227 Abolitionist Place

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THE CURRENT SITUATIONWhile 227 Abolitionist Place is no longer threatened with the wrecking ball, many difficult structural, and financial challenges remain. We have launched a massive and ongoing fundraising drive to secure the safety of 227 Abolitionist Place to bring the Museum to fruition.Below is short video of a NY Times reporter climbing into the tunnel used to hide enslaved Africans who were fighting for their freedom.History on Duffield Street By ROBERT FURMAN | June 20, 2007What would be the reaction if the City Economic Development Corporation suggested tearing down Fraunces Tavern and Federal Hall and replacing them with a hotel and an underground parking garage to attract tourism and then stated it would add a heritage trail to commemorate where they had been?In point of fact, the buildings on those sites are not the actual places where, respectively, George Washington said farewell to his troops and was inaugurated as our first president. The tavern is a 1909 reconstruction, and Federal Hall, our first Capitol, which had been New York's City Hall, was torn down in 1831 and replaced by the current Sub-Treasury Building.We seek those shrines to liberty in spite of them being facsimiles because they are crucial to us for knowing who we are. Note the only survivor of colonial era in downtown New York City is St. Paul's Chapel.Is the history of abolitionism and slavery so much less significant that EDC will be permitted to do just that in Brooklyn where 223-237 Duffield Street, houses it concedes were probably involved in the Underground Railroad, are slated to be replaced by an underground parking garage, a park, and access for a hotel? An Underground Railroad Freedom Trail was added as an afterthought. The houses are to be seized from the owners by eminent domain as part of the Downtown Brooklyn Urban Renewal Plan that seeks to replace everything old with high-rise hotels, offices, housing, and big-box stores.The owner of 227 Duffield Street, Joy Chatel, wants the house converted into a museum about abolitionism and the Underground Railroad. Her children and grandchildren are descendents of Frederick Douglass. The house was owned by the abolitionists, Thomas and Harriet Truesdell, who were colleagues of William Lloyd Garrison.The row of houses possesses archaeological anomalies, which professionals consider possible tunnels for moving escaping slaves. The city's historical consultant, AKRF, hired to reach the conclusion that the houses were unimportant, declined to evaluate these features via its own staff archaeologist, alleging this could not be done without demolishing the houses. This is a palpable falsehood — at a May 1 oversight hearing City Councilman, John Liu, said electronic remote sensing could be done without any disturbance of building or soil, seconding the views of EDC's own academic peer reviewer archaeologist, Cheryl LaRoche. Instead, AKRF had an architectural historian inspect plans and conclude the features were unimportant.Why build a freedom trail to nowhere? Wouldn't downtown Brooklyn be a better tourism destination if visitors could cower underground in the same tunnels where fugitives slaves did?We actually have the beginnings of a national historic park in the area. Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims in nearby Brooklyn Heights is a known abolitionist site because of the activities of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher who staged a mock slave auction there in 1860. His sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote "Uncles Tom's Cabin." Abraham Lincoln paid tribute to the importance of that book in turning public opinion against slavery by calling her "the little lady who started this big war."Two blocks from Duffield Street, which is co-named "Abolitionist Way," within the Metrotech office park, stands what is marked as Polytechnic University's Student Center, but it is obviously a very old church. In 1860 it was the Bridge Street A.M.E., Brooklyn's first black church, and an abolitionist site.So why has New York always replaced the old with the new and ignored history while doing so? The question answers itself — we are the city of the new.Unlike much of the rest of the country, we were founded by the mercantile Dutch as a trading city, and prospered as the nation's port and financier of shipping. Land in desirable areas has always been scarce, so developers have always been influential.While developers continue to be the major donors to many elected officials, our current mayor has self-financed his campaigns so he is not subject to these pressures. But he is a self-made billionaire who is therefore sympathetic to other businessmen.Moreover, back office space and corporate headquarters do not appear to be the city's future as they were in its past. Rather, tourism and upper-end residential real estate seem to be replacing offices.It has been suggested that the deputy mayor, Dan Doctoroff, who is being spoken of as Mayor Bloomberg's successor and is in charge of the redevelopment we are discussing, is today's Robert Moses. But Moses, for all his faults, operated in what was then perceived as the public interest using public funds supplied by a president from New York, Franklin Roosevelt, and thereafter by a Democratic controlled Congress.Those funds are gone, and redevelopment must be privately financed, so Mr. Doctoroff, a former investment banker, enables private business to rebuild the city. Moses specifically opposed the use of eminent domain for private projects when a new stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers was proposed for Atlantic Terminal.Are we to be a shining new city without a soul?Mr. Furman is chairman of the Four Borough Neighborhood Preservation Alliance Corporation and a historian of New York City.