A New Freedom Trail
After the state abolished slavery in 1827, New York City became both a sanctuary and a trap for slaves who had escaped from their owners.
By day, freed men and women could live and work here. But by night, they could be snatched off the street by bounty hunters.
The landmarks of this chapter of New York’s history—the homes, churches, printing presses and businesses of the city’s abolitionist leaders—are all but gone. But Jacob Morris is on a determined quest to mark them nonetheless, a one-man mission to develop New York’s own Freedom Trail of slavery, the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad.
“It’s a uniquely New York story,” he said on a recent afternoon, walking the streets of Lower Manhattan. “This is a hidden New York City. It’s like you walk by and don’t know.”
Mr. Morris, director of the Harlem Historical Society, first dreamed up the idea in 2007, when he successfully lobbied for a small stretch of Chambers Street to be named after Frederick Douglass. He envisions about 20 sites, tracing the story of emancipation from the slave market that opened in 1711 at Wall and Water streets to spots associated with the country’s first black newspaper, first black theater and first black licensed doctor. Also highlighted is the place where Elizabeth Jennings, a black schoolteacher, was forced off a streetcar at Pearl and Chatham streets in 1854. She sued, forcing the desegregation of streetcars.
Mr. Morris estimates the cost at less than $200,000 for a path of historical markers, along with a map and podcast or smartphone app that visitors can listen to as they walk the route. He hasn’t secured funding for the project, but this past spring he gained support from Community Board 1 and the Downtown Alliance, groups that say the project could lure tourists to Lower Manhattan and highlight a period in the city’s history that many know little about.
“The Freedom Trail is absolutely something we need to have in New York City,” said Julie Menin, chairwoman of Community Board 1.
The trail would be fashioned after historical trails in other cities: The most famous, Boston’s Freedom Trail, is a 2.5-mile, brick-lined route commemorating the city’s Revolutionary War history. Philadelphia has a Constitutional Walking Tour. Trails in Syracuse and Portland, Maine, highlight figures associated with the Underground Railroad and antislavery movement.
In the Colonial period, more than 40% of New York households had slaves, and New York’s economy depended on slavery, said Valerie Paley, historian for special projects at the New-York Historical Society. When the practice was abolished here, blacks from all over the country headed for New York, she said.
Slave catchers did, too, tracking runaways but also kidnapping black people for ransom.
The New York Committee of Vigilance, headed by the African-American publisher David Ruggles, was formed to protect them and used the city’s legal system to keep them on free soil.
The site of Mr. Ruggles’s home and bookstore at 36 Lispenard St.—now an apartment building with a coffee shop on the ground floor—already has a plaque noting its history as a station on the Underground Railroad. There, one of the country’s most important abolitionist figures sought refuge in 1838.
Douglass, 20 years old and not yet a renowned orator, had stepped off a ferry from New Jersey a few days earlier and become a free man. He later wrote of his arrival in New York: “A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the ‘quick round of blood,’ I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life.”
But he feared slave catchers. Mr. Ruggles took him in. He was married there to his fiancée, Anna Murray, a free black woman, and the couple set out for Massachusetts with a letter of recommendation from Mr. Ruggles and a $5 bill.
New York was the home of many firsts for African-Americans: Freedom’s Journal, the first black-owned and -operated newspaper, was at 236 Church St. The pharmacy of James McCune Smith, the country’s first African-American to obtain a medical license, was at 93 W. Broadway. The first black theater, the African Grove Theater, presented Shakespeare at 165 Mercer St. Also on the tour: Downing’s Oyster House, a black-owned restaurant that sheltered slaves in the basement while power brokers dined above.
One of the few original structures still standing on the route is the home of the Rev. Theodore Wright, another conductor on the Underground Railroad. The Rev. Wright was the first black graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and spoke out against slavery from the pulpit of his church on Prince Street.
His three-story home is at 235 W. Broadway. The ground floor is now a men’s clothing store named “Liquor Store,” after the antique sign that hangs outside—a vestige of another period of the building’s history.
Stepping into the store on a recent afternoon, Mr. Morris asked the manager and a sales associate if they knew about the building’s past life as a station on the Underground Railroad.
The manager did. The sales associate, Derrick Harden, didn’t.
Mr. Morris showed him an image of the Rev. Wright, and Mr. Harden, who is black, mused that it could be his uncle. “I love that!” Mr. Harden said. “Free slaves used to be under the floor. Just think about that energy.” He stomped his feet on the broad wooden floorboards.
Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com