Excerpt from Reproduced with permission

CREATING CENTRAL PARK from The Park and the People:

A History of Central Park
Roy Rosenzweig and (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
Elizabeth Blackmar 1992).

Selected by Sondra Perry to be

republished on the occasion of
the Queens Museum exhibition
After the Plaster Foundation, or,
“Where can we live?” (Fall 2020).

aftertheplasterfoundation.
queensmuseum.org

1
 SENECA VILLAGE

In September 1825 cartman John Whitehead and his wife Elizabeth

began selling off parcels of the farmland they owned, which lay
roughly between 83rd and 88th streets and Seventh and Eighth
avenues. The first purchaser was Andrew Williams, a twenty-
five-year-old African-American bootblack, who bought three lots for
$125. Epiphany Davis, a black laborer and a trustee of the African
Methodist Episcopal Zion church, purchased twelve lots for $578
that same day. (AME Zion had been organized in New York in
1796; a contemporary described it as the “largest and wealthiest
church of the coloured people in this city, perhaps in this country.”)
Within a week of Williams’s and Davis’s purchases, AME Zion
bought six lots from the Whiteheads. Over the next three years three
or four other church leaders—trustees, deacons, and preachers—
purchased lots in the Whitehead tract. Between 1825 and 1832
the Whiteheads sold fifty land parcels, no fewer than twenty-four
of them to black families.1
By 1829 at least nine houses dotted this landscape, including
one belonging to Andrew Williams. The other houses also seem
to have been owned by African Americans. We might, then, suspect
that black settlement of Seneca Village began in 1825 with these
initial purchases, but it may have begun even earlier in this general
area. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, free African
Americans had apparently developed a community on York Hill, an
elevation located almost precisely in the middle of the future Central
Park, on the blocks just west of the tract, between 79th and 86th
streets and Sixth and Seventh avenues. It gave its name to the village
of Yorkville, then being settled in that vicinity and farther north and
east. One account describes Bill Dove, a young runaway slave from
Virginia (and later a family retainer for Boss Tweed), who spent 1819
hiding out among black families who lived in this vicinity. In the early
1830s, St. Michael’s Episcopal Church briefly conducted a mission
Sunday school “among the colored people” on this site. Although
the city owned most of York Hill, by the late 1830s William Matthews,
a young black man from Delaware, may have held almost five acres.2
The building of the first reservoir in the late 1830s and early
1840s disrupted York Hill’s black community. In 1838 New York
acquired the thirty-seven-acre York Hill tract as a receiving basin for

2 Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar

the new Croton water system. Some families probably moved direct-
ly west and joined those who had begun to settle the tract, where ten
more houses were added between 1835 and 1839. In the late
1830s the African Union church, which William Matthews served
as minister and trustee, bought land in Seneca Village. By 1840 the
former Whitehead tract was home to more than a hundred people.
By the next decade, Seneca Village (reflecting the virulent racism
of the day) was known as “Nigger Village.” But as the neighborhood
more than doubled in population, its composition changed; by
1855 when at least 264 people lived there, Irish Americans made up
about 30 percent of the community.3
Among the earliest Irish residents of the area was its most
famous native. In 1842 Sara Plunkitt, wife of Irish immigrant laborer
Pat Plunkitt, gave birth to twin sons, one of whom grew up to be the
celebrated West Side Tammany boss George Washington Plunkitt.
Years later Plunkitt recalled that he was born on “Nanny Goat Hill,”
just “twenty feet inside the Central Park wall at [West] Eighty-fourth
Street” and right on the edge of what he called “Nigger Village.”
Within the next seven or eight years, the Plunkitts moved farther
south, although still perhaps within the borders of the future park.
Plunkitt may not have been the only future Tammany boss to spend
his early years on the western edge of Seneca Village. In 1846 the
Croker family—including three-year-old Richard—fled famine-
ridden Ireland and took up residence, according to one biographer,
“in a dilapidated dwelling in what is now the western portion of
Central Park.” Young Richard’s father plied his trade as an itinerant
veterinar­ian among the horses, cows, and pigs of the park dwellers.
Although some other white residents—police officer William Evers
and milkman Philip Dunn, for example—settled in Seneca Village
in the 1840s, most came after 1850, seeking cheap housing in an
increasingly crowded and expensive city.4
Seneca’s white population generally faced the same contempt
leveled at their black neighbors. The commingling of whites and
blacks sparked fears fantasies of miscegenation and “amalgamation.”
Working from the notes of his father, a missionary to the Seneca
Village residents in the 1840s and 1850s, John Punnett Peters of
St. Michael’s described the park in the late 1840s as a “wilderness”
filled with “the habitations of poor and wretched people of every
race and color and nationality.” “This waste,” he continued, contained

