Mapping the History of Slavery in New York
A Slavers of New York sticker pasted over a Bergen Street subway sign. Photo courtesy of Ada Reso This interview is a part of “Memory Loss,” a series co-published with Urban Omnibus.
Nostrand, Bergen, Stuyvesant: Many of New York City’s streets and neighborhoods are named after families who owned or traded slaves. For a number of New Yorkers, this fact is unsurprising. Slavery was a source of colossal wealth for the city, fueling the construction of both local infrastructure and the Southern plantations from which its businesses extracted huge profits. In 1730, 42 percent of families in New York City owned at least one person; many slaves were bought and sold at a market located on what is presently known as Wall Street. Still, the origin of the city’s street names elicits disbelief in others. Some are haunted by the question: In 2021, why are slavers still dignified with toponyms?
Streets names are an inescapable part of navigating city life, embedded into the addresses of our homes, schools, and workplaces. It is near impossible to give directions in Brooklyn, for example, without invoking the name of a historic local slaver. The family of nineteenth-century congressman Teunis G. Bergen, for whom Bergen St. is named, owned at least forty-six people in 1810. Nostrand Avenue is named for one of the first Dutch families to colonize Manhattan. The family went on to own approximately forty-three people between 1790 and 1820.
Co-naming a street is an increasingly popular way for communities to interrupt these narratives that privilege slave-owning colonists and wealthy landowners. But the process can often a take up to a year, and is at the discretion of community boards, whose on the official city map. So activist group Slavers of New York is changing the streetscape by different means: archival research, mapping, and small-scale interventions. Part of their work involves literally contextualizing the city’s street signs with straightforward, uncomfortable notes about the families and individuals for whom they were named. Here the group’s three founders, Elsa Waithe, Maria Robles, and Ada Reso, discuss their mission to place facts in the hands of everyday people, and to bring attention to legacy of slavery encoded in the city’s signs.
