Seneca Village

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So today, uh,
we're going to cover another topic that has been on
my list for a while. And it's you know, Tracy

(00:22):
and I often talk about our lists and their length,
and sometimes something will be on the list and you're
really into it, but then as as you're working on
other projects, other things kind of move around. It's a
very shifting list for me anyway, Oh me too. Um.
And then my memory was jogged about this particular topic
by contemporary television, as is often the case, specifically the
Apple TV Plus animated series Central Park. That show did

(00:45):
not sponsor this episode, but it does include a song
in its opening that very briefly mentions the people that
lived in New York Central Park before it was Central Park,
and it kind of makes it a joke that, hey,
we don't talk about that. Um. This was a reference
to Seneca Villege and that reminder of it put it
back at the top of the list for me. And
Seneca Village is significant because this story features a predominantly

(01:08):
black community in New York that built itself from the
ground up. But this story is also fragmented because even
though it existed at a time when it could have
been fairly well documented, there was a vested interest in
erasing it. And we're going to talk about that. But
first we will talk about the island of Manhattan and
how this one area of it came to be sold

(01:28):
off in lots and thus became Seneca Village. So if
you're looking into the story, the story of Seneca Village
often is told with the beginning being the selling of
land by John and Elizabeth Whitehead, but that of course
leaves out how the white Heads came into possession of
that land. So first, what we really have to do

(01:49):
is talk about Manhattan and how it went from being
indigenous land to being the property of Europeans. Manhattan Island was,
according to the version from the point of view of
Western his Tree that you have probably heard many times before,
purchased from indigenous tribes in the area by Peter Minuit,
the first director of the New Netherlands Province, in sixty six,

(02:11):
and the purchase price was, according to these accounts, and
depending on the source you look at sixty guilders about
the value of a pound and a half of silver
at the time, or twenty four dollars sometimes, or you'll
see it said that it was just a bunch of
beads and trinkets. So this entire purchase, though, is a
moment in history that's difficult to untangle. It's even harder

(02:31):
to substantiate. For one, the primary source on that transaction
is a letter written by Peter Shagan, who was the
representative of the States General in the Assembly of the
nineteen of the West India Company. This is a letter
he wrote back to the West India Company and he stated, quote,
they have purchased the island Manhattans from the Indians for

(02:54):
the value of sixty guilders. But that is the entirety
of the contemporary documentation. That alleged purchase has also been
represented in various painted depictions, as the Dutch representative showing
the Lenape leaders a trunk of various European items, ostensibly
as goods that they were intending to trade for the land. Right. So, um,

(03:19):
not that those paintings are intended to be historically accurate accounts,
But even if that were the case, it's just completely
muddling what the actual situation was because these depictions unsurprisingly
make out those indigenous leaders as foolish enough to trade
their land for beads or something similarly worthless. Uh. This

(03:40):
hearkens back to our prior episode that we did on
Thomas Harriet, who wrote the influential book A Brief and
True Report of the Newfoundland of Virginia, in which he
characterized the indigenous population of North America as easily awed
by Europeans and thus easy to manipulate. And if you
recall that episode, that book was very popular lear in
Europe and got republished a whole bunch of times and

(04:02):
kind of became the foundation of how Europeans saw North
American indigenous people's and that frequently cited number of twenty
four dollars as the purchase price was literally just something
that got calculated out as that story was written about
in subsequent years, it was an estimate by historians that
then started to be relayed as though it was fact. Plus,

(04:23):
this whole story puts a lot of significance on one
line in a letter. That one line is just casually
reported with no nuance, and it was written by somebody
with a minimal understanding of the indigenous people he was
referring to. That understanding minimal at best. I mean, he
really did not know a lot. It conveniently leaves out

(04:43):
the probability that those people probably did not see the
situation in the same way as the Dutch, who were
seeing it as a business deal. The idea of land
as property, as something you could own, was not even
part of how their culture functioned. It's entirely possib but
that the Lenape were seeing the goods being presented by
Manuet as a gift or as an offering to garner

(05:06):
permission to live on the same land as the Lenape
people who were already living on Manhattan. Modern day Lenape
people have stated that memorials in New York that reference
the sale of Manhattan are perpetuating a fabricated myth. Um.
We have talked some more about like the nuances of
how a different, totally different indigenous people, but still indigenous