3 Creating Central Park: Seneca Village

“many families of colored people with whom consorted and in many
cases
amalgamated, debased and outcast whites. Many of the inhabitants
of this village had no regular occupation, finding it easy to replenish
their stock of fuel with driftwood from the river and supply their
tables from the same source, with fish.”5
Were the residents of Seneca the “wretched” and “debased”
floating population that Peters and other observers described?
The origins of the village in purchases from the tract as well as in
the earlier settlement at York Hill suggests that this community had
a much longer and more continuous history. Three-quarters of
those residents (or their families) who were taxed in 1840 were still
there fifteen years later. Virtually every black family in Seneca
Village recorded by the 1850 census was still there five years later.
Such figures acquire special significance when we consider that
40 percent of Boston’s population moved in those same five years,
that other cities had similarly high mobility rates, and that African
Americans, in general, showed significantly less residential stability
than other city residents.6
Other evidence reinforces this picture of unusual stability.
Although few Seneca Village black heads of household were New
York City natives, by 1855 they had been in the city an average of
twenty-two years, a sharp contrast to the area’s Irish residents.
Some black residents had much deeper roots specifically in Seneca
Village; at least nine individuals or families could trace their ties back
more than two and a half decades.7 Over those years they developed
dense webs of interconnection.
Between 1825 and 1827 Diana and Elizabeth Harding
(probably mother and daughter) purchased land in Seneca Village
from the Whiteheads. Sometime before 1835 Elizabeth Harding
married Obadiah McCollin, a cook born in Westchester County, who
had already acquired at least two lots of Seneca Village land from
James Newton, who had purchased it from the Whiteheads in 1825.
Despite her marriage (and in seeming contravention of the common
law of married women’s property rights that prevailed in New
York until 1848), Elizabeth Harding McCollin continued to hold some
Seneca Village land in her own name. In the course of the next
three decades, the McCollins forged ties and alliances with other
families. In 1855 their household included six-year-old Frederick

4 Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar

Riddles; Frederick’s parents, Peter and Angelina Morris Riddles,
are not listed in that year’s census, but they were present five years
earlier when they buried his nineteen-month-old brother and his
grandmother, Nancy Morris, in the AME Zion graveyard. Nancy
Morris had purchased land in Seneca Village back in 1827, and her
daughter Angelina remained a landowner there thirty years later,
even after she and her husband had moved out (and left their young
son in the care of their neighbors, the McCollins). Also still present
in Seneca Village was Nancy Morris’s other daughter, Charlotte, who
had married William Godfrey Wilson.8
Such examples of intermarriage and interconnection can be
multiplied even on the basis of the limited surviving evidence.
Elizabeth Harding McCollin’s father, Samuel Harding, for example,
boarded for a time with his daughter and previously with Elizabeth
and James Thompson, the son of Ada Thompson, another long-­
standing resident. And William Godfrey Wilson (Nancy Morris’s
son-in-law) may have been the son of Sarah Wilson (also a longtime
Seneca Villager), who later adopted Catherine Treadwell, daughter
of another of the original purchasers of the Whitehead land.
These instances of kinship and neighborhood ties stretching over
at least four decades may seem unexceptional; yet they defy the
stereotype of the park dwellers as a drifting population of criminals.
So does information on their housing, jobs, property holdings, and
commu­nity institutions.
Most observers described the humble dwellings of Seneca
Village residents as “shanties.” In part, the word accurately describes
small, one-story, six-to-ten-foot-high dwellings usually built out
of unpainted rough board and not professionally constructed.
Ishmael Allen, for instance, shared his nine-by-eleven-foot dwelling
on 83rd Street with his wife, four children, and a boarder. Yet the
word shanty, as a cultural term, often describes (and demeans)
a building’s occupants as well as the building itself. Although
many lived in crowded circumstances, their conditions were often
sig­nificantly better than thousands of other poor immigrant and
black families living downtown in cellars, garrets, or eight-by-ten-
foot tenement rooms. Park dwellers also had considerable outdoor
space, an amenity in short supply in the downtown tenement
districts. Given what we know about the length of residence of so
many Seneca Village black families, it also seems unlikely that their

