Archeological Discoveries Shed Light on Old New York
Slavery, landfill and brothels: Archeologists are learning more about the history of New York City after recent discoveries in downtown Manhattan that date back to the city’s pre-colonial days.
Published July 1, 2006
By Diana Wall
Academy Contributor
New York is unique among American seaboard cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston in that it is regarded as a city with a present and a future, but not with a past. Recent archeological excavations in downtown New York, however, give the lie to that notion. In this oldest part of the city, archeologists have discovered sites dating from the early 17th century until the end of the 19th century, yielding artifacts left by Dutch and English settlers, enslaved Africans, and working-class and middle-class families. Digs have also yielded many secrets about the infrastructure of the old city: how people claimed land from the rivers and how they built on newly made land.
Fruits of Development
Urban archeology in New York itself dates only from around 1980, when preservation regulations, based on local, state, and federal legislation, first took hold. The regulations state, in effect, that any construction project that has government involvement (which might range from federal money to a local zoning variance) requires an environmental review, including an archeological study.
The developer hires archeologists to see if an important find might be preserved in the proposed construction site. In most cases, these studies conclude either that there was never anything of archeological interest, or that (as is usually the case in Lower Manhattan) any remains were destroyed by recent development, such as the construction of a 20th-century building with a very deep basement.
However, if an intact site could be present, the regulations require that archeologists conduct test excavations. If those tests are positive—to the archeologist’s joy and the developer’s agony—the impact of construction on the site has to be “mitigated.” Mitigation can occur in several ways: by moving the construction project, by modifying its plans so that it will not harm the archeological site, or by excavating the site. In Lower Manhattan, where real estate is so valuable, development projects are never canceled and get modified very, very rarely. But there are relatively frequent excavations. In fact, over a dozen large-scale excavations have taken place.
From the perspective of archeologists, these government-mandated Downtown projects are double-edged. On the one hand, archeologists do not choose the sites they get to dig; instead, the sites are chosen, for better or worse, by the vagaries of development. But on the other hand, if there were no development and no government regulations, there would be no archeological excavations in Lower Manhattan at all.
Beneath the Kitchen Floor
Once archeologists are in the field, they are particularly eager to excavate “features,” such as the pits from outhouses and the basements from long demolished houses which might survive under modern basement floors. Features often contain treasure troves of artifacts that were deposited in the ground at a single time and can often be linked with a particular household or business. Archeologists use artifacts to date the layers of soil inside these features, and then use that date to find out who was living or working in the building at that time by consulting historical documents like city directories and tax and census records.
Archeologists have excavated two sites that date to the 17th-century Dutch and early English colonial periods, both on Pearl Street, which was once the East River shoreline. At the Broad Financial Center site, just south of Broad Street, archeologists led by Joel Grossman unearthed the cobble-paved basement floor of a warehouse that Augustine Heermans built in the late 1640s, just next to the Dutch West India Company’s warehouse.
Heermans, a Bohemian, had come to New Amsterdam as an agent for a Dutch mercantile company. He dealt in tobacco, wines, and provisions, and was also involved in the trade in enslaved Africans. There on the floor of the warehouse, the Grossman team discovered a token that had been issued by Prince Maurice of the House of Orange to commemorate his election as a Stadtholder of the City of Utrecht in 1590.
The First Large-scale Excavation in Lower Manhattan
The Stadt Huys Block dig excavated over three tons of artifacts from a slightly later period. Nan Rothschild and I led this first large-scale excavation to take place in Lower Manhattan. Our team found the foundation walls and cellar deposits from the King’s House, the tavern that the English provincial governor Francis Lovelace had had built in 1670. Thousands of clay tobacco pipes, pieces of dark green liquor bottles, and shards from glasses all evoked 17th-century revelers.
The charred basement floor revealed that the tavern had burned—a fact that was not in the historical records. In addition, the archeologists found a barrel buried under the kitchen floor. Inside the barrel were about a dozen whole liquor bottles as well as some whole clay tobacco pipes—the only intact pipes and 17th-century bottles that were found. The barrel and its contents seem to have been a cache, perhaps left by the tavern keeper or by an enslaved African who worked in the kitchen when the tavern burned.
