Gergely Baics (gbaics@barnard.edu; Profile) is Professor of History and Urban Studies, and Helman Family Chair of Urban Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research areas include urban history, spatial history, U.S. economic and social history, and social science history methods. He is the author of Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790-1860 (Princeton University Press, 2016). His articles have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, Urban History, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Planning Perspectives. He is also one of the Co-PIs on the public spatial history project Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas.
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Envisioning Seneca Village: A Story of the Place and the Project
Envisioning the AME Zion Cemetery - The Envisioning Seneca Village team created this model of how the cemetery might have looked by researching and comparing other roughly contemporaneous AME cemeteries in the northeast region, including in Rossville, Staten Island and Glouchester, New Jersey. We also considered African American burial practices more broadly, such as some uncovered at the earlier Manhattan African Burial Ground and others from oral histories.
Artists: Gergely Baics, Meredith B. Linn, Leah Meisterlin, Myles Zhang
Location: Video Monitors 1, 2, 3
Project Description:
Seneca Village was a community established by African Americans in 1825, two years before emancipation was completed in New York State. By the mid-19th century, the village was the home of at least 50 families—⅔ Black and ⅓ white, mostly Irish. Situated on an approximately six-block area east of present-day Central Park West, roughly between 82nd and 88th Streets, then a few miles north of the city’s urban core, the village offered a safer, freer environment than downtown. Villagers built a thriving, complex, and heterogeneous community with core institutions including three churches and a school. Seneca Village’s destruction by New York City in 1857 to build Central Park abruptly ended 30 years of successful efforts to nurture families, sustain livelihoods, and create community. It was also an early instance in a long history of American cities’ abuse of eminent domain to sacrifice Black neighborhoods for urban development projects.
Remembering and celebrating Seneca Village at the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and 201 years after the community’s founding presents an opportunity to reckon with fundamental questions about the meaning of US citizenship and how we remember or forget the diverse communities that shaped our nation. It directly engages with the 2026 Milstein Center Exhibition’s central questions: “Who is and has been represented by the phrase ‘the people,’ and who is excluded? Who is considered an ‘American’—and who gets to decide?”
A collaborative digital history project, Envisioning Seneca Village imagines and depicts what Seneca Village might have looked like in the summer of 1855, about two years before the community’s destruction by the City. Anchored in extensive scholarship, and integrating our expertise in archaeology, social history, historical geographic information systems, and digital architectural reconstruction, the project aims to make the village’s history visible to a wide audience. To date, ESV features an interactive 3D model, a non-interactive tour through the 3D model, a printable PDF guide with maps, and supplementary materials. The project is a work in progress with updates, additions, and new features planned. Since its launch in 2024, it has been presented widely at scholarly and public events, has been written about in multiple forums, and has received three prestigious awards, including the 2025 American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History.
For this exhibition we utilize the three screens available at the Milstein Center lobby to present a series of videos (expanded over the course of the year) centered on three central questions: What was Seneca Village? How do we know about Seneca Village’s history? And why does remembering Seneca Village’s history matter? Envisioning Seneca Village: A Story of the Place and the Project combines images from the larger project, the extensive previous scholarship and archival and archaeological collections on which our research draws, as well as new visuals and narratives, to start to answer these questions.
Artist bios:
Gergely Baics, Meredith B. Linn, Leah Meisterlin, and Myles Zhang are the co-creators of Envisioning Seneca Village.
Meredith B. Linn (meredith.linn@bgc.bard.edu; Profile) is Associate Professor of Historical Archaeology at Bard Graduate Center. She researches artifacts, documents, and oral histories to discover more about people omitted from traditional histories. She is particularly interested in issues of health, healing, and community in nineteenth-century New York City. Her book, Irish Fever: An Archaeology of Illness, Injury, and Healing in New York City, 1845–1875, and articles published in the journal Historical Archaeology investigate the experiences of Irish immigrants. She is also a co-author of the archaeological site report of the 2011 excavations of Seneca Village and an assistant director of the long-term collaborative team researching the village, the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History (IESVH).
Leah Meisterlin (leah@meisterlinprojects.com; Website) is Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University and leads a spatial design and research practice, Meisterlin Projects. Broadly, her work engages techniques of social representation in architecture and cartography, critical geospatial analytics, and informational ethics. Her articles and essays have appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Planning Perspectives, Avery Review, and ARPA Journal. Among others, her work has been shown in exhibition at the Oslo Architecture Triennial and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is also one of the Co-PIs on the public spatial history project Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas.
Myles Zhang (mylesz@umich.edu; Website) is a PhD candidate in architecture and urban history at the University of Michigan. His dissertation examined how state policy and technological innovations drove the loss of social infrastructure, civic groups, and family-owned small businesses in inner-city Newark and peer cities. Using archival sources and the tools of history, this work challenges the popular misconception that particular urban neighborhoods are marginalized as a result of the work ethic of those who live there.