(05:29):
people in North America were thinking about land use in
that episode earlier this year on King Philip's War. Yeah, yeah, um,
it is that thing where obviously this whole story that
we get normally is from the white European lens, but
Regardless of all of that lost nuance, the Dutch did
believe that they had ownership, and they made Manhattan the

(05:51):
center of their colonization efforts, and when frustrated that the
Lenape were not moving out, they built a wall around
their new city in the sixteen sixties to keep the
indigenous people out of it. It also kept out the
English for a time. England took control of New Netherlands
in sixteen sixty four and renamed it New York. This is,
of course, part of much bigger conflicts that were going

(06:13):
on in the sixteen seventies. The Dutch once again regained
control of the island briefly, but it ultimately reverted to
English rule in the sixteen seventy four Treaty of Westminster.
And of course, after the Revolutionary War, it was part
of the United States and became land that got sold
off by the government in various ways. So as we're
talking about the section of Manhattan that became Seneca Village

(06:35):
being farmland that was owned by John and Elizabeth Whitehead,
that's the backstory before it passed into the white European
real estate cycle. The white Heads had purchased the property
in eighteen twenty four, and then they partitioned it into
lots to resell. The area that made up Seneca Village
was about five acres in total. I've also seen it
listed as almost seven uh and it sits in the

(06:58):
strip between Seventh and A Avenues running from present day
eighty two Street to eighty ninth Street. In the lots
that would become Seneca Village went up for sale, and
while it is very hard to imagine if you're familiar
with New York City today, that area was considered remote
enough from the main city that the land there was
fairly inexpensive. Fifty lots were sold in total over the

(07:22):
course of several years. The first purchaser was Andrew Williams,
who was a bootblack and a resident of Downtown. He
bought three lots for a hundred and twenty five dollars.
The next two people who bought lots were Epiphany Davis,
who bought twelve lots for five hundred and seventy eight dollars,
and John Carter. And all three of these first three

(07:42):
buyers were black. That's notable considering that New York's date
a final emancipation was still two years away. You'll recall,
of course, that New York had this like very stepped
in gradual way of eliminating slavery, and they weren't to
the end of that yet. Two of these buyers, Epiphany
Davis and Andrew Williams, were also members of the African
Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Epiphany was actually a church trustee,

(08:07):
and that church was the city's first black church, and
at the time it was described as possibly being the
largest and wealthiest black church in the country. It's unclear
exactly how Williams and Davis had heard about the white
Heads land for sale, but word clearly spread through the church.
A week after the first lots were sold, the church
itself purchased several connected lots from the white Heads. Amy

(08:31):
Zion lost their access to the city's Potter's Field in
eighteen seven when that land was reallocated to become Washington
Square Park, and at that point several of the churches
lots in Seneca Village were set aside to develop them
into a cemetery. Purchases of the white Head land, made
by prominent leaders within the church continued for several years.

(08:51):
By the time all fifty lots were sold by the
White heads. In eighteen thirty two, twenty four of them
had been purchased by black residents of the city. Seneca
Village had formed, although where that name came from is
still unknown today. In case people are like, well, obviously
the Seneca lived in New York. That's true, but like,
we don't we don't know how the village came to

(09:13):
be called that. We'll talk about it in a minute,
But there are often when you see the village referred
to in contemporary papers of the day, it is referred
to with a racial slur. So in just a moment,
we will talk about other black communities of historical significance
to contextualized Seneca Village a little bit, But first we
will pause for a word from a sponsor. We recently

(09:42):
talked on the show about New Philadelphia, Illinois, which was
touted as the first town designed and plotted out by
a black man, and that did not happen until the
eighteen thirties. But unlike New Philadelphia, Seneca Village's establishment as
a community was a little bit more organic. Even though
those plots were like separate, eat it out and made
as as parcels of lands that were sold, it wasn't

(10:05):
planned as a community. It was just broken into those lots.
And we know that by eighteen twenty nine there were
nine families in Seneca Village for certain, and that's based
on records as well as archaeological evidence. There may have
actually been more. We should mention as well that there
was another area of Manhattan that had a similar black
community which predated Seneca Village. It was on a thirty

(10:26):
acre piece of land known as York Hill because of
its elevation. This community's origin on the timeline is a
little bit unclear, but there do appear to be mentions
of it in the eighteen teens. Some of this area
was city property, but some of it was also privately owned. Ultimately,
York Hill's downfall was the creation of the Croton Reservoir.

