Exploring Black History in the Greenwich Village Historic District
Village Preservation recently released a revamped and updated version of our Greenwich Village Historic District Virtual Maps. Originally created in 2019 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Greenwich Village Historic District, the map includes Then & Now Photographs of the entire district, and a number of thematic tours of sites around the neighborhood. In honor of Black History Month we will explore sites on our Black History Tour.
Greenwich Village has been integral to New York City’s Black history since the 17th century, when a small group of formerly enslaved African Americans became the first non-native settlers of what is today Greenwich Village. In the 1800s, the neighborhood was home to New York’s largest Black community, and in the 20th century drew civil rights organizations and leaders, as well as leading Black writers, artists, and musicians.
North America’s first Free Black Settlement, Washington Square Park
According to historian Christopher Moore, the first legally emancipated community of people of African descent in North America was in Lower Manhattan, comprising much of present-day Greenwich Village and the South Village, and parts of the Lower East Side and East Village. This settlement was comprised of individual landholdings, belonging to former “company slaves” of the Dutch West India Company. Brought to the colony as slaves, and freed in the decades after the founding of New Amsterdam in 1624, they were granted parcels of land by the Council of New Amsterdam, under the condition that a portion of their proceeds go to the Company. Director General William Kieft granted land to manumitted slaves under the guise of a reward for years of loyal servitude. However, the Council may have granted these parcels, at least in part, for more calculated reasons. The farms lay between the settlement of New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan Island and areas controlled by Native Americans to the north. Native Americans sometimes raided or attacked the Dutch settlement, and the farms may have served as a buffer between the two. Scholars have noted that this area was also among the most desirable farmland in the vicinity, and the Dutch Governor Peter Amsterdam established his own farm in this area in 1651, offering a different interpretation of the choice of this area for farmland for manumitted slaves.
Records indicate that two of these farms were located on what is presently Washington Square Park. One, was owned by Paulo d’Angola, who was part of the very first African slave ship to New Amsterdam in 1626. On July 14, 1645, d’Angola was granted a six-acre plot of farmland in present day Washington Square Park, potentially making him the first non-Native American settler in what is now Greenwich Village. The other farm was granted to Anthony Portuguese n September 5th, 1645 by the Council of New Amsterdam. His twelve-acre farm spanned present-day LaGuardia Place, Thompson Street, and Sullivan Street, with its southern boundary below West 3rd St and its northern boundary just below Waverly Place.
The settlement’s status was not permanent. When the English captured the colony of New Amsterdam and renamed it New York in 1664, the newly established English government demoted free blacks from property owners to legal aliens, denying them landowning rights and privileges. Within twenty years, a vast majority of land owned by people of African descent was seized by wealthy white landowners, who turned these former free black settlements into retreats, farms, and plantations.
Learn more about North America’s First Free Black Settlement by checking out our Civil Rights and Social Justice Map.
AME Zion Church, West 10th and Bleecker Streets
This is site of the third location of Mother Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, the founding congregation of the Zion African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church and the very first black church in New York City. The AME Zion Church was founded in 1796 when a group of parishioners, led by former slave James Varick, left the John Street Methodist Church. The church has since had profound effect on African American life. It has been a force for abolition and civil rights and has been the home to prominent civil rights leaders, including Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass.
First, located in a rented house on Cross Street, by 1800, they had built their own house of worship on Church Street. It remained on Church Street until 1864 and became a part of the network of Underground Railroad “stations.” That year, AME Zion purchased the former Dutch Reform Church at 10th and Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village, and remained here until 1904, a time considered “The Flourishing Period” for the church due to its wealth and success. The church then moved to Columbus Avenue and 89th Street, before settling on West 136th Street in Harlem, where it remains today. The old church building at Bleecker and West 10th Streets was replaced by a pair of tenement buildings that still stand.
Café Society/First Performance of ‘Strange Fruit,’ 1 Sheridan Square
Opened in 1938 by Barney Josephson, the Café Society was the first racially integrated nightclub in New York City. Josephson had been a shoe salesman but quit to pursue his dream of owning a nightclub. He knew that Greenwich Village would be the only place in Manhattan that would welcome the progressive club he hoped to establish. Cafe Society welcomed some of the biggest talents in jazz, including Billie Holiday, who here first performed “Strange Fruit,” an explicit song decrying lynching and racism. While Café Society was only open for a little over a decade, its radical politics had an enormous impact, and its legacy lived on long after its doors closed in 1949.
James Baldwin Residence, 81 Horatio Street
James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924 and became a celebrated writer and social critic in his lifetime, exploring complicated issues such as racial, sexuality, and class tensions, as a gay African-American man. Baldwin spent some of his most prolific writing years living in Greenwich Village and wrote of his time there in many of his essays, such as “Notes of a Native Son.” Many of Baldwin’s works address the personal struggles faced by not only black men but of gay and bisexual men, amid a complex social atmosphere. His second novel, Giovanni’s Room, focuses on the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings and frustrations with his relationships with other men. It was published in 1956, well before gay rights were widely supported in America. His residence from 1958 to 1963 was 81 Horatio Street. A historic plaque memorializing his time there was unveiled by Village Preservation on October 7, 2015.
Explore more sites connected to Black History through our Black History Tour and see the many other tours on the Greenwich Village Historic District Virtual Map and Tours. Take the opportunity to delve deeper into our neighborhood through the updated interactive map website here.