Blacks in Manhattan: St. Augustine's Slave Gallery
It is a clear Sunday morning in the summer of 1828 and skiffs filled with people both black and white make their way across the East River from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan Island. The white people are churchgoers, on their way to services. The black men rowing them will also worship. The African-Americans guide the skiffs into slips and the white families disembark, making their way to Henry Street, where lies St. Augustine's, a brand-new Episcopal church. They take their places in the pews that fill the nave. Meanwhile the blacks climb up two treacherously narrow staircases to a pair of small rooms behind the pipe organ at the back of the church. It is dark and stiflingly hot where the Africans stand packed together.
These rooms made up the church's slave gallery, one of two that remain in the United States today. (The other is in Boston's South Church.) For decades the church's staff and its parishioners knew what the spaces had been, but not until 1999 did they decide to really explore the gallery's history.
"It was there—people would go up there, children would play in it—but no one talked about it," says Rev. Edgar W. Hopper, St. Augustine's deacon. "Why? I think because the church wanted to forget that part of its history, but the African-Americans in the congregation were also reluctant to admit that their ancestors were slaves. Our rector, Rev. Dr. Errol Harvey, and I were concerned that the African-American presence in New York's history was getting lost."
What is so remarkable about two cramped rooms in a church? Described by nothing more than floorboards, walls, and a few hinge marks, they give only a small glimpse African-American life on the Lower East Side, but they speak volumes about segregation in Manhattan at that time. In 1799 the state legislature had passed a bill providing for the gradual emancipation of New York’s slaves, but the white citizenry did not extend the same thinking to worship. Yet in the very southern city of New Orleans, where race mixing and segregation was severely codified, people of all color and class prayed side by side at St. Louis Cathedral.
That the space in St. Augustine’s was called a slave gallery at all "raises certain questions about African-Americans in New York," says Elizabeth Sevecenko, vice president of programs at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The museum, founded in 1988, and housed in an actual nineteenth-century tenement building, is a center for projects like the one at St. Augustine's, which it took on last year. "Slavery here was abolished in 1827," Sevecenko relates, "yet a year afterward the slave gallery was built. If that was the case, what did freedom mean for black New Yorkers?"
African-Americans numbered around 2,000 in Lower Manhattan in the 1820s. Over the century, they were pushed north to Harlem as other cultural groups moved into the Lower East Side. "This is still a diversified neighborhood," says Sevecenko, "but relationships among the different groups are very fractured, mostly because of competition over living space brought on by rising real estate costs and gentrification." She believes that looking at the role that architecture and crowding have played in the lives of minorities in Manhattan can help us understand the nature of a neighborhood that today is still much peopled by immigrants.
Study of the slave gallery is the first of what promise to be several projects for the Lower East Side Community Preservation Program (LESCPP), which is shepherded by a consortium of neighborhood groups and the Tenement Museum. Sevecenko looks at the slave gallery as a way to connect different ethnic groups. "We're preserving the African-American site as a shared experience," she explains. "The gallery speaks powerfully about anyone who has been treated badly because of his race or religion." The LESCPP and Rev. Hopper want to take the project to another level. "We're hoping this will lead to a full-blown museum that would include African-American history throughout New York City," he says.
These rooms made up the church's slave gallery, one of two that remain in the United States today. (The other is in Boston's South Church.) For decades the church's staff and its parishioners knew what the spaces had been, but not until 1999 did they decide to really explore the gallery's history.
"It was there—people would go up there, children would play in it—but no one talked about it," says Rev. Edgar W. Hopper, St. Augustine's deacon. "Why? I think because the church wanted to forget that part of its history, but the African-Americans in the congregation were also reluctant to admit that their ancestors were slaves. Our rector, Rev. Dr. Errol Harvey, and I were concerned that the African-American presence in New York's history was getting lost."
What is so remarkable about two cramped rooms in a church? Described by nothing more than floorboards, walls, and a few hinge marks, they give only a small glimpse African-American life on the Lower East Side, but they speak volumes about segregation in Manhattan at that time. In 1799 the state legislature had passed a bill providing for the gradual emancipation of New York’s slaves, but the white citizenry did not extend the same thinking to worship. Yet in the very southern city of New Orleans, where race mixing and segregation was severely codified, people of all color and class prayed side by side at St. Louis Cathedral.
That the space in St. Augustine’s was called a slave gallery at all "raises certain questions about African-Americans in New York," says Elizabeth Sevecenko, vice president of programs at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The museum, founded in 1988, and housed in an actual nineteenth-century tenement building, is a center for projects like the one at St. Augustine's, which it took on last year. "Slavery here was abolished in 1827," Sevecenko relates, "yet a year afterward the slave gallery was built. If that was the case, what did freedom mean for black New Yorkers?"
African-Americans numbered around 2,000 in Lower Manhattan in the 1820s. Over the century, they were pushed north to Harlem as other cultural groups moved into the Lower East Side. "This is still a diversified neighborhood," says Sevecenko, "but relationships among the different groups are very fractured, mostly because of competition over living space brought on by rising real estate costs and gentrification." She believes that looking at the role that architecture and crowding have played in the lives of minorities in Manhattan can help us understand the nature of a neighborhood that today is still much peopled by immigrants.
Study of the slave gallery is the first of what promise to be several projects for the Lower East Side Community Preservation Program (LESCPP), which is shepherded by a consortium of neighborhood groups and the Tenement Museum. Sevecenko looks at the slave gallery as a way to connect different ethnic groups. "We're preserving the African-American site as a shared experience," she explains. "The gallery speaks powerfully about anyone who has been treated badly because of his race or religion." The LESCPP and Rev. Hopper want to take the project to another level. "We're hoping this will lead to a full-blown museum that would include African-American history throughout New York City," he says.
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