5 Creating Central Park: Seneca Village

shanties were the rickety structures described by outside observers.
Some perhaps more closely resembled rural cabins. Certainly park
dwellings were valuable enough to cause disputes over ownership
when the city took over the land. In seeking permission to remove
a two-room “little house” he had erected at his own expense, Irish
Seneca Village resident John Wallace pointed out that it “is to me
of considerable importance having a wife and four little children
to support.” The quality of housing, moreover, varied considerably.
Not too far from the Allens lived the four-person McCollin household
in an ample, nine-hundred-square-foot, two-story frame house,
which the census taker valued at four thousand dollars.9
One should not exaggerate the wealth of even the McCollins,
one of the best-off Seneca Village families, whose substantial
dwelling no doubt reflected savings accumulated over more than
one generation as well as perhaps their own construction labor.
Obadiah McCollin could not have earned a very large weekly salary
as a cook, one of the few occupations open to African Americans
in antebellum New York. Like their counterparts elsewhere in the
city, virtually all black Seneca Villagers earned their living in the
service trades—as domestics or waiters, for example—or as unskilled
laborers. The same could be said of their Irish neighbors, most of
whom were laborers earning perhaps a dollar per day. Among
Seneca residents, only German grocer Henry Meyers, black grocer
William Pease, and New York-born innkeeper John Haff could even
loosely be considered occupationally “middle class.”10
The economic activities of women and children supplemented
the earnings of male household heads. Many black women worked
as domestics or laundresses. Wives also contributed to the house-
hold economy through housework: sewing, economizing on meal
preparation, and especially scavenging for food, clothing, fuel, and
implements that could be used by their own households or traded
in New York City’s extensive secondhand market.11
Such activities throw a different light on the repeated
references to “living off the refuse of the city,” gathering “rubbish
of all description,” and denuding the park’s forests for firewood.
For contemporary commentators, the scavenging of the park dwell-
ers was a mark of sloth, of lack of “regular occupation.”12 Yet it might
as easily have signified the reverse—the energy and resourcefulness
with which park dwellers supplemented paltry wages with food,

6 Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar

fuel, furniture, and clothing that could be obtained without cash.
On the urban fringe in upper Manhattan trees offered a free source
of fuel for warmth and cooking. It was only a short walk to the river,
where driftwood and fish could be gathered much more easily and
with less competition than downtown. There were economical
uses for refuse that could not be recycled for human consumption:
unused garbage fed the pigs and goats that some park dwellers
raised; the bones of dead animals fueled the two bone-boiling plants
located at 66th and 75th streets, a short walk south of Seneca
Village. A few residents had fairly extensive gardens as well as their
own stables and barns. Others—such as eighty-eight-year-old
Henry Garnet—kept small gardens out of which they supplemented
their diets. The ability to raise at least some of their own food and
to take advantage of the larger urban and natural ecology were
among the advantages Seneca Village residents had over downtown
poor families.
Most important, many of the black Seneca residents had
something denied to most of their compatriots elsewhere in the city:
security of tenure based on landownership. Throughout the city,
few black New Yorkers owned land because of the barriers imposed
by limited financial resources, a state law that prohibited black
inheritance as late as 1809, informal racial bars on land sales, and the
high price of downtown Manhattan real estate. In 1850 census takers
counted only seventy-one black property owners; ten years later
the number had grown only slightly to eighty-five. In this context,
Seneca Village, where the Whiteheads willingly sold land to African
Americans and where land was cheap by New York standards,
offered an unusual opportunity for blacks who had some savings
and wanted to become landowners. At least some black Seneca
Village landowners actually lived downtown. Joseph Marshall,
a hardworking house painter and AME Zion church member, owned
five lots in Seneca Village as well as his house on Centre Street in
lower Manhattan.13
Among black Seneca Village residents, landownership
rates were extraordinarily high. With more than half the black house-
holds in Seneca Village in 1855 owning property, African-American
residents there had a rate of property ownership five times as great
as New Yorkers as a whole.14 In 1850 black Seneca Villagers were
thirty-nine times as likely to own property as other black New

