An Archaeology Of Architecture: The Harlem African Burial

Ground

1. Specifically, enslaved African women in the Caribbean, primarily Barbados. See Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

2. One strategy is “critical fabulation,” a writing methodology introduced by historian Saidiya Hartman that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative.

3. Quotation from Fuentes’s presentation at the 2019 conference “1619 and Its Legacies” at Columbia University.

When historian Marisa J. Fuentes set out to find and document individual voices from the lives of enslaved Africans in the Americas,1 she found the archive so lacking that it was impossible to write a standard historical text. Almost always, enslaved individuals entered the historical record through instances of violence, through the hand and gaze of the oppressor. Facing thin and fragmented, even nonexistent records, Fuentes initiated a creative form of scholarship in order to generate a living subjectivity out of the very impossibility of her “site.”2 In her book Dispossessed Lives Fuentes chronicles these individuals and the process of restoring their subjectivity. In the chapter “On Jane and Method,” for example, she uses a runaway slave advertisement to meticulously construct a vignette of Jane, one of the names she gives to unnamed enslaved individuals, thus subverting the archive of that space and time. Only by examining how the machinations of power have operated is Fuentes able to portray the subjects themselves. As she puts it, “The problem of the archive transcends time and plays out two hundred and fifty years later when one still cannot even write about these figures . . . these figures who were not meant for history” – at least not in its current practice.

Neither are these figures easily represented in architecture in its current practice. The archival abyss that surrounds their histories, dispossessions, and subjectivities poses both a practical problem (of memorialization or representation) and a pedagogical problem that centers around violence and, more so, repair. Can we architects do what Fuentes does in our own discipline? How might we mirror her act of scholarly resistance and mount an architectural resistance to our own disciplinary forms of violence? First, we have to identify how architectural violence parallels archival violence and how this violence works. Second, we need creative forms of

James Barron, “Rezoning pedagogy and practice that not only allow for the marginalized imaginary to speak but also to reframe our discipline such that the conditions for violence and erasure are destabilized. At the same time, we have an opportunity to build up knowledge and new ways of interpreting architecture that allow for these forms of practice to be understood and valued. This challenge is brought to bear at site of particular significance, recently unearthed African burial ground in Harlem. The New York City Economic Development Corporation wants to develop the immediate surroundings of the burial ground into mixed-use housing complex with cultural center and “living memorial” at its heart. The plan to construct an “everyday” urbanism around this highly symbolic site is a starting point for interrogating development where building anything at all is questionable. Can memorial be ephemeral? Can be a set of ethics or programs that pervade the entire site? What tactics can be developed to create an architecture that supports new archival practices?

The implications of this query extend beyond single site, building typology, or set of individual narratives. These questions have been bolstered by the extensive work of historians and community members, as well as by design students with whom I’ve worked on this and related sites. We looked deeply into several areas of the architectural discipline, particularly time, ground, and archive, pushing ourselves to reconceptualize these concepts in new and unconventional ways and testing how each is involved in generating new imaginary out of the historical and architectural layers of site.

The Burial Ground

Where the busy 125th Street commercial corridor meets the western terminus of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, there is terrain vague of vacant lots, city vehicles, and police presence – an infrastructural hodgepodge that includes a nondescript Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus depot that spans an entire city block immediately to the north. At 126th Street and First Avenue, beneath portion of the decommissioned depot’s concrete foundation, lies a 17th-century African burial ground that, until its excavation in 2015, few were aware of, even in the communities of Harlem. Miraculously, some scant record of the site’s significance survives in the present: fragments of oral histories, church records, and the faded 1820 John Randel Map that, when examined closely, denotes the “Negro Burying Ground.” One can just make out the irregular, residual shape outlining the

146 Log 48 ad hoc cemetery. The figuration of the boundary is residual and crude, formed by what was then the Harlem River embankment. Today, the river’s edge is an infilled, impervious bulwark nearly 100 feet east of the site, obscured by the infrastructural snarl of the FDR Drive overpasses.

The second church of the Low Dutch Reformed Church, 1686.

16. The series of plans and corresponding maps put place grid of rectangular blocks in Manhattan between Houston and 155th Street.

17. The more agrarian “commons” that characterized the village Nieuw Haarlem, for example.

18. her recent show “1919: Black Water,”

Dyson produced work with Chicago’s history of water and blackness, as well the “current conditions of increasing water levels, land being exhausted, migration, warming.” Torkwase Dyson, “Black Compositional Thought,” interview by Mabel O. Wilson, in 1919: Black Water ed. Irene Sunwoo (New York: Columbia GSAPP, 2019), 16. Exhibition catalogue.

