In his new book Seneca Village, Alexander Manevitz provides the most in-depth study to date of this remarkable community in antebellum Manhattan. Beginning in 1825, free African Americans bought land and built this settlement in today’s Central Park with the intent of fostering Black social, economic, and political self-determination. But in the 1850s, New York City forcibly evicted the residents, seized the land, and destroyed the buildings, burying the neighborhood under the landscape of the Park.

Manevitz reconstructs this history by investigating the overlooked traces they left behind, focusing on their interconnected lives and daily work. Decades before the Civil War and Reconstruction, this community honed a vision of Black freedom on their own terms, fighting to create space for themselves in a country that promised liberty for all but denied it to many.