Dozens of features dating to the late 18th and 19th centuries are associated with middle-class households whose members both lived and worked in the same buildings—households like that of Daniel van Voorhis, a silversmith, who, with his family, journeymen, and apprentices, both lived and had his workshop on Hanover Square in the 1780s. Another excavation took place in the Five Points District, the Irish working-class neighborhood which was located to the northeast of City Hall Park. Martin Scorsese recently immortalized this notorious slum in Gangs of New York. Charles Dickens described it after a visit in 1842 as “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth… Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old.”
A Hard Life in the Slums
Life could be extremely hard in the slums. In one of the privy pits, excavators discovered an unusual array of artifacts: ornate dishes; implements used for fancy sewing, such as embroidery; an unusually high number of chamber pots (almost 40); glass bed pans, all designed for women; and a ceramic pot inscribed with “AMAILLE, s.d. Vinaigrier.” The privy also contained the skeletons of three infants—two newborns and a fetus.
Rebecca Yamin, the director of the interpretive phase of the project, discovered historical records that confirmed that there had in fact been a brothel on the site which had been shut down by the police in 1843. The artifacts had presumably been discarded into the privy when the brothel was closed. The bedpans spoke of the illnesses that the young women suffered as occupational hazards, and the vinegar container perhaps of attempts at birth control. Whether the infants died of natural or unnatural causes (we shall never know the answer), their remains also speak of tragedy—they were discarded into the privy rather than accorded proper burials.
Filling in the Blanks
In addition to revealing aspects of daily life, archeological excavations have also uncovered secrets of the city’s infrastructure. Many New Yorkers are not aware that much of Lower Manhattan is made up of landfill—land claimed from the East and Hudson Rivers, as well as low-lying inland areas filled to the height of the surrounding grade. Three blocks of new land were added along the East River shore, from the late 17th through the early 19th century. And four new blocks were added along the Hudson, beginning in the early 19th and continuing into the late 20th century. Excavating in landfill lets us learn about the landfill process itself and also find out what has been buried beneath it.
Some of the landfill came from the river bottom, and was probably dredged up from slips or alongside piers. Other fills are made up of clean soil, probably from grading down hills and excavating cellars. Others contain garbage that was probably picked up by local cartmen and then dumped into the landfill.
Although archeologists cannot link this trash to particular households or businesses in the city, it can reveal details about the city as a whole. During the yellow fever epidemics in the early 19th century, the city government passed regulations outlawing the dumping of organic material into the landfill. But then, as now, illegal dumping was prevalent—an excavation along the Hudson River revealed offal from butchering when such dumping was illegal.
Landfills and Bulkheads
New Yorkers used many different techniques to hold the landfill in place. Most common were bulkheads made out of planks or logs. But archeologists led by Joan Geismar working at 175 Water Street, a mid-18th-century landfill block, discovered an unusual form of bulkhead. There, an 18th-century merchant ship had been scuttled and sunk to form part of the bulkhead line. Another ship, apparently sunk for the same purpose, has been uncovered in the basement of two of the Water Street buildings owned by the South Street Seaport Museum.
This spring, archeologists working with the MTA on the expansion of the South Ferry subway station in Battery Park discovered part of a seawall. This wall, which also served as a battery and was mounted with cannon to protect the city in case of attack, was put into place between 1730 and 1766. Later, after the Revolutionary War, it was buried in the landfill that was added to the shoreline to create Battery Park. Archeologists uncovered around 600 feet of this seawall in four different areas; the wall is made of stone and is 8 to 10 feet wide. There are plans afoot for reconstructing parts of the wall as an exhibit in Battery Park.
Building on a Landfill
Archeologists have also discovered the different ways that people have dealt with the problem of building on landfill. If buildings are constructed on landfill before it has had a chance to settle, the buildings shift and crack due to the settling. One solution when building in shallow water involves resting the footing stones of the foundation walls directly on the natural river bottom.
Another technique consists of using spread footers—wooden structures laid on top of the landfill and made up of large beams placed on rows of planks set perpendicularly to the beams along the line of the building’s foundation wall. Builders then lay the stone foundation wall on top of the beams. This results in spreading the load of the building so that it in effect “floats” on top of the landfill. This was the most common technique in the 18th and early 19th centuries, when people were building structures out in what had been deep water in the East and Hudson Rivers.
The final technique (a variation of which we still use today) involves driving pilings down through the landfill to the underlying river bottom along the outline of the footprint of the building and placing large beams on top of the pilings. Builders then lay the stone footings of the foundation wall on top of these beams. This technique, which has only been discovered at one site in New York City, required an enormous amount of energy to execute before the invention of the steam-driven pile driver.
