Seneca Village Landscape

Historical accounts portrayed Seneca Village and the land later taken for Central Park in derogatory terms, emphasizing rocky, swampy, and diseased conditions, while park promoters presented the site as a wasteland to justify its seizure for recreation and to cast the park as an extraordinary transformation. Closer study has shown that although parts of the landscape were swampy and rocky, it also included small gardens, woodlands, and hills that some regarded as beautiful and productive. Research into the village has examined the land’s natural and built features, seeking to understand how residents lived there and what survived of the mid-19th-century pre-park landscape, revealing a place shaped both by residents’ agency and by urban growth and change. When the first African Americans began buying property there in 1825, the city’s northern border was around 23rd Street, but by the time residents were forced to leave in 1857, development had reached as far north as 50th Street and the city’s population had grown almost sevenfold. Originally a remote settlement that researchers believe residents viewed as a refuge from the crowded conditions and racist climate of Lower Manhattan, Seneca Village became less remote as urbanization gradually encroached on it with little accommodation for African Americans or the poor. This northward expansion appeared in the village through the grid plan, the construction of new streets such as Eighth Avenue and 86th Street by 1830, and the reservoir completed in 1842 along the village’s east side. In 1851, after the city outlawed burials below 86th Street and barred new burial grounds in Manhattan, the village’s churches had to obtain burial space in newly developed rural cemeteries in Queens. The same dramatic urban growth that affected Seneca Village also drove the creation of Central Park, as city leaders sought a large park to counter overcrowding, harm to public health, and the lack of recreational open space, while some supporters and businessmen also expected it to spur surrounding real estate development. Construction of the park forced residents to move, leveled houses, and graded and landscaped the site, but the area was not completely refashioned because the reservoir and the hilly, rocky topography made radical transformation too difficult. The original design for this section relied mainly on paths and roads and a new reservoir north of the existing one, and in the 1930s the Parks Department added two playgrounds and filled the original reservoir to create the Great Lawn. Some natural features nevertheless remain, especially the many rock outcrops. The geology of the area likely helped lead Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux to preserve some of its character and existing features, which also suited their ideal of scenic beauty and the park’s role as an escape from the city. The site includes some of the area’s most striking landforms, including Summit Rock, now the park’s highest point, a massive outcrop that would have been prominent in Seneca Village and was nearly impossible to remove, and nearby Tanner’s Spring, believed to have been a principal water source for the village.

New York, New York · United States