This Empty Lot Is Worth Millions. It’s Also an African-American Burial Ground. (original) (raw)

New York|This Empty Lot Is Worth Millions. It’s Also an African-American Burial Ground.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/nyregion/african-american-burial-ground-queens-newtown.html

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The owner of a plot of land in Queens wants to sell it or develop it. Others want to memorialize one of the city’s first communities for former and freed slaves.

About 200 years ago, one of New York’s first African-American communities established itself in what is now Elmhurst, Queens.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

June 14, 2019

The flier advertising a near-one-acre plot of land for sale in Elmhurst, Queens, looks like a typical real estate listing. The oddly-shaped parcel that abuts the Long Island Rail Road tracks is available for $13.8 million. According to the flier, the lot is a great opportunity to capitalize on the growing demand for residential space in the neighborhood.

What is not mentioned is that the site is a historical African-American burial ground. As many as 300 men and women, many of whom were former slaves, could be buried there. By the 1830s, a church and a school stood on the lot, at the heart of one of the city’s first African-American communities, formed around the time New York abolished slavery in 1827.

The empty lot has a murky future. For one thing, it comes with an archaeological restriction which requires the St. Mark African Methodist Episcopal Church, the organization associated with the human remains buried there, to be consulted before the lot can be further developed.

Representatives of 90 Queens Inc., the firm which owns the land, have offered to build a 5,000-square-foot cultural space on the ground level of a five-story condominium at 47-11 90th Street, but the church has yet to give its blessing on that plan.

After years of negotiations without a resolution, the firm has now put the lot up for sale, leading church leaders and local preservationists to wonder if there is a buyer out there that can help preserve the site instead of build on it.

“It has been extremely hard for the church to find a partner that is willing to help us, to look at this piece of real estate from a historical perspective,” said the Rev. Kimberly L. Detherage, who has been leading the negotiations on behalf of the church with the developer.

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