city, amount of land, and the natural resources present on the property. Scholars could not find much evidence of if the difference in payment was also racially motivated, and to what extent if so.
While there was compensation given, the city of New York did not assist them to find new homes for the newly and violently displaced residents. There are no confirmed written records of what happened to the residents once they were removed. Instead, assumptions are mainly made about where these residents could have gone.
Some residents might have made their way back downtown, reintegrating with the hostile environment that marginalized communities were faced with in New York. Others might have made their own more north, settling even further into rural New York. A few might have even left New York City entirely and settled their families somewhere else. But, who knows?
The issue is exactly that: no one knows. The erasure of a middle class, blossoming community of African American property owners reflects the history of marginalized communities being deprioritized for American ideals, through the lawn, to be realized. Seneca Village was removed to provide a third space, a natural environment, and reprieve from the pollution of the city. None of these purposes are inherently bad, and instead show a consideration for very important factors in the health and well being of the environment and the people in it.
Seneca Village was a developing community, with diverse plant life, natural springs and hills, and the beginning of wealth building for marginalized communities. Now it is a leveled area with grass that requires yearly maintenance that costs more than the estimated amount that Village residents were compensated for their history and their land.
***
What became of us is mostly a matter of assumption, which is itself a form of erasure.
My family eventually settled in Brooklyn, where my father continued his work and I continued becoming the person Miss Eleanor had spent years insisting I could be. I thought about Pauline growing up without the village around her, without Clara and Ruth and Essie, without the greenhouse and the apple trees and the springs we drank from. I thought about what it means to grow up without the particular kind of security that comes from a community that has decided, collectively, that it belongs somewhere.
For most of the village’s two hundred families, the record simply ends. No follow-up. No documentation of resettlement. No city assistance in finding new homes for the people the city had just displaced. Our lives were interrupted in a way that had consequences no compensation figure, however fair, could have addressed.
I carried what I could. I carried the memory of my father’s hands in the soil. I carried the essays Miss Eleanor made me write. I carried the particular quality of light on the village in the early morning, before the city noise reached us, when it was still possible to believe the world was arranged in a way that made some kind of sense. I carried my sister’s hand in mine.
What I could not carry was the place itself. And the place did not survive me.
Central Park and the lawns it contains were built to be a public, democratic good to push back against the exclusivity becoming rampant in New York City. It was built to be a space for all to enjoy and have a free reprieve from the city. The Park was designed for the intersection between leisure and the environment.
In aiming for this, Central Park pushed the idea of the American Lawn, and how it represented peace, the American dream, and who and what an American should be. These ideals, while helping bring access to come communities, came at the detriment to many others, especially in Seneca Village.
***
The land did not survive the transformation intact either.
Our village was a working landscape. The hills and natural springs and groundwater and planted plots were not incidental to our community. They were part of how we functioned, how we fed ourselves, how we connected to neighboring towns and maintained a relationship with the environment that was practical and reciprocal. The diversity of what grew here reflected the people who had cultivated it with purpose. The trees, the gardens, the greenhouse seedlings that spread across neighboring properties every spring, all of it was the result of people who understood the land as something to be tended rather than performed.
What replaced it was a different philosophy entirely. A curated, engineered version of the pastoral that required enormous ongoing effort to maintain.
Now, somewhere in the present, on a warm afternoon when the park is full and the lawn is green with the effort of all that water and all that maintenance, someone walks through without knowing. They are just a person, taking a walk, doing exactly what the park was built to invite people to do. They stop somewhere near where our village used to be and they look around at the trees and the paths and the carefully maintained lawn, and they feel what people feel in the park: a kind of peace, some sort of reprieve, the sense that beauty is still available to ordinary people.
They do not know that the ground beneath them was tended by my Ma or Clara’s mother or Father Donahue first. That the water running beneath the surface was carried by people who were never allowed to drink from the reservoir they maintained. That the springs we drank from freely have been engineered into infrastructure. That the peace they are feeling was purchased, as peace so often is, at a cost paid by people who did not agree to pay it and were never adequately compensated for it.
They finish their walk. They go home. The park stays behind them, green and maintained and full of people who mostly do not know either. And somewhere under all of that managed, engineered grass, the land remembers what it was before someone decided it needed to become something else.
This is a brief history of Central Park, but the endless history of the constant erasure of marginalized communities around America.
