The prevailing narrative of Seneca Village is one of loss, focused predominantly on the moment the City of New York moved to evict Black villagers and raze their community by the power of eminent domain for the implementation of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s design for Central Park. In her new book Before Central Park, Sara Cedar Miller illuminates the deeper histories of the Black property owners—many of whom were women—and the monetary awards they received. For this event, Miller will be in conversation with Carla L. Peterson, author of Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth Century New York City and a descendant of the Lyons family of Seneca Village. Together they will discuss recovered stories of Black women who empowered themselves through real estate profits and other means before, during, and after the creation of Central Park.

Sara Cedar Miller is the historian emerita of the Central Park Conservancy, which she first joined as a photographer in 1984. Her books include Central Park: An American Masterpiece (2003), Strawberry Fields: Central Park’s Memorial to John Lennon (2011), and Seeing Central Park: The Official Guide (updated and expanded edition, 2020). Her website is www.beforecentralpark.com.

Carla L. Peterson is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Maryland. She specializes in nineteenth-century African American literature, culture, and history and has published widely in this field. Peterson is the author of “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) and Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale UP, 2011). She is currently writing a book on notions of taste in antebellum Philadelphia and New York.