Gotham City Soul

I've backtracked five years to give a short chronicle of black people and their migration up the island of Manhattan. This is swiped from Ame rican Legacy , for which I wrote this article in 2003 called "At Rest". And so they were buried. After two centuries of lying forgotten in the ground, and another dozen years being studied, squabbled over, and finally, honored, 419 wooden caskets, decorated with traditional West African symbols and village scenes were lowered into crypts in a small plot of land next to 290 Broadway, all that remains, in any practical sense, of an African burial ground, the oldest known cemetery of its kind in the United States. As I walked along Reade Street toward Broadway on my way to the reinterment ceremony in October 2003, I in all likelihood walked near more graves, all located under downtown buildings. The original burial ground spread across five to six acres of lower Manhattan that is today bounded by Duane Street and City Hall Park o...

On this day in 1689 the then-governor of New York, Jacob Leisler, wrote a letter to King William and Queen Mary of England about Fort Amsterdam situated right along State Street (at that time the water line was at State Street) informing them that the city was nearly destroyed. “I have immediately proceeded to the proclaiming [of a day for prayer and thanksgiving] which was solemnly effected the 22nd day of June when we had miraculous deliverance of a fyre which had been kendled in three severall places upon the Terret of the Church in the fort six thousand pounds of powder being next under the same roof and suspected to be done by one Papist who had been there before and was discovered by one Neger, and fort, city and the people were trew God’s mercy, saved of that hellish design." A few days after Jacob Leisler wrote the king and queen he mounted a rebellion of his own, seizing the very fort the Papist had allegedly tried to destroy. Leisler claimed that he was holding the fort...