Uppity in Central Park

The exhibit book informs us that, by the early 1850s, many whites in New York City became concerned with how well Seneca Village was doing. “That the Village occupied land that was increasingly valuable as the settlement of Manhattan marched north was not lost on them.” The Democratic Mayor of New York City, Fernando Wood, employed the powers of eminent domain, in 1855, to remove these black property owners and create a city park.

For two years, the Villagers resisted the city’s orders to leave, as well as the efforts of the police who had been directed to remove them. In the words of one New York newspaper, “[t]he policemen find it difficult to persuade them out of the idea which has possessed their simple minds, that the sole object of the authorities in making the Park is to procure their expulsion from the homes which they occupy.” Seneca Village was thus destroyed and, in the words of another newspaper “the supremacy of the law was upheld by the policemen’s bludgeons.” Some 1,600 persons – who had the audacity to believe that they were entitled to live as free men and women in a city that had earlier enslaved them – were forcibly evicted from their homes. The lands were then cleared to become a part of Central Park.