(10:47):
This water system, which was developed in the late eighteen
thirties and early eighteen forties, had been preceded by the
city acquiring all of the property in York Hill and
displacing that community. Many of them had moved to Seneca Village.
That uncertainty that we mentioned just a moment ago about
how many people were living in Seneca Village early on
is actually a problem that persisted for much of its history.

(11:10):
We know that in the time immediately following the Croton
Reservoir displacement of York Hill, Seneca Village had grown to
a population of more than one hundred residents, and we
also know that Irish immigrants started moving into the village
starting in the eighteen forties, including the mother of future
Tammany Hall boss George Washington Plunkett. George and his twin
brother were actually born in Seneca Village, and by that

(11:32):
time the African Union Church had also bought land from
the white Heads and moved in. It's significant that the
white Heads were willing to sell their land to black buyers,
as that offered an affordable entry into holding property that
was unavailable in most of Manhattan. The residents of the
village were more likely than New Yorkers of any color
anywhere in the city to own the land where they lived.

(11:54):
In order to vote in New York, free black men
had to have lived in the state for three years
and had to own land valued at two hundred fifty
dollars or more. So, the Seneca Village land opened up
an avenue for black residents in the city to meet
that property requirement. In the eighteen fifties, ten of Seneca
Villages black residents were voters, and while that is a

(12:15):
tiny number, it was by percentage far higher than in
other communities within the city. In eighteen forty five, for example,
there were thirteen thousand black New Yorkers and only ninety
one of them had voting rights. In eighteen fifty five,
the black population of Manhattan was recorded at twelve thousand,
there were still fewer than one hundred who had secured

(12:36):
voting rights, and that meant that at the time, with
only about a hundred and fifty black residents, Seneca Village
was home to more than ten percent of the city's
black voters. There were also people who were not residents
of Seneca Village but owned land there in order to
attain voting rights. So if you look at black voting
landholders in Seneca Village instead of the population of the village,

(12:59):
that concentration is even higher. Yeah, there were definitely people
that chose to stay downtown as where they lived, but
they wanted to own this property and that once again
opened up voting opportunities for them. In eighteen fifty five,
a census was taken, so the information about the village
during that time becomes much more robust. There were two

(13:20):
d thirty people living in Seneca Village then in the
village's fifty two homes, so a lot of these were families.
Roughly two thirds of the residents were Black, roughly one
third was Irish, and there were a few German residents
as well making their homes there. There were also three
churches in the village by that point, African Methodist Episcopal
Zion Church which was the one that was there from

(13:41):
the beginning, African Union Church, and All Angels Church. Amy
Zion and African Union were all black churches. All Angels, however,
had a mixed congregation and was a mission project of St.
Michael's which was at Broadway in ninety nine, and that
also had a Sunday school as part of it. The
Semate terry associated with All Angels was also integrated, and

(14:03):
there was also a school in the village known as
Colored School Number three that had been founded in the
eighteen forties. So now we're gonna start getting to how
this was turned into a park. Starting in the eighteen forties,
there was growing interest and ensuring that the rapidly growing
city retained some kind of green space for Manhattan's residence.
This was a valid concern because the natural land on

(14:27):
the island was being sold off and built up at
a really quick rate. In the space of just a
decade from eighteen eighteen fifty five, the population of New
York City doubled. It was also driven in part by
a desire on the part of the wealthiest inhabitants of
the city to have a green space similar to something
that you might find in a European city. Yes, New

(14:48):
York was building up. They were like, we should have
fancy places like Paris or London, so that rich people
can take their carriages through them and we will feel
very worldly and fancy. There was a lot of debate
about exactly where a large park might fit into Manhattan's layout.
There was one fifty acre strip of land on the
East River that was considered, but that was met with

(15:10):
criticism because the size was deemed too small by a
lot of the people who really wanted this park. There
was also some concern that the park had been suggested
by the editor of the Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant,
because he and many of his Ideas supporters to put
it there happened to own property very near that site,
and they would have gotten a financial boost from a
park project that would have raised the value of their

