White people doing what they do best and continue to do in modern day... then they question why black people hold anger toward them.
“ The community, called Seneca Village, began in 1825 and eventually spanned from 82nd Street to 89th Street along what is now the western edge of Central Park. By the time it was finally razed in 1857, it had become a refuge for African Americans. Though most were nominally free (the last slave wasn’t emancipated until 1827) life was far from pleasant. The population of African Americans living in New York City tripled between abolition and complete emancipation and the migrants were derided in the press. Mordecai Noah, founder of The New York Enquirer, was especially well-known for his attacks on African Americans, fuming at one point that “the free negroes of this city are a nuisance incomparably greater than a million slaves.”
Most landowners at the time refused to sell to African Americans. A white couple who lived in what was then a distant northern outpost of Manhattan was an exception, subdividing and selling off their land first to Epiphany Davis and Andrew Williams, two prominent members of the The New York African Society for Mutual Relief, and then to the AME Zion Church. More members of the African Society, whose purpose was in part to build black communities, followed suit and purchased land too. Slowly, houses were built. Some of them were rather grand, two-story affairs, with barns and stables, and some were modest shacks. The area was eventually anchored by three churches and a school.
Owning land in Seneca Village meant more than finding a refuge from the slums and violence of Manhattan proper. Buying property meant voting rights (at least for men), as laws in New York at the time required that all voters own at least $250 worth of real estate. Seneca Village probably had a more radical purpose, too, as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Prominent abolitionists such as Albro Lyons, later recognized as a conductor on the railroad, owned land and lived there. In fact, the African Society so instrumental in founding the village was reputed to have a hidden basement for hiding runaway slaves. And the name of the village itself may have come from a philosophy tract called Seneca’s Morals, a book that was popular with abolitionist activists.
As Seneca Village was building up, however, support for Central Park grew, driven by some of the same pressures that created the African American enclave. The tip of the island of Manhattan was overflowing with people. The slums were spilling over as more and more immigrants arrived, especially after the Irish potato famine started in 1845. None of these conditions appealed to well-off New Yorkers, who had already started migrating further uptown, or out of town, by the 1840s. Already, the Lennox family and other wealthy New York names owned swaths of land in the vicinity of the proposed park. Real estate developers easily foresaw the demand for an exclusive neighborhood bordering parklands.
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).
But in 1857, it was all torn down.
