African American history is everywhere in New York, but can also feel oddly muted unless you know where to look. While the glories of the Harlem Renaissance are widely known, other aspects of the city’s Black experience remain largely in the shadows.
“My New York state history students have no idea people in New York were enslaved,” said Susan Goodier, an assistant professor in the history department at SUNY Oneonta.
But slowly the awareness over New York’s role in African American history is changing.
The City Council is considering legislation to erect a sign at the site of a slave market that operated on Wall Street. Last Thursday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which helps prevent the erasure or destruction of historic sites, announced that three of 30 grant recipients from its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund are located within the five boroughs.
The grant recipients include the New Amsterdam Musical Association, the nation’s oldest Black-founded musical organization, in Harlem; Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where Ralph Bunche, Madam C.J. Walker and Tuskegee Airman Ivan Bynoe were laid to rest; and Lefferts Historic House, an 18th century farmhouse in Flatbush, Brooklyn where dozens of enslaved men and women lived and worked.
At the same time, state lawmakers are moving forward with a commission designed to study the possibility of reparations for the descendants of enslaved New Yorkers.
Gothamist reached out to historians as well as Black artists and writers and asked them to share a site of Black history in the city that holds special significance. Below are their suggestions, ordered by the year each site came into existence. Although some long ago disappeared, some remain standing today.
1799
During a massive yellow fever epidemic that claimed thousands of lives in the late 18th century, state officials required all ships arriving at Manhattan to first stop at the Quarantine Station of Staten Island. It also served as a secret entry point in the North for people escaping enslavement in the South.
Public historian Debbie-Ann Paige said the Quarantine Station, which no longer exists, was built on Staten Island due to the island’s relative isolation from the rest of the metropolitan area. Every local, national and international vessel bound for Manhattan had to first quarantine here for three to 10 days.
Paige said this included ships arriving from southern ports. She said they occasionally included stowaways – “self-emancipating freedom seekers,” as she put it – who waited until a ship had docked at the Quarantine Station before disembarking and attempting to blend into the urban masses.
According to Paige, the Quarantine Station figured in the memoirs of two men who escaped enslavement, including William Grimes, whose book “Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave” was published in New York in 1825.
1832
One of the oldest African American communities on Staten Island lies in the Stapleton neighborhood across from Bay Ridge. The Union African Methodist Episcopal Church, also known simply as the UAME Church, was established in Stapleton in the early 1830s and served as a meeting point for Black residents of the area.
“Its members represent the Great Migration as it appears on Staten Island. It is a community church that has taken care of the surrounding Black community here on the island and in its present state, continues the legacy of care in and for the community,” Paige said.
“The church has endured violence as the focus of the Civil War draft riots, and random acts of violence during the 1880s,” she said.
The church, still active, is located at 49 Reverend Dr. Beasley Way.
1838
Founded 11 years after the end of enslavement in New York in 1827, Weeksville in Crown Heights, Brooklyn was previously home to one of the largest colonies of free Black landowners in the country. Today its memory is preserved at the Weeksville Heritage Center located at 158 Buffalo Ave.
“Despite the horrors and bondage of slavery formerly enslaved people came together to build a sturdy community,” said Darrick Hamilton, the Henry Cohen professor of economics and urban policy, and the founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School.
The residents of Weeksville, Hamilton said, were hardly immune from “stratification, exploitation and oppression” in pre-Civil War New York City.
“Still, we are lucky that Weeksville Heritage Center has preserved that community for us to continue to celebrate their humanity today,” he said. “Weeksville represents resilience, perseverance and humanity.”
1846
Located at 339 W. 29th St. in Midtown, the Hopper-Gibbons House is “the only documented surviving station of the Underground Railroad in Manhattan,” said Sarah Henry, the Robert A. and Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe chief curator and deputy director at the Museum of the City of New York.
The 19th century rowhouse was the home of Abigail Hopper Gibbons and James Sloane Gibbons, who were targeted by rioters because they were white abolitionists who aided enslaved people attempting to secure freedom.
“Members of the household had to flee across the rooftops to escape the mobs,” Henry said.
The rowhouse is also the only surviving site from the 1863 Draft Riots, according to Henry. The rioters, most of them Irish, were enraged by the idea that they’d have to serve in the Civil War and threatened by the prospect they’d be competing for jobs with newly emancipated Black workers, historian Leslie Harris said in her book, “In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863.”
1854
Elizabeth Jennings was a 24-year-old school teacher who boarded a Third Avenue Railroad Company streetcar on her way to church in 1854. Jennings, who was Black, was thrown off the streetcar at the intersection of Broadway and Walker Street by police for violating segregation laws. Her lawsuit against the company sparked a movement against segregation in the five boroughs.,
“She successfully sued the Third Avenue company, setting off a movement that would end racial segregation on New York City transit, in a landmark case that has earned her the reputation as ‘the 19th century’s Rosa Parks,’” said Henry of the Museum of the City of New York.
“The all-male, all-white jury found for the plaintiff and awarded her damages of $225,” according to the Historical Society for the New York Courts. “She was also awarded $22.50 in costs.”
1912
Built in the early 20th century by William Fox, a Hungarian immigrant who later founded the Fox Film Corporation, the Audubon Theater and Ballroom at Broadway and 165th Street in upper Manhattan was immortalized more than half a century later, as the site of Malcolm X’s assassination.
Photographer Accra Shepp, whose work includes the book “Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice,” recalled being asked to photograph the site for a magazine in the early 1990s. At the time, the site had been marked for demolition, prompting protests.
“It was like a shadow,” Shepp said. “You could have walked past it without ever noticing it, despite the fact that the building is mostly white. It was kind of gray, covered in grime, and stripped of all the ornamentation or paint. And I struggled to see it as a place of power in history, the place that it really held, where Malcolm X spoke and was assassinated.”
Since then, Shepp noted the site has been restored, “which is really remarkable.”
1940s
“Greater Than Ever!” read a 1946 the flier for Club 845. “The Newest Thing to Hit the Bronx!”
The lineup that day featured Dizzy Gillespie, among other jazz greats. Admission was $1.25 plus tax. Club 845 was one of a slew of jazz clubs that flourished in the Bronx but that were nonetheless lesser-known than their Harlem counterparts.
Sadly, the club no longer exists. According to Mark Naison, a historian at Fordham University who in 2016 wrote about the role of Morrissania in hip-hop’s evolution for Thirteen.org, “every one of Morrisania’s live music venues — the Tropicana Club, Club 845, the Blue Morocco, Frieddie’s, Goodson’s, the Apollo Bar, and the Royal Mansion” closed its doors between 1965 and 1975. A New York Times article from 2006 notes that the original building that housed Club 845 “has been replaced by a low-slung stretch of gritty shops below the rattling of the elevated 2 and 5 trains.”
Writer Garnette Cadogan, the Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in Urbanism at MIT and editor-at-large of the book “Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas,” said the 845 and other Bronx spots like the Blue Morocco became pilgrimage points for him in his adulthood.
“The parts of New York Black history that are especially resonant to me are the histories that we walk past, or we walk over, and they go unnoticed,” Cadogan said. “They may be sites that don’t exist anymore, except as an address, or the memory of people who are in the neighborhood.”
As a kid growing up in Jamaica, Cadogan said his home was filled with the sounds of doo wop and jazz, and then the hip hop records he spun: Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force. Well before he moved to New York, New York was part of him.
These local spots, he said, including the “phenomenal nightclubs” of the borough, brought together “working-class Black residents who were making a life for themselves there. And music itself was part of that life they were making.”