(15:32):
own land. Incidentally, Bryant Park is named for him, so
he did get a park. That strip of land on
the East River was known as Jones Woods, and as
that lost favor as an option, the idea of a
park in the center of the island started to gain popularity.
There were a number of factors that made this location
more appealing than the previous one. For one thing, a

(15:53):
lot of the land there was already owned by the city,
whereas the Jones Wood strips had been privately owned and
would have required a pretty big investment on the city's part.
For another, that central strip of land had already been
deemed tricky to develop as a real estate because of
its terrain. This kind of cracks me up, because if
you look at cities or at maps rather from the

(16:16):
early eight hundreds of New York City, it all had
like terrain that would have been tricky. Somehow they managed
many cities do it, turns out right, they figure it out.
But as the plan for Central Park got underway, there
really was not much consideration for Seneca Village or any

(16:36):
of the people living in the proposed park space. The
initial plan for the park was seven hundred seventy nine acres.
It was later expanded to its current size of eight
hundred forty three acres, So that was a pretty significant
tract of land right in the middle of the city.
And even though Manhattan had less and less population density
the farther north you went on the island, the land

(16:57):
that had been identified as a potential green space for
this project was occupied, including Seneca Village, by an estimated
six hundred people. Despite that fact, and despite the fact
that Seneca Village had grown into a community on lots
that had been purchased from the White Heads, the park
was generally described as an empty space with a handful

(17:18):
of people living there illegally. This may have been a
case of supporters of the park plan, including journalists, either
willfully ignoring the residents of Seneca Village and other communities
in the area, or being truly unaware of how developed
these communities were. I would argue if they were journalists
that was their job to figure out. Or they may

(17:40):
have just been devaluing and disregarding the people living there
because these communities were made up of black and immigrant inhabitants.
I will point out that journalism was a very different
thing at this point. Yeah, I know, but still yes.
And we don't know the motivation of every journalist who
wrote about the proposed land for Central Park as though
it were inhabited. But what we do know is that

(18:02):
downplaying any human habitation would have helped make the project
more appealing for anyone in the city, particularly any stakeholders
who might have questioned its expense and its purpose. And
there was of course racism in the mix as well.
People who did acknowledge Seneca Village referred to it using
a racist slur for years, as we mentioned a little
while ago. Uh. It's interesting because when you look at

(18:25):
some of the records online, depending on where you see them,
some places that show these newspapers, like the image of
the actual newspaper, have chosen to black bar the name
because it is gross. Um. There was also this general
suspicion about any of the white immigrants who lived in
the village, and they were characterized as being very shifty

(18:47):
and untrustworthy, and there were all these rumors of misagenation
and a lot of racist language about the mixing of
these races. Uh the rhetoric of the park being occupied
only by indigent drifters be ga in the erasure of
a stable community, both literally in terms of its existence
and in the historical record, and we really want to

(19:08):
stress the stability of this village. In the book The
Park and the People, authors Roy Rosenswig and Elizabeth Blackmar
note that if you compare Seneca Villages tax records from
eighteen forty to the records from eighteen fifty five, three
quarters of the families from eighteen forty we're still living there.

(19:28):
If you compare eighteen fifty to eighteen fifty five, all
of the black residents in the community were still in
Seneca Village. So it's definitely not a case of drifters
or squatters. These are people who owned the land, paid taxes,
and had that information captured in the city records. Seneca
Village was more stable than really most city communities during

(19:50):
the mid eighteen hundreds. They make a point in that
book that if you compare Seneca Village to like I
think they mentioned a neighborhood in Boston. At the same time,
they're like, this is constant movement, This is almost no
movement like it's way more stable, uh, and in many
cases to these families were staying through multiple generations with
marriages and children and adding to the village's population and

(20:13):
reinforcing the community ties within it. So it was the
exact opposite of Itinerant descriptions of the homes in the
village during the time when the city was considering where
to build a park also characterized them as though they
were barely standing. The words shock and shanty were very
commonly used. These were definitely not fancy houses. They were

(20:35):
generally built by the residents themselves. They tended to be
on a smaller side, mostly one story, and there was
a wide range of quality from one house to another.
But they were there through all those years of records
that we mentioned, so they definitely weren't temporary structures on
the verge of collapse. In terms of quality of life,
if compared to the black population living downtown, the residents

