The True Story of Seneca

*Spoiler Alert If you have not yet read the The Twilight Prisoner, you may want to stop here.

On the west side of Central Park, between West 81st and 89th streets just off Central Park West, is a real-life ghost town. Though commemorated only by a small plaque and referred to as recently as 1995 by one top New York reference book as a “squatter camp”, Seneca Village was in fact a full-fledged and legitimate town with 250 people, 60 households, 3 churches and a school. Founded in 1825 by free African-Americans including Epiphany Davis, who bought their lots, the village was largely African-American but later expanded to include Irish residents as well. Relations between the two groups were reportedly harmonious--one of the churches, All Angels,’ was even racially integrated. Though no one knows exactly how the village got its name, one theory is that the village’s African-American founders admired the Roman philosopher Seneca whose treatise Morals argued for the kinder treatment of slaves.

So how did this legitimate and progressive town become the squatter camp that history records it as? As early as the 1830s, powerful New Yorkers began to advocate for a park and finally, in response to these demands, in 1853 the state legislature authorized the purchase of the 760-acre tract of land that would become Central Park. In order to get rid of the residents of Seneca Village, the city legislature used a practice called eminent domain in which the government can force landowners to relinquish their property for the public good so long as it fairly compensates them for their property’s value.

Under eminent domain, residents of Seneca Village were ordered to vacate their homes by August 1, 1856. One of them, an original owner named Andrew Williams, filed a petition to the State Supreme Court of New York arguing that the city had not fairly compensated him for his land. By this time, public opinion had become vehemently pro-park. Newspaper articles published at the time described the land the city had taken over as filled with shantytowns of “squatters” and “tramps.” To be sure, there were shantytowns and tramps in the park but the papers made only subtle distinctions between these illegal inhabitants and the legal ones in Seneca Village. One article referred to Seneca Village as “Nigger Village” and, while complimenting the “Ebon inhabitants” for their neatness, noted that, “the policemen find it difficult to persuade them of the idea which has possessed their simple minds, that the sole object of the authorities in making the Park is to procure their expulsion from the homes which they occupy.”

There is a famous saying, “History is written by the winners” and the story of Seneca Village illustrates this. Seneca’s inhabitants were forced out, the park was built and became an iconic part of the city, and by the turn of the 19th century, the false idea that the land had once been merely the province of illegal squatters and tramps had become fact. Forty years after the park’s creation, even Egbert Viele, who had included Seneca Village on his 1856 survey, described the land as “the refuge of about five thousand squatters, dwelling in rude huts of their own construction, and living off the refuse of the city.” Seneca Village was forgotten for nearly a hundred years. It wasn’t until the 1990s that city scholars and archeologists began to piece together the story of this unique community. Read more about their work and the Seneca Village story, including more illustrations, here at the New York Historical Society's amazing site.

I decided to include the story of Seneca Village in The Twilight Prisoner not only because I find the idea of a real ghost town in Central Park incredibly cool but because I believe that the stories of history’s so-called losers are as important and valuable as those of its winners. On a final note, the spring that Epiphany Davis guards in The Twilight Prisoner actually exists. Known as Tanner’s Spring, it can still be found at the end of a short trail near the base of Summit Rock.