A Hidden History
Landfill also helped preserve what many consider the most remarkable site not only in Lower Manhattan but in the whole nation: the African Burial Ground, which was excavated in 1991-1992. This project began when the Federal government was about to build an office tower at 290 Broadway, a block north of City Hall Park.
Archeologists began this project as they always do—by studying the history of the site. They learned that during the 18th century, part of the Negros Burial Ground had been located on part of the parcel that the government was developing. But buildings on that part of the site in the late 19th and 20th centuries had had deep basements, so deep that archeologists assumed that the burial ground had been destroyed, except in the area of an old alley.
Archeologists checked the alley and found something completely unexpected: In the 18th century, the ground surface in the area of the Burial Ground was much lower than it is today. In the early 19th century, developers had added 20 to 25 feet of landfill that served as a blanket and protected most of the burials from being destroyed by subsequent development.
Over the next year, archeologists disinterred over 400 burials. The human remains were taken to Howard University, where they were studied by a team led by Michael Blakey, a physical anthropologist. A decade later, in 2003, the remains were returned to New York, and amidst great ceremony were reinterred in vaults right next to the office tower where they had originally been buried and had lain for over 200 years.
Important in Many Ways
The African Burial Ground is important in many ways. First of all, the presence of slavery in early New York City, and even in the north as a whole, has been denied in modern popular history. But 18th-century New York City had a higher population of enslaved Africans than any other city in the British-American colonies except for Charleston, South Carolina.
Throughout the English colonial period in the 18th century, enslaved Africans constituted from 14% to almost 21% of the city’s population, and in 1703 (the only year for which a detailed census survives for the period), 40% of the city’s households included slaves. The discovery of the burial ground brought home in no uncertain terms to today’s New Yorkers that Africans have had a deep historical presence in New York City from the time of the first European arrivals.
Secondly, because Africans and other members of the disenfranchised tend to have been ignored in written historical records, archeological study is the best way that we have to find out about their lives. The people whose remains were disinterred at the African Burial Ground constitute the largest sample of people of African descent from the colonial period that has ever been studied in the United States. Although we will probably never know the names of any of those whose remains were unearthed—we know them only by the numbers that were assigned to them as they were disinterred—the Blakey team has been able to write their biographies.
Burial 101
Several women were buried with infants resting in the crooks of their arms, presumably mothers who, along with their babies, died during or shortly after childbirth. And there was “Burial 101.” His coffin was unusual in that it was decorated with a design formed by brass tacks. The excavators initially thought that the design represented a heart, but as Blakey discovered, it might also be a Sankofa bird symbol used by the Akan people of Ghana and the Ivory Coast to mean “turn to the past in order to build the future.”
Unlike many of the other burials, Burial 101’s remains showed no signs of stress suffered during childhood. This suggested to the Blakey team that he had been born in Africa and spent his childhood in freedom. His front teeth had been filed into an hourglass shape, an African custom apparently not practiced in the Americas, more evidence suggesting an African past.
But, as Blakey put it, his vertebrae showed fractures that indicate that after his capture and removal to North America as an adult, “his forced labors were backbreaking in the most literal sense.” However, his burial in the decorated coffin—one of only four decorated ones found at the site—indicates that he enjoyed prestige in his community despite his forced labors.
A Spotlight on the Ignored
Many modern-day African-American New Yorkers have been guiding the direction of the African Burial Ground Project. Earlier this year President Bush designated the site a National Monument, and construction is underway on an African-inspired memorial that includes an ancestral libation court and chamber. An interpretive center is planned. Meanwhile, the New York Historical Society has opened a small permanent exhibit on slavery in New York, a smaller spin-off of an earlier landmark exhibit spurred by the Burial Ground discoveries.
As we all know, history is written by the victors. But as digs in New York have demonstrated, archeology can shine a spotlight on individuals and groups whose presence in the past is often ignored or even denied.
Also read: Beyond the Beaches: Revealing the Real Puerto Rico Part I and Beyond the Beaches: Revealing the Real Puerto Rico Part II.
About the Author
Diana Wall, professor of Anthropology at the City College of New York, is co-author (with Anne-Marie Cantwell) of Unearthing Gotham: The Archeology of New York City (Yale, 2001) and Touring Gotham’s Archeological Past (Yale, 2004).