(20:57):
of Seneca Village had significantly more space as well as
outdoor areas for recreation, and they weren't subjected to the
cramped and poorly maintained rooms that would have been available
in the Five Points neighborhood, where a large portion of
the city's black population lived. When you consider that most
of the people of color and immigrants living downtown were
in tenements that were really poorly managed, this was a

(21:20):
way better set up and again way more stable, but
completely devalued. Uh. Most of Seneca Villages male residents worked
in service or labor jobs, and the women of the
village also worked. They took in laundry. Some of them
worked as domestic servants. There were also gardens and livestock
was kept on the Seneca Village acreage that supplemented the
diets of the residents. The most well off among the

(21:42):
people who lived there were two grocers and an innkeeper,
So it wasn't a wealthy demographic, but it was the
highest concentration in the city of an area where black
people owned property. The people debating the future location of
the park idea were generally wealthy. As the city had
expanded nor to take up more and more of the island.
It wasn't only William Cullen Bryant who had thoughts of

(22:05):
how a park would drive up adjacent property values. There
was definitely a recognition that the development of what was
being called at the time the Central Park was going
to create value in the land of the northern half
of the island. Back when Jones would or Jones Woods,
You'll see it written both ways was still being considered
as a possible park location. Social reformer how Guernsey had

(22:28):
written a letter to the Tribune in which he said,
quote will anyone pretend the park is not a scheme
to enhance the value of uptown land and create a
splendid center for fashionable life without regard to and even
in dereliction of the happiness of the multitude upon whose
hearts and hands the expenses will fall. Even after that

(22:49):
other strip of land was eventually dismissed because it would
benefit existing landowners, At this point, it was inescapably obvious
that any location was going to create a potential new
area for affluent buyers to flock to. On July fifty three,
the city filed the legal action that would be the
demise of Seneca Village. That was when the city claimed

(23:11):
eminent domain over the portions of the island from fifty
nine to a hundred and sixth streets designated for the park.
For the property that the city did not already own,
the city allocated five million dollars for the purchase of
the properties in that tract that were privately held. But
naturally a lot of those people did not want to
give up their homes, and this is not a case

(23:32):
where they just went along with it. Many of them
fought it for through legal channels. Over the next two years,
there were ongoing court cases and appeal after appeal as
the residents of what would become Central Park, and specifically
the residents of Seneca Village, tried to hang onto the
community they had built. In some instances, those battles were
over the amounts of money that the city had allocated

(23:54):
for specific properties as their like purchase agreement, because the
owners really felt that they were being undervalued. As the
legal issues churned, the city made a map in eighteen
fifty five that was an account of all the separate
properties and their owners, as well as notes on what
dwellings and outbuildings existed on each parcel. This came to

(24:15):
be known as the Central Park Condemnation Map. But eventually
all of the legal avenues for the residents were exhausted
and the city was eager to get on with its
park project. In the summer of eighteen fifty six, Mayor
Fernando Wood issued an eviction notice for Seneca Village. Still
a lot of the residents resisted. News writers penned incendiary

(24:37):
articles indicating that the land should be cleared by any
means necessary to make way for the park that included violence.
How things actually played out is a little unclear, though
some modern versions of this story suggests that police were
called in and a violent series of actions resulted, often
in community members being beaten and dragged from their homes.

(24:57):
But there actually aren't any firsthand at counts of how
and when the holdout residents finally left or were removed.
But by October one, eighteen fifty seven, the land set
aside for Central Park had no human inhabitants anymore. Demolition
of existing structures followed soon after that. By the time
Seneca Village was destroyed, five eighty nine people had lived

(25:21):
there in its three decade existence. And we're gonna pause
here for a sponsor break, and then we'll come back
and talk about trying to trace some of Seneca Villages
lost history. Construction on Central Park began in eighteen fifty eight,

(25:41):
and the lake of the park opened that same year,
Although construction continued throughout the rest of the park for
the next fifteen years. Almost as soon as it had
been raised, it was as though Seneca Village had never existed,
at least in the minds of the people who were
enjoying their new park. One of the big historical tragedy
these is that we don't really know where the residents

(26:03):
of Seneca Village went after they were evicted. All Angels
Church actually moved their building to a new location on
the upper west side the church. Sexton William Wilson moved
near the new church location. It's also known that resident
Andrew Williams moved with his family to Queens, but beyond
that information is thin to non existent, and there are

