The African Burial Ground

It is difficult to imagine away the tall buildings and traffic noise that dominate Duane Street and the fragment of the African Burial Ground that is memorialized by raised grass plots and a marble monument. The "Negro Burial Ground," as early nineteenth-century maps designate it, actually extends from Reade Street north beyond Duane and east as far as Foley Square.

In a sense, its existence was one of New York's most closely kept secrets. New York historians and city planners always knew it was there, though prospective real estate developers, even after they had learned it existed, preferred to forget it. In 1992, excavations for the Federal office building that straddles the site revealed the burials, hundreds of them, and their numbers made it difficult for the authorities to forget. Surprise of surprises, New York survived without another Federal office building and, though it took almost sixteen years, gained a monument as moving and distinctive the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., whose design it echoes.

Here is a little known fact about the location. One approaching the African Burial Ground from the corner of Chambers and Elk Streets at the Surrogates Court building and walking downhill across Reade is walking along the execution track used to send slaves convicted of a capital crime to their deaths. The place of execution was on the island of Little Collect Pond, just at the western edge of Foley Square and half a block from the African Burial Ground Monument. Until Collect Pond was drained in 1829, the swampy surroundings held tanneries, a brewery, a ghetto of freed and escaped slaves, and a poor ground for their burial.

The remarkable thing is the dignified pride with which they were buried: all facing east to the rising sun and to Africa; all with bits of jewelery, stones, or beads that marked their particular region of that continent. When one most despairs of humanity, it is worth remembering the extent to which we live in hope, even after death.

The Rhinelander Sugar House

Hidden away behind the Municipal Building is an inconspicuous monument to an atrocity, the Rhinelander Sugar House massacre. During the Revolutionary War, while the city was under the occupation of English troops, the Sons of Liberty conducted a campaign to intimidate Tory residents and harass the occupying army. Some of this was almost playful, such as the erection of "Liberty Poles," stolen pinewood masts furtively set up in public places. Once such place was in northeastern City Hall Park, then simply called the Common, where the statue of Nathan Hale presently stands. This would have been less than five hundred feet from where the Redcoats were bivouacked.

Often, though, the actions of the Sons of Liberty more closely resembled what we might nowadays call terrorism. Homes and businesses belonging to British sympathizers were destroyed by fire in the middle of the night, and in 1776 an enormous fire spread north from Pearl as far as Vesey Street.

New York was, however, a city that generally supported England and its Royalist citizens demanded that the occupying army take strong measures against the Sons of Liberty. Makeshift prisons appeared in various places of the city, among them the Rhinelander Sugar House, a warehouse for the storage of Caribbean sugar that stood at Duane and Rose Streets until 1892. The prisoners in the sugar house were allowed to starve. Indeed, during the English occupation of New York City from 1776 to 1783, it is estimated that 11,000 revolutionists died in such prisons.

When the sugar house was demolished, a loft called the Rhinelander Building replaced it. Several of the sugar house prison windows were incorporated into the loft building, which itself was demolished in 1968 at the construction of One Police Plaza, the central New York City police headquarters . One section of the sugar house wall was transported to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and re-erected near the Van Cortlandt mansion. A single window and its surrounding brickwork was incorporated into a small monument just behind the subway arcade of the Municipal Building.