In early 2019, Nicole Clare stumbled upon a dingy old auto repair shop for sale in the Inwood neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan. She had been looking for sites to build shelters for a homeless services nonprofit. The auto shop’s lot fit the bill.
Situated next to an elevated train line, the property had seemed ordinary, with a big parking lot and a small building that could easily be razed. By that September, the down payment was in place, and the nonprofit was ready to move forward with design and construction.
But then Ms. Clare received a call about the site’s dark history: Long before the auto shop, before skyscrapers dominated Manhattan’s skyline and even before the subway was built, the site had been a burial ground for enslaved people.
In a city that’s in a constant state of redevelopment, where every block has a past, what is the right thing to do with sites that have a grim back story?
In 1903, as the neighborhood was being developed, workers who were leveling 10th Avenue in Inwood unearthed roughly a dozen skeletons. About 40 percent of New York households had slaves in the early 18th century, and slavery wasn’t abolished in the state until 1827.
When the nonprofit, the Bowery Residents’ Committee, learned about the graveyard, it hit pause, unsure of what to do next. The Department of Homeless Services had uncovered the history during an environmental review of the site, at 3972 10th Avenue. “It was really a gut blow,” said Ms. Clare, the nonprofit’s head of real estate development.
She said the group couldn’t “act or go on as normal.” At the same time, she didn’t want to walk away from the site entirely — wouldn’t someone else just buy it and build a McDonald’s or a vape shop? Employees at the nonprofit spent months meeting with community members and descendants of slavery to figure out how to build the shelter in a way that respected the land’s history.
Now, more than six years later, the transformation of the former burial site into a homeless shelter and public memorial is almost complete. The American Museum of Natural History has some of the remains of people who were buried there, but will return them to the memorial, Ms. Clare said.
With the Inwood shelter, the Bowery Residents’ Committee and the Department of Social Services are hoping to bring attention to how the traumas of the past continue to play out in the present.
“We know that deep-rooted inequities continue to drive generational poverty across historically marginalized communities, and the city’s homelessness crisis overwhelmingly impacts Black and brown New Yorkers,” said Molly Wasow Park, the Department of Social Services commissioner, in an emailed statement.
While Black people account for less than a quarter of the city’s total population, the Coalition for the Homeless reported that they make up more than half of heads of household in homeless shelters.
“Communities of color were systematically excluded from wealth-building and long-term housing stability through decades of formalized redlining policies,” Ms. Wasow Park said. “This deeply discriminatory practice — certainly a vestige of our country’s dark legacy of slavery — consistently undermined minorities and shaped the face of modern homelessness.”
People are often surprised to hear that slavery existed in New York, said Melissa Kiewiet, the executive director of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, which is named after a family of slaveholders in Manhattan. “That narrative is just taught over and over — it’s a Southern problem, it’s a Southern problem,” she said.
As early as the 1620s, Dutch colonizers trafficked slaves as they settled New Amsterdam, which was the territory of the Lenape Indigenous people but would eventually become New York City.
Jan Dyckman, one of the settlers, had arrived in the 1660s and started amassing land in northern Manhattan. At one point, the Dyckman family owned about 250 acres, running roughly from 190th to 215th Street. With slave labor, they farmed apples, cherries and pears, according to Ms. Kiewiet.
Near their farmhouse, the Dyckmans used two adjacent cemeteries — one for family members and the other for the enslaved workers.
The Dyckmans began selling off their land, and by the early 1900s, Inwood was being rapidly developed. Tenth Avenue was being leveled for the Interborough Rapid Transit Company’s new train line in 1903 when construction workers found the skeletons. The New York Times reported that a neighbor said it was widely known that the site was a burial plot for slaves. Though a police captain ordered that the skeletons be reburied, they were left “in a confused mass in an old soap box near the scene of the work,” according to the report.
Amateur archaeologists and scientists then rushed to the site, and some of the remains were looted. Around 36 bodies had been buried there, according to the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum. Several Lenape artifacts, including oyster shell pockets and pottery fragments, were also discovered. “It was the heyday of amateur archaeology, like Indiana Jones,” Ms. Kiewiet said. “They’re just looking for things.”
Among those who came and collected was Ales Hrdlicka, an anthropologist and pioneer of eugenics, who worked at the American Museum of Natural History. The museum still has the remains of seven people buried at the site, said Peggy King Jorde, a historic preservationist who is consulting with the Bowery Residents’ Committee on the Inwood site.
In 1916, the Dyckmans’ farmhouse was donated to the city, and it became a museum. The burial site is about a 10-minute walk away.
The shelter is slated to open in the coming weeks, with 116 beds for single women in a congregate dorm where rooms, bathrooms and the dining area are all shared.
A door next to the main entrance opens to a ramp leading to the memorial. The interior, which is still a work in progress, is inspired by praise houses, the small, single-room structures on Southern plantations that served as gathering and contemplative spaces for enslaved people.
Ms. King Jorde said she hopes visitors will experience “a transitioning from the living to the spiritual world” as they enter.
A cosmogram will be embossed onto the floor surrounded by benches made of sassafras, a plant that Indigenous people used for healing and the symbol of the Lenape Center, a nonprofit. The back wall will be floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out onto a small outdoor space that has a burial mound for the remains from the museum.
“It was a real struggle getting the design to take on the right tone,” said Mark Gardner, an architect who worked on the memorial. “Not to be so formal, but at the same time you want to evoke something from people.”
Ms. King Jorde said she views the site as a reclamation for the “humanity of the individuals who were taken out of the ground, the humanity of those individuals experiencing homelessness and the humanity of the Indigenous people.”
Anna Kodé writes about design and culture for the Real Estate section of The Times.
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