(26:23):
still efforts to try to locate information about any of
these community members or their descendants. In August eighteen seventy one,
two coffins were accidentally unearthed when landscapers were working in
the area of the park where Seneca Village had been.
One of those coffins was really, really nice and had
an engraved plate on it with the name Margaret McGuinty,

(26:44):
while the other was a simpler style with no identify errs.
Despite the fact that Seneca Village had been an active
community there just fifteen years prior to this discovery. It
was reported as though these coffins were just a complete mystery.
There is no in The cemeteries of Seneca Village attached
to All Angels Church and the amy Zion Church were

(27:06):
relocated after the inhabitants of the village were evicted. The
burial records from amy Zion burned in eighteen thirty nine,
so the earliest records of burials were lost even before that. YEA.
So it's very very possible that since they basically were
knocking down buildings and then covering them with dirt. Uh,
it's very possible that they basically just filled in over

(27:29):
the cemeteries. It is difficult for historians to research and
contextualize the inhabitants of Seneca Village because there aren't, as
we've been saying, a lot of records, and many of
the records that do exist were created because there was
a desire to move those people off of their land. Additionally,
as we have talked about on the show before, it
was the second half of the eighteen twenties when Nissa

(27:51):
Fournie started experimenting with photography in France. So there are
really no photographs of Seneca Village. There are a few
photos that were taken of the landscape as prep was
underway to turn it into a park, and some buildings
appear in those photos that may have been part of this,
but they aren't the focus. They're sort of often the
distance in the background, and it is not a comprehensive

(28:12):
view of the entire community area. There is one family
associated with Seneca Village that there are surviving photos of,
but they were not residents. Albro and Mary Joseph Lyons
had their portraits made as well as their children's portraits
in the eighteen sixties, so while these are important historical items,

(28:32):
they are a degree of remove from actual life in
the village. Will be coming back to them at a
moment though. In the New York Historical Society mounted an
exhibition titled Before Central Park, The Life and Death of
Seneca Village, which challenged the long established story that the
area that became Central Park had been essentially a waste
land before Olmstead and Vox work their landscaping magic. This

(28:56):
exhibit also stoked interest in this subject, helping to bolster
a bigger exploration of the history of the Park's land
before it became Central Park. The Seneca Village Project began
building on work done through the nineteen nineties. That project
was headed by Diana Wall, an anthropology professor at the
City College of New York, Nan Rothschild of the Bernard

(29:17):
Anthropology Department, and Cynthia Copeland of the New York Historical Society.
Wall started research into Seneca Village in the nineteen nineties,
building up a case for the project to gain funding. Initially,
the work that was being done was largely collecting as
much documentation as they could related to Seneca Village, and
then after soil studies and careful initial probing of the area,

(29:40):
it expanded over time into an archaeological dig. And this
project was funded through a number of sources. It received
a Research Experiences for Undergraduates grant from the National Science Foundation,
as well as getting funding from National Geographic the Durst Foundation,
the Guilder Foundation, and Friends of Cornell Edwards. And it
required a lot of careful and savvy negotiations to get

(30:03):
permissions to actually have access to the park for field work.
This is something I have summed up here in just
a few sentences, but please know that this work was
done in very carefully planned stages over the course of years.
It was really really uh an instance of a great
deal of dedication on the part of these people who
initiated it. In twenty eleven, the first excavation project was

(30:26):
conducted at the Seneca Village site that had a combination
of classroom prep work, eight weeks of field work and
four weeks of lab work for the undergrad students who participated.
Field work started on June seven of that year, and
the excavation located, among other things, the foundation wall and
interior of the home of William Godfrey Wilson and Charlotte
Moore Wilson. Also, they found a number of artifacts that

(30:49):
had been part of daily life in the village, including ceramics,
a pipe, a child's shoe, a teapot, things like that. Yeah,
it's interesting. One of the things that comes up lot
when you're looking at this is that people want to
discuss how this was a very poor community. But there's
a really lovely video I came across where some of

(31:11):
the people who worked on this project you're talking about like, no,
this china is as nice as like the middle class
would have owned. Um, you know, there are enough things
that they found that kind of bolster the idea of
like it. It further enhances this picture of it as
a very stable, settled community of people that were not
just like scratching by. They had a sense of of

(31:34):
place and belonging and stability there uh In, new archaeological
work began on the site of Seneca Village as the
playgrounds that have been on the plot of land where
the village once existed were set to undergo renovation. The
Central Park Conservancy also initiated an effort of archabole research
alongside the archaeological work during this construction project, in an

(31:55):
effort to create a more thorough record of the land's history.
The result of this project in recent years has been
the installation of a number of signs in the park
that note the locations of various village buildings and the
village's residents. In the fall of New York Mayor Billed
Blasio announced that Central Park would get a historical monument

(32:16):
about Seneca Village, focusing specifically on the Lyons family, who
we mentioned earlier. While they did not live in Seneca Village,
they were prominent members of Manhattan's nineteenth century black community
and they ran a stop on the underground railroad in
the city. Submissions for the design of that monument were
supposed to be open until April of this year, but
the pandemic has probably put the brakes on that plan. Yeah,

(32:39):
hard to dig up information and once everything went left. UM,
it's cool to me that this has gotten a lot
more attention in recent years. And I like that. I mean,
those people that we mentioned on the Seneca Village project,
they are still working on this and there's still you know,
archable analysis that goes on and and I don't know

(33:00):
if there are plans for additional digs, but it's one
of those things that UH has kind of cropped up
in the news in recent years. But I thought it
might be nice to really talk about just how complete
this community was, because it's not often talked about in
that way. UM, it's a um in that way a
cool thing, and I don't I'm really really glad that

(33:21):
they're making efforts to document prepark history of that area. UM.
I love Central Park, but also am not ignorant to
the fact that it did not just sprout out of
nowhere with land that no one ever had. So I
hope that we'll get more. I hope more and more
stuff comes to light about Seneca Village and the people
that live there. UM. I love it. Anyway, that's what's up.

(33:46):
You want some listener mail, I sure do this listener
mails about Bonds. I. UM, this is from our listener, Keith,
who writes, Hey, Holly and Tracy, I've been listening for
a long time. I just heard your podcast on Bonds.
I I'm a little behind. I think that sounds behind.
That sounds pretty contemporary. Uh. He says that I'm so
excited to actually have a reason to contact you both.
I work at a museum in Colorado, and while this

(34:08):
isn't my specialty, I did really want to mention Colorado's
role in modern bonsai in the US and around the world.
You spoke of the role of Japanese interment camps in bonsai.
To my understanding, the interment camp in Colorado, known as
Amachi or Granada, was instrumental in the resurgence of bonzai
in both the US and Japan after the war. Amasia
was the smallest of the camps, but it held four

(34:29):
expert Bonsaie artists, so the art was common there. Classes developed,
and it was picked up by many of the other prisoners.
Because the plants near the camp weren't traditional Bonsai trees,
the camp prisoners used non traditional local trees such as junipers.
This was the beginning of a new style of bonzai,
which focused on the plants of the area that you're
in instead of limiting the craft to traditional Bonsai trees.

(34:52):
That idea was transported back to Los Angeles after the war,
and eventually back to Japan. After the camp was disbanded,
many of the internees from Mtchi remained in Colorado. Colorado's governor,
Ralph Carr, was the only governor who welcomed the inturnees
to remain as part of their state. Denver actually had
two Bondsai clubs for years, one that spoke English and
one that was dominated by former internees and spoke exclusively

(35:15):
in Japanese. The Denver Botanic Garden still has a wonderful
Japanese garden and a thriving Bondsai club that we wouldn't
have without this history, all of which leads me to
a podcast suggestion, and he mentions Ralph Carr. Uh. He says, anyway,
I hope that's interesting to you and not just a
waste of your time. Thanks for all the history of
the year. Stay safe and healthy. That's super interesting to me.
Um And now I have a place on my list

(35:36):
of things to do next time I am in Denver
because I absolutely want to go see the Botanic Garden.
Uh it's We've had a few people write to us
about Bondsai, which I love, including um our listener Maggie,
who shared a picture of one of hers that uh
no longer survives but was very very pretty. Uh I

(35:57):
love it. I like hearing about people's interest in in
Bonzai and trees in general. It's great, so please keep
sharing those. They're all interesting to me. If you would
like to ideas, you can do so at History Podcast
at i heeart radio dot com. You can find us
on social media as Missed in History, and if you
would like to subscribe to the podcast, we hope that
you do, you can do that on the I heart

(36:17):
Radio app, at Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is you listen.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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