7 Creating Central Park: Seneca Village

Yorkers. Seneca Village’s Irish households were not equally fortunate:
only three of twenty-one owned property, and none of the recent
Irish arrivals did. Irish immigrant settlers of Seneca Village in the
1850s faced some of the same problems as did black migrants to
the north a century later: a narrowing of opportunities, in this case,
less available land and higher prices.
The high levels of property ownership and residential stability
among black Seneca Villagers allowed them to reinforce and
develop their own community institutions, particularly churches.
A settlement centered on four city blocks and comprising around
sixty households included two African-American Methodist
churches (AME Zion and African Union) and one racially mixed
Episcopal church (All Angels’, an affiliate of St. Michael’s). AME Zion
church had purchased land from the Whiteheads in 1825 and
1827, and in 1827 when the city transformed the Potters Field into
Washington Square, thereby eliminating the burial ground used
by AME Zion, it began to use some of its Seneca Village lots as
a cemetery. Not until 1853 did AME Zion begin construction of a
church, although a congregation—with a hundred weekly worship-
ers—predated that building by as much as five or six years.
In downtown Manhattan, where most black New Yorkers lived, AME
Zion had faced competition from three other Methodist churches,
and one of those rivals now competed with AME Zion in Seneca
Village. The trustees of African Union Methodist Episcopal church
had purchased land only a hundred yards from AME Zion in 1837,
although in 1855 they claimed to have “been in possession of
said lots and meeting house thereon for more than twenty years.”
The African Union Church also housed another important local
institution, Colored School No. 3, set up in the 1840s, one of only
a handful of black schools in New York City.15
St. Michael’s at Broadway and 99th Street created Seneca
Village’s third church in 1846 as a mission to the poor residents
of the park. First, it set up a Sunday school and then held services in
the home of a white policeman, William Evers. Thomas Peters
greatly expanded the missionary work, and by 1848 he arranged to
build a wooden church on West 84th Street with subscriptions
raised among wealthy white parishioners of St. Michael’s and other
philanthropic New Yorkers—Robert Minturn, for example. Known as
All Angels’ Church when it opened in 1849, it ministered to an

8 Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar

unusual congregation. Black parishioners came largely from Seneca
Village, white parishioners from Irish and German settlements located
within a mile of the church.16
African Americans numbered about two-thirds of the names
in All Angels’ register and were some of its most loyal and active
members. Ishmael Allen, who lived next door, not only served as
church sexton but named his first son after the Reverend Mr. Peters.
The widow Ada Thompson, a domestic worker born in Virginia in
1796, lived just across “old lane” from the church. In September
1849 Peters came to her small house to baptize her first grandchild,
who was named (like four other black Seneca Villagers) after the
late president William Henry Harrison. Over the next six years,
Peters baptized three more of Thompson’s grandchildren and buried
her son and a fourth grandchild. Four children of ragpicker and
sailor John White were baptized through All Angels’. A fifth was
buried in the graveyard in Astoria, Queens, that Peters established
for the church after burials were banned below 86th Street in Man-
hattan. But although All Angels’ was the best-endowed and largest
of Seneca Village’s three churches, only about thirty people seem to
have attended its weekly services. Many black residents may have
preferred to worship in all-black churches. African Union, with only
half the capacity of All Angels’, had fifty regular congregants, and
AME Zion seems to have been twice as large as that.17 In a communi-
ty of perhaps only 260 inhabitants, 180 people attended church each
week. Even allowing for some exaggeration and for the attendance
of some people from outside Seneca Village, this community was
exceptionally devoted to its churches.
The community involvement suggested by these high levels
of church attendance was reflected in politics as well, although here
the evidence is somewhat sketchier. In the mid-nineteenth century,
black New Yorkers faced formidable and unique obstacles to voting:
a $250 freehold estate and three years of residency in the state
were required. As late as 1845 (the last citywide statistics were
collected) only 91 of 13,000 black New Yorkers had the franchise,
and ten years later, with the city’s black population just below
12,000, the number of voters was still under 100. Of that tiny cadre
of black voters, 10 lived in tiny Seneca Village; thus, that communi-
ty’s residents were several more likely to have voting privileges than
black New Yorkers in general. Some black men who lived downtown