The Ground, the Archive, and Time

When reflecting on the evolution of the Harlem site, the importance of the ground itself cannot be overstated. While the burial ground contains the literal repository of remains and artifacts registry now many times disturbed and eroded – the terrain also indexes layers and layers of political power and environmental violence. The establishment and redrawing of lot lines and changes in land ownership led to historical erasure and the loss of agency for the residents, including those whose ancestors were buried in the cemetery. In 1811, during massive rescripting of the topos of the city to realize the Commissioner’s Plan,16 the capital-driven, grid urbanism often proved antagonistic to other forms of community like the commons of Nieuw Haarlem that once flourished here.17

The burial ground remains blighted and polluted area made toxic by fuel spills, and today its future is further threatened by a rising flood zone. Homeless people shelter under the nearby overpasses in makeshift structures. Attempting to chart and navigate the historical interface between blackness, environmental degradation, the disrupted shoreline, and the transhistorical presence of water conjures the work of artists and thinkers such as Torkwase Dyson, whose interdisciplinary art practice attempts to understand and conceptualize black liberation through mediums such as architecture, water, time, and precarity.18 The first phase of efforts by the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway project to rehabilitate this area with planting and walkways along the Harlem River is underway. Future massive efforts to create resilient shoreline and restore access to the water are still in the schematic phase. Understanding and embracing the ground as constructed, as a

Originally the riverfront site was a trading ground for the Lenape, the indigenous inhabitants of what is now Manhattan.9 European settlers’ accounts of the plot of land designated as a segregated cemetery begin during the time of the Low Dutch Church of Harlem, in what was then the village of Nieuw Haarlem, when the area was mostly farmland. Sites typically set aside for such a purpose were usually leftover spaces: land near the water’s edge; land vulnerable to flooding and disruption.10 From the mid-1600s onward, the Church permitted both free and enslaved blacks to use the church-owned lot for burial and funerary rites, while a separate cemetery was established nearby for European families. In the 1830s, the church began to lease the burial ground to nearby parishioners’ estates for use as grazing pastures, thus beginning a long process of neglect and erasure – an amnesia that would prove productive for future development.

A wave of interventions contributing to the site’s nearly complete physical and historical expungement followed the Low Dutch Church’s eventual sale of the site in 1853, which allowed the redivision of the area including the burial ground into private parcels that would become City Block 1803,11 without recognition of the cemetery. Following this repurposing of the ground, new buildings were designed and foundations were laid. An entertainment complex grew on the block, first with a carousel and then a casino.12 During World War I, the buildings were converted into barracks,13 and after the war, the Hearst family purchased the complex for conversion into movie studio in 1918. Eventually, the studio was torn down, and in the 1940s a trolley (now bus) depot, which still stands today, was constructed.14 The initial mistreatment and erasure of the burial ground was compounded by each subsequent architectural disruption, leading to state of historical and environmental neglect that still characterizes the area today. The related histories of indigenous and black inhabitants of Harlem, and the details of their respective mistreatment and dispossession,15 are key to understanding how we might enact project of repair, the effects of which could resonate beyond the limits of this particular site.

11. The number assigned to the present-day New York block set in place by the Commissioner’s Grid Plan 1811.

12. The Harlem River Park complex, which occupied the site from the 1885 to 1917, included freestanding carousel.

13. Information excerpted from HABG Task Force website via New York Public Library records. The casino complex was converted in 1917 to serve World War army barracks for black regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters.

14. Information excerpted from HABG Task Force website via New York Public Library records. The Third Avenue Trolley Company built the structure, which was purchased in 1962 by what now the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

15. “The transformation of land into property, which could then be seized, is inseparable from the transformation of people into property, who could then banned from considerations of humanity.” Lou Cornum, “Burial Ground Acknowledgements,” New Inquiry October 14, 2019, https://thenewinquiry. com/burial-ground-acknowledgements/.

148 Log 48 such practices to be staged. And what this architecture made of? By choosing materials that are more impacted by time (that erode, degrade, change color), even the care and maintenance of the architecture itself could be foregrounded.

Jerome Haferd is Harlem–based architect, educator, and cofounder of BRANDT HAFERD studio. He teaches at Columbia University GSAPP, Barnard College, and City College.

In addition to spatial design of an urbanism, the ability to coproduce an integrated form of architecture and stewardship model with the inhabitants of this neighborhood is critical to the performance of living archive. The more opportunities there are for residents to be engaged in the shaping of the site’s archival dimension the better. The entire site could become means by which the community might work in conjunction with the architecture to “make objects on which [they] can be free.”26

Beyond Our Limits In the growing movement to acknowledge and spatialize America’s Indigenous and black histories and local, lived experience in general – the rediscovery and forthcoming development of the Harlem Burial Ground site is significant, sobering opportunity for architecture to engage in the process of placemaking and justice to reflect desires and subjectivities obscured by mainstream modes of architectural practice and urbanism. The work starts with our own daily practices; unpacking this site through text alone has its limits. By taking cues from the work of Fuentes and others, the latent by-product of such task is to produce new language of liberation, opening up new ways of interpreting the capacity of our discipline to produce new urban imaginaries everywhere. Hopefully, the site will join projects such as the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn and the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan, which have helped to build restorative processes and change the discipline of archaeology and others in their creation.27 Still others, such as Seneca Village in what is now Central Park, are known but remain physically buried and largely erased. Many more remain unknown and unidentified. The fact that the Harlem Burial Ground has been unacknowledged for centuries produces radical potential for design, propelling us to reexamine the ways that cities are made and the role that capitalism, urbanism, and racism have played in that making. These histories, and those of form and typology, problematize our prevailing models of architectural pedagogy and practice, but if we mine the historical layers of site as series of different practices and ethics that organize communities, then more nuanced approach to history is available to designers, architects, and, indeed, everyone.

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