Harlem’s buried treasure
It may not look like a national park or grand museum, but beneath the bus depot at 126th Street is a great American story, long buried and forgotten. It is the birthplace of Harlem.
The depot, where the Willis Avenue Bridge meets First Avenue, marks the end point of Dutch Gov. Peter Stuyvesant’s “road to New Harlem,” a 10-mile trail from lower Manhattan constructed in 1658 by enslaved African workers. Beneath the depot’s block-long concrete floor, according to historians and archaeologists, is where those slaves are still buried.
In lower Manhattan, a colonial village called New Amsterdam was established in 1625. Multinational from its inception, merchants and traders, primarily from Holland but also from England, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and Scandinavia, built a center for trade and commerce, while the African slaves of the Dutch West India Company labored to expand the colony to the island’s northern regions.
Throughout the Americas — from Albany to Argentina — the successful colony building strategy was the same: Deploy slaves to clear land for plantations, towns and roads, and entire families would migrate to the New World.
Population statistics tell the story. Of the 6.5 million people who sailed westward across the Atlantic to the Americas between 1500 and 1776, only 1 million were Europeans. Five and a half million were Africans, almost all of whom were slaves, according to historian Philip Curtin.
By the time Harlem was founded, slaves had cleared much of Manhattan for homes and farms. They had widened an Indian trail to create Broad-way. On Feb. 25, 1644, during the era of relentless Dutch and Indian Wars, some slaves received their freedom or grants of farmland.
In 1653, Manhattan’s slaves constructed a wall spanning the width of the island, later called Wall Street, before Stuyvesant had his eye set on a new frontier village.
Harlem gets its name from Haarlem, a Dutch town that was nearly destroyed during Spain’s war against Holland in the late 16th century. Haarlem and its citizens were renowned for their strength, perseverance and ability to survive through difficult and painful times. Considered a dangerous outpost, vulnerable to Native American or English attack, New Haarlem was chosen as the banner for the frontier community. One in five Harlem residents were black.
In 1660, the First Dutch Church of Harlem, a small wood building, was founded on the high riverbank overlooking the Harlem River. Within a few years, a stately stone church was built nearby and its original site became the community’s “negro burying ground.” The church’s primary cemetery, a k a “God’s Acre,” was for whites only.