9 Creating Central Park: Seneca Village

had also qualified to vote based on landownership in Seneca Village;
indeed, land purchases there may have been a deliberate stratagem
to meet the property qualification. At least three of those “absentee”
owners took a prominent role in New York politics. Timothy Seaman,
who owned a lot on 87th Street, and James N. Gloucester, a minister
who held a lot on 88th Street, were both leaders in the campaign
for unrestricted black suffrage. Charles B. Ray, who owned three lots
a half mile south of Seneca Village, was a well-known abolitionist
clergyman and president of the New York society for the Promotion
of Education among Colored Children. Ironically, a settlement that
contemporary and historical accounts depict as disorganized and
degraded may have been one of the pillars of New York’s antebellum
black community.18

10 Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar

NOTES
1. Information is not available on the race of the
remaining 26 purchasers, but it seems likely they
were all black. See Whitehead in Grantor Index and
Register of Conveyances, New York County, Hall of
Records, City of New York, 191:445, 447; 197:344,
346, 348; 350; 207:93; 226; 211; 231:144; 252:233;
288:289; quotation from George Walker, “The
Afro-American in New York City, 1827–1860” (Ph.D.
diss., Columbia University, 1975), 127. On church
leaders, see Christopher Rush, A Short Account of
the Rise and Progress of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church in America (1843).
2. Denis Tilden Lynch, “Boss” Tweed: The Story
of a Grim Generation (1927), 14–15; Peters, Annals
of St. Michael’s, 29–30, 40–41, 248. The first year in
which the Ward 12 Tax Books list the Seneca
Village landowners is 1829, but the tax listing for
Upper Manhattan before that date do seem to cover
relatively small holdings. Edward Hagaman Hall,
“Central Park in the City of New York.” American
Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, Annual
Report, Albany, 1896, lists Matthews as the owner
of 4.75 acres of land on the receiving reservoir site.
But New York City Board of Aldermen, Documents
(New York, 1849–75), 4, no. 10 (Jan. 1–June 30,
1839): app, indicates that the land was owned by
Tums Van Brunt.
3. Number of houses based on annual listings in
Ward 12 Tax Books. Matthews connection African
Union can be found in 1850 US. Census Mss.
and African Union petition, Central Park Condem-
nation Records, Bureau of Old Records and
Condemnation Records of New York County. Mss.,
vol. 5. Hall, “Central Park,” 444, writes that the
black community “crowded west” in 1838. epithet,
see NYT, July 9, 1856.
4. On Plunkitt, see New York Times, July 7, Nov.
20, 1924; William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany
Hall (1905; rpt. 1963), vii, nii, xxiv; 1850 US. Census
Mss.; on Croker, Lothrop Stoddard, Master of
Manhattan: The Life of Richard Croker (1931), 16–20.
5. John Punnet Peters, ed., Annals of St. Michael’s:
Being the History of St Michael’s Protestant
Episcopal Church, for One Hundred Years,
1807-1907, 445–46.
6. Some of these links are necessarily tentative.
On mobility rates, see Peter Knights, “Popular
Turnover, Persistence, and Residential Mobility in
Boston, 1830–60,” in Nineteenth-Century Essays
in the New Urban History, ed. Stephan Themstrom
and Richard Sennett (New Haven, 1969), 262;
Stephan Themstrom, The Other Bostonians:
Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis,
1880–1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 220–61;
James Horton, “Shades of Color: The Mulatto in
Three Antebellum Northern Communities,”
Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 8
(July 1984): 41–42.
11 Creating Central Park: Seneca Village
7. Based on land records and NYS 1855 Census
Mss.
8. These family reconstructions are based on
manuscript records of All Angels’ Church; 1850
