Envisioning Seneca Village: A GIS Repository of Archival and Archeological Records

Gergely Baics, Barnard College
Leah Meisterlin, Columbia University
Myles D. Zhang, University of Michigan: College of Architecture / Urban Planning
Meredith Linn, Bard Graduate Center

We plan to present at the SSHA two papers on our project Envisioning Seneca Village (envisioningsenecavillage.github.io). Established by African Americans in 1825, Seneca Village by midcentury was the home of about 50 families—2/3rd Black, 1/3rd white. Its remote location in present-day Central Park offered a safer environment than downtown. Villagers built a thriving, complex, and heterogeneous community with core institutions. Seneca Village’s destruction by New York City in 1857 ended 30 years of efforts to nurture families, sustain livelihoods, and create community. No known visual records of Seneca Village survive, and after its destruction, the village was omitted from city histories, and almost forgotten for a century, which make it difficult to imagine the place. ESV integrates our expertise in archaeology, social history, GIS, and digital architectural reconstruction to present an interactive 3D model, a non-interactive tour through the model, and a printable PDF guide with maps in order to make the village’s history accessible to a wide audience. The project is a work in progress. Our first paper focuses on ESV as a GIS-based repository of historical and archeological records on Seneca Village. Working within a GIS framework and leveraging co-location have allowed us to integrate previously fragmented records into a layered spatial historical archive about the village. This not only allows us to relate historical records in new ways, and explore new questions, but also provides the base on which our 3D digital model was built. The second paper details how our 3D model incorporates archeological records. While cartographic and written sources provide core contextual information about the village and residents, archeological records offer invaluable details about their daily lives, experiences, practices, and values. We discuss how those records are integrated in the model visually and narratively to tell more complex, layered, and intimate stories about Seneca Village.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 173. GIS and Archaeology of New York City