Seneca Village: The Black Community Destroyed to Build Central Park

In 1825, a Black shoe shiner named Andrew Williams purchased three lots of land on the rocky, undeveloped outskirts of Manhattan — in what would eventually become the area between West 82nd and West 89th Streets, on the west side of the island. The land was cheap: upper Manhattan was considered too far north, too uneven, and too remote from the commercial center of the city to be worth much to white developers. For Andrew Williams, it was an opportunity.

Within weeks, a free Black trustee of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Epiphany Davis, purchased twelve lots nearby. Word spread through New York's free Black community. Over the next decade, more families followed. The settlement they built became known as Seneca Village — its name's origin is uncertain, possibly from the Seneca chief, possibly from the Latin word for "old."

What made Seneca Village remarkable was its legal foundation. These were not renters, not tenants at will, not squatters. They were property owners. In New York State in 1821, the legislature had amended the state constitution to effectively strip most Black men of the right to vote — while keeping universal suffrage for white men. There was one exception: Black men who owned property worth $250 or more could still vote. Seneca Village was, in part, a direct response to this law. Land ownership was political enfranchisement.

At its peak, Seneca Village was home to roughly 264 residents living in approximately 50 households. The community was predominantly African American, though historical records show it also included Irish and German immigrant families. What set it apart from the rest of Manhattan's Black population was stability, institution-building, and — crucially — voting rights.

Among the residents documented in historical records: Andrew Williams (the founding buyer), Epiphany Davis (AME Zion trustee, 12 lots), William Godfrey Wilson (teacher at the colored school), and dozens of families who worked as laborers, sailors, cooks, and domestic workers by day and lived as landowners at home. The 1855 New York State census recorded at least ten Seneca Village landowners who met the $250 property threshold for voting rights — a rate of Black political participation that was nearly impossible to achieve in the city's renting population.

By the 1840s, wealthy New Yorkers and urban reformers had begun lobbying for a large landscaped park — a democratic "lungs of the city" on the European model, something like London's Hyde Park or Paris's Bois de Boulogne. New York was growing explosively: its population had quintupled since 1800. The lower island was becoming choked with commerce, tenements, and industry. The civic elite wanted green space.

In 1844, the poet William Cullen Bryant began publicly advocating for a great central park in the New York Evening Post. The landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing took up the cause. In 1851, Mayor Ambrose Kingsland formally recommended the project to the Common Council, proposing the Jones Wood site along the East River. A political battle followed over location. In 1853, the New York State legislature settled it: the city would use eminent domain to acquire a rectangular tract of approximately 778 acres in central Manhattan, roughly between 59th and 106th Streets.

The chosen site encompassed Seneca Village, along with several other existing communities — a mixture of poor Irish and German immigrants, free Black families, and small farmers. In total, the city displaced roughly 1,600 people. But Seneca Village, as the largest organized Black landholding community in New York, had the most to lose and received the least protection.

Before the first residents were evicted, the New York press had already written the story that would stick for the next 130 years. Coverage of the park project's progress consistently described the communities on the site — and Seneca Village in particular — as slums full of squatters, vagrants, and people with no legitimate claim to the land. The language was deliberate and consequential.

The framing of residents as squatters — people with no legal right to the land — was false. Seneca Village residents held deeds. Some had owned their lots for thirty years. But the press narrative served a function: it made displacement feel like sanitation rather than theft. If the people being removed were squatters, then the city was simply clearing an eyesore. If they were property owners, it was confiscation.

This is a pattern that would repeat throughout American history: the dehumanizing of communities slated for removal as a precondition for the removal itself. Seneca Village in 1856. The Greenwood community before the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. The communities bulldozed for urban renewal highways in the 1950s and 1960s. The script was written here, in the coverage of Central Park.

In the fall of 1857, the final eviction notices were served. The Central Park Commission, under the direction of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux — who had won the design competition with their "Greensward Plan" — began clearing the site. All structures in Seneca Village were demolished. The three churches, the school, the houses, the gardens — all of it gone.

The compensation paid to residents varied widely and was generally inadequate. Epiphany Davis, who had bought twelve lots in 1825, was recorded as receiving $2,335 for his property in 1856 — an amount historians have subsequently analyzed as substantially below what comparable land was worth, let alone what thirty years of community-building represented. Andrew Williams, the original buyer, appears to have received similarly reduced payments. Most residents simply disappear from the historical record after their eviction — a secondary erasure following the physical one.

Where did the 264 residents go? The honest answer is: we largely don't know. Some joined the broader African American community downtown. Some appear to have moved to other parts of upper Manhattan. Some records suggest that members of the village's congregations attempted to reconstitute their churches elsewhere. But the community as a community — the specific combination of land, institutions, neighbors, and voting rights — was gone forever.

Central Park opened in 1858. It became one of the most celebrated public works in American history — the birthplace of American landscape architecture, a model for urban parks around the world, a symbol of democratic leisure and civic vision. The story of Olmsted and Vaux's Greensward Plan was told and retold for over a century.

Seneca Village was not part of that story. For approximately 130 years, the community that had stood on the site — built by Black New Yorkers who had turned cheap land into a bastion of self-determination — was absent from the official history of the park. The standard accounts discussed the geological challenges of the site, the labor of the Irish immigrants who built it, the genius of the landscape design. The prior landowners were, at best, footnoted as "squatters" who had been removed as part of the clearing process.

The omission was not accidental. It reflected the same dynamic that produced the original erasure: treating the displacement of Black property owners as a precondition for civic achievement rather than a cost of it. As long as the residents of Seneca Village were framed as people with no legitimate claim, their removal required no mourning and no accounting.

The recovery of Seneca Village began in 1993, when historians Diana diZerega Wall, Nan Rothschild, and their colleagues began investigating archival records — census data, tax records, deeds, church rolls — and reconstructed the village's population and ownership history in detail. Their work established definitively that the "squatters" of the press accounts were landowners, parishioners, and voters. The 1997 book by Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, brought the research to a wider public.

In 2011, the Central Park Conservancy authorized a full archaeological excavation of the Seneca Village site — the first such excavation in Central Park's history. The dig uncovered structural foundations, ceramic fragments, bone fragments from domestic animals, and most significantly, human remains — graves that park construction in the nineteenth century had simply built over without documentation or removal. The dig confirmed the material record of what documents had already established: a real, dense, organized community had stood here.

Today, a marker in Central Park acknowledges Seneca Village. The Museum of the City of New York has mounted exhibitions on the community. Columbia University has hosted research conferences on the site. The work of restoration is ongoing — bringing back, document by document and fragment by fragment, the names and lives of the people the official story buried.

The name Andrew Williams deserves to be remembered. He was a shoe shiner who bought land in 1825 and helped found a community of Black landowners in a city that was actively trying to exclude Black people from political life. Seneca Village existed for thirty-two years. Central Park has existed for one hundred sixty-seven. The park is built on what the village lost.