US. Census Mss.; NYS 1855 Census Mss.; and land
records.
9. John Wallace to Board of Commissioners of
Central Park, May 2, 1859, Frederick Law Olmsted
Mss. See similarly Francis Brown et al. to BCCP,
May 12, 1859, FLO Mss.; BCCP Min, Nov. 2, 1857,
Dec. 23, 1858. On see Citizens’ Association of New
York, Sanitary Conditions of New York (1866; rpt.
1970), 300. On dwelling sizes, CP Cond. Mss.
See also Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent,
1785–1850, Ithaca, 1989), 205–10.
10. On black workers, see Rhoda G. Freeman,
“The Free Negro in New York City before the Civil
War” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1966), 291.
11. Jeanne Boydston, “To Earn Her Daily Bread:
Housework and Antebellum Working-Class
Subsistence,” Radical History Review, no. 36 (Apr.
1986): 15–16; Christine Stansell, City of Women:
Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (1986), 50–51.
12. Viele, “Topography,” 556–57; James D. McCabe,
Jr., New York Sunlight and Gaslight (1882), 442–43;
Peters, Annals of St. Michael’s, 92.
13. On black property holdings, see Leonard P.
Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–
1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago, 1981),
41, 287; Freeman, “Free Negro,” 84, 276–78. The
census may not have accurately recorded black
property ownership. But whatever the actual
figures, the higher level of ownership in Seneca
Village still stands. On Marshall, see Maritcha
Rémond Lyons, “Memories of Yesterdays: All of
Which I Saw and Part of Which I Was, an Autobiog-
raphy,” typescript in Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, NYPL.
14. The 1855 figures for Seneca Village and the rest
of the city are not strictly comparable, because we
used multiple sources (census, park condemnation
records, land records) to compute ownership
in Seneca Village but based citywide and uptown
levels solely on the 1855 census.
15. Harry J. Carman, The Street Surface Railway
Franchise of New York City (1919), 13; Rush, Short
Account, 26; African Union petition, CP Cond. Mss.,
vol. 5. Rush’s book, published in 1843, makes no
mention of a branch of AME Zion at Seneca Village,
nor does another survey of churches published
in 1846: Jonathan Greenleaf, A History of the
Church of AII Denominations in the City of New
York from the Settlement to the Year 1846 (1846).
According to Freeman, “Free Negro,” 386, the
Seneca branch was called AMZ Branch Church
Militant by 1854. On African Union, see Greenleaf,
329. On school, see Freeman, 342, and the call for
improved schools, originally published in the
Anglo-African in July 1859 and reprinted in Herbert
Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the
Negro People in the United States, 3 vols. (1968).

16. The development of All Angels’ is chronicled in

All Angels’ Mss. and Peters, Annals of St. Michael’s.

17. On segregated pews, see Freeman, “Free

Negro,” 380. Attendance figures for All Angels’
and African Union come from the NYS 1855 Census
Mss.; the census takers apparently missed AME
Zion, but the attendance for that church was
given in New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 5, 1853,
which also suggests that the congregation
preceded the erection of the church building.

18. On black voting, see Leo H. Hirsch, Jr.,

“The Negro and New York, 1783 to 1863,” Journal of
Negro History 16 (Oct. 1931): 420; New York State,
Census 1845, 29; Curry, Free Black, 218; Walker,
“Afro-American,” 140. On Gloucester, Seaman, and
Ray, see David E. Swift, Black Prophets of Justice:
Activist Clergy before the Civil War (Baton Rouge,
1989), chaps. 5, 6, 7, and passim; Earl Ofari, “Let
Your Motto Be Resistance”: The Life and Thought
of Henry Highland Garnet (Boston, 1972), 90, 93;
Aptheker, Documentary History, 1:198, 398–401;
Walker, “Afro-American,” 167, 198; Freeman, “Free
Negro,” 84, 139.

12 Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar