Heather Gilligan: 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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
By 1871, Seneca Village had largely been forgotten. That year, The New York Herald reported that laborers creating a new entrance to the park at 85th Street and 8th Avenue had discovered a coffin, \u201cenclosing the body of a Negro, decomposed beyond recognition.\u201d The discovery was a mystery, the paper reported, because \u201cthese lands were dug up five years ago, when the trees were planted there, and no such coffins were there at the time.\u201d That\u2019s unlikely, as the site was the graveyard of the AME Zion church. More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Heather Gilligan: 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 … Continue reading An entire Manhattan village owned by black people was destroyed to build Central Park<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11263"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11264,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11263\/revisions\/11264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}