When the Lynxleys stole Agnes de Snake's plan for the Weather Walls, he iced over the Reptile District, burying it beneath three storeys of ice and snow.
Comparisons can be drawn in this film with the Israeli paving over of settlements in the West Bank, and the building of New Delhi and Seattle on top of older versions of their respective cities, but to surprised, unsuspecting me, the most obvious connection is a real story of a park for the wealthy and privileged built atop the remains of a Black and Indigenous settlement in the largest city in America: Good Old New York.
In 1825, exactly two hundred years ago, Seneca Village was established as a settlement-slash-neighborhood by members of the wealthy Black community in New York, including the large AME Zion Church, who built a thriving community between 82 Street, 89th Street, 7th Avenue, and 8th Avenue.
Are this time, the only path to voting rights (suffrage) was owning land, making the highly successful Seneca Village a crucial forward step for endangered and frequently disenfranchised Black Americans.
By the 1840s, Seneca Village was a majority Black community also including Irish, German, and Indigenous landowners, business owners, and tenants. There were three churches (two AME and one Catholic), one of the only integrated schools in the city, several cemeteries, and fresh water from a dammed spring that would eventually become the Jackie Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. Today, the Reservoir, located at what was once the northern edge of the town, is the only piece of Senenca Village remaining: the defunct Reptile District lighthouse, if you will.
It's still unclear where Seneca Village derived its name. Some think it may have been an homage to the Seneca tribe, who still have territory further north in New York State at Salamanca. Some think it may have been a distorted form of the name of the country Senegal (which could have been a code word used by the Underground Railroad). It may even have been a reference to the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, popular at the time among Black academics and activists.
At that time, members of the city's white upper crust decided they wanted a large park in Manhattan: something like London's Hyde and Regents Parks, so that they could walk and ride horses and compete with London for the title of Greatest City at the Centre of an Empire.
Jones's Wood was considered as a location, but wealthy white families doesn't want to give up their lands. After an attempted acquisition was blocked by injunction, the board of commissioners turned their sights on Seneca Village and a nearby tract of land already called Central Park.
Seneca Village was decried in the press and by advocates of the Central Park construction as a “shantytown” full of run-down shacks, barefoot naked children, criminals, and illegal squatters: blatant, obvious lies basically describing it as a homeless encampment. The people of New York who had never had cause to actually visit Seneca Village sucked it right up, and in 1855, the the city began to clear the neighborhood out as if it was one.
Residents were offered money for their lands, sometimes even a lot of money (one man was paid $2,335 for his lands, nearly $90,000 dollars in today's money), leased the lands back, and enforced obscure, nitpicky regulations to evict anyone they could from the community. Residents fought back, waging a battle in courts, town halls, and newspapers, that lasted until sometime in the summer of 1856, when final evictions were issued and the denizens of Seneca Village were forcibly cleared from the land. They dispersed throughout the city, and its memory and name were buried by the Mayor with its buildings under soil and green grass and neatly manicured pathways.
Only in the 1970s was the village rediscovered by historian and author Peter Salwen (potentially the NYC artist of the same name, but likely unrelated), who noticed discrepancies in some maps, did a little digging, and brought the settlement back into the light in his 1989 publication Upper West Side Story: A History and Guide. Other historians seized on the information and in 1992 Roy Rozenweig and Elizabeth Blackmar released The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, delving deep into the stories of Seneca Village and other communities that once stood where Central Park is now. The Village became the subject of a 1997 Historical Society exhibition, and a year later a historical project was formed that became the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History. Three years later, a plaque was unveiled commemorating the site, and in 2019, plans were underway for a statue in memory of one of the neighborhood's wealthy Black families, while an outdoor exhibit called “Discover Seneca Village” opened. Originally only slated to run for a year, it has remained open much longer due to popularity.
I remember when the exhibit opened: it came across my news feed while I was a fifteen year old high school student, and I dug deep into the story of the village and the existing resources and history available, searching up maps and photographs and names. In my own town in the 1960s, several blocks of homes in a vibrant Black community were evacuated on short notice and then burned, with left-behind furniture and appliances still inside, in the name of “urban renewal”. The fires burned for weeks, keeping nearby community residents awake into the night and stinking of noxious fumes. They made way for a trucking warehouse and a number of strip malls. At least 75% of that space that was once family homes and beautiful trees is now parking lots.
Turns out when they pave Paradise, it's usually the Black neighborhoods that get paved.
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