Central Park: The Public Space Built on a Displaced Community

Before Central Park was a park, it was a neighborhood. Specifically, it was Seneca Village, a stable, property-owning Black community that had existed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan since eighteen twenty-five.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, African Americans in New York could vote if they owned property worth at least two hundred fifty dollars, a threshold most white men did not face. Seneca Village developed partly in response to this: Black New Yorkers purchased land in what was then rural upper Manhattan, built churches, schools, and homes, and established the kind of rooted community that provided both civic standing and some degree of protection from the city's pervasive racial violence. By eighteen fifty-five, the village held approximately two hundred twenty-five residents, predominantly Black but also Irish and German immigrant families. It contained three churches, two schools, and three cemeteries.

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux submitted their Greensward Plan for a great public park in eighteen fifty-eight. The plan was selected. The city condemned the land under eminent domain. The residents of Seneca Village were removed.

The park that Olmsted and Vaux built over the next decade is one of the masterworks of landscape architecture in the world: eight hundred forty-three acres of designed naturalism, containing meadows, forests, a reservoir, a skating rink, miles of carriage roads and walking paths, and a concert venue, all of it constructed by hand in the decade before the Civil War. The labor force included Irish and German immigrants. The design principle was that all New Yorkers, regardless of class, would have access to nature in the city.

The irony that this democratic public space was built on the site of a community destroyed by eminent domain was not widely discussed at the time. The Archaeological Field Methods class at Columbia University spent decades excavating Seneca Village and recovered the material evidence of what was lost: dishes, buttons, shoes, the foundations of the houses and the church, the bones of the animals the residents kept. The objects are in a storage facility somewhere. The park is still there.