The Fight to Preserve Abolitionist History in Brooklyn
By Emma McCauley
On the Open House New York listing for their tour of Downtown Brooklyn, Friends of Abolitionist Place write “our city was built as if abolitionists were its enemies.” Their point is made in Abolitionist Place, a pocket size privately-owned public space (POP) tucked beneath three of the borough’s tallest buildings. The space has the anonymity of so many POPs across the city—an open plaza with skinny trees, a few moveable patio tables and chairs, a small playground, and a dog run. Its name is a nod to the area’s roots as an 18th-century free Black community and the generations of freedom fighters who have made their mark there. Today’s Downtown Brooklyn set could be forgiven for not considering the name of Abolitionist Place, or reading Ida B. Wells’ foam plaque tacked up on a Chase Bank,[i] or noticing the sun faded sign outside an NYU-Tandon administration building.[ii] If it hadn’t been for some determined organizing, Black liberation in Downtown Brooklyn would have been wiped from its landscape.
In 2004, sixty blocks of Downtown Brooklyn were rezoned under Mayor Bloomberg. At the time, the predominantly Black and Caribbean neighborhood was anchored by its commercial hub at Fulton Mall. The neighborhood’s economic success was outstanding compared to inner-cities around the country that had been gutted by decades of racist home-lending policies and white flight. With no option to move to the suburbs during the city’s earlier fiscal crisis, Black Brooklynites kept the neighborhood alive. Beyond its commercial viability, the Fulton Mall was a socially important place to assert “the presence of the Black middle class.”[iii] It was also “Brooklyn’s headquarters of hip hop,” carrying a cultural cache that won international recognition.
Shawné Lee, who co-founded Friends of Abolitionist Place along with Raul Rothblatt, remembers visiting the Mall as a young woman while her mom, “Mama” Joy Chatel, was living at 227 Duffield Street in the 1990’s. She recalls A&B Bookstore and the Albee Square Mall as cultural touchstones for her community. Lee had an idea that her experience of the neighborhood as a celebration of Black life was rooted in place. Her mother had been told that her home on Duffield Street was sacred. Her and her neighbors’ homes—the “Duffield Seven”—were linked by remnant tunnels seeming to stretch toward Bridge Street Church, a known stop on the Underground Railroad. An intergenerational oral history identified the Duffield Seven as stops as well.
Three years ahead of the neighborhood’s rezoning, the Department of City Planning (DCP) established the Special Downtown Brooklyn District to “promote the most desirable use of land and building development… and thus conserve the value of land and buildings and thereby protect the City’s tax revenue.”[iv] In zoning parlance, “highest and best use” is an oft-cited goal to encourage land use that will reap the highest benefit for the landowner. Logic follows that more intense development will generate higher property taxes – so “highest and best use” should also benefit the city. In his book “Zoned Out!” planning scholar and Hunter UPP Professor Emeritus Tom Angotti challenges this “trickle down” paradigm, explaining that the period “between 2002 and 2013… produced immense value for landowners,” and priced out existing tenants.
The Downtown Brooklyn Plan that followed paved the way for private sector-led redevelopment. The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership (DBP), a community-development corporation, soon coalesced to chase highest-and-best uses. Joe Chan, a close ally of Bloomberg Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, headed the new public-private partnership. Chan had worked with Doctorff on pro-development projects including the transformation of the Williamsburg waterfront and the bid for 2012 Olympic games. DBP’s board members, including Bruce Ratner (Forest City Ratner), Paul Travis (a partner in the City Point development), and Fred Harris (AvalonBay Communities, Inc) gained handsomely from the rezoning.
Mama Joy and her neighbors, however, stood to lose everything.
In 2004, the Duffield Seven received notice that their homes would be taken by eminent domain. The city planned to raze the 19th-century homes to build a micro-park, called Willoughby Square, and an underground parking lot for a new hotel. Chan defended the taking, saying that the park was and “has always been the centerpiece of the [Downtown Brooklyn] Plan and is an important incentive to attract private investment.”[v] Lee described that more than losing the security of her house, her mother felt the taking as an attack on her “livelihood. Her home symbolized her family, community, support, a village.”[vi]
Mama Joy knew that uncovering the abolitionist history of her home could support the Duffield Seven in their fight to stay in their homes. Working with the Queens Historical Society, Mama Joy discovered that 227 Duffield was the 19th century home of Thomas and Harriet Lee Truesdell. The Truesdells were connected to famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, agents for his newspaper Genius of Universal Emancipation, and founding members of anti-slavery societies. On Duffield Street, they lived next to parishioners of Plymouth Church, Harry Ward Beecher’s abolitionist congregation and a stop on the Underground Railroad. Being an abolitionist in Brooklyn was incredibly dangerous, and the militant worshippers were advised to travel to services armed, as the Church was frequently targeted by Brooklyn’s pro-slavery mobs. Prior to the Civil War, New York City and neighboring Brooklyn built their economies trading southern crops harvested by enslaved people. In 1861, on the eve of the War, Brooklyn’s pro-slavery Mayor threatened to secede from the Union. Two years later, incensed Irish immigrants angered by conscription launched a multi-day campaign of racial violence, massacring hundreds of Black New Yorkers. Historian Craig Wilder writes “most white Brooklynites—immigrant or native, Catholic or Protestant, wealthy or poor—were in conflict on all but a single issue: the subjection of free Black people, a cornerstone of pro-slavery politics.”
Armed with this knowledge, Mama Joy went to work. She began hosting tours of her basement to get word out about the tunnels and their possible connection to the Underground Railroad. She joined Families United for Racial Economic Equality (FUREE), a group advocating for community-based planning and resisting displacement of existing tenants in Downtown Brooklyn.[vii] In 2003, Mama Joy testified at the Economic Development Corporation’s (EDC) public hearing for the plan’s Environmental Impact Study. She and her neighbors demanded that the city re-examine their homes’ connections to the Underground Railroad before they move forward with demolition plans.
In response to their testimony, the City Council held a hearing on June 8, 2004 to verify whether the EDC had taken appropriate steps to verify Underground Railroad activity at the Duffield Seven. Josh Sirefman, Chief Operating Officer at the EDC, testified that AKRF, the preparers of the Environmental Impact Study, had consulted numerous city resources, contacted agencies and organizations, and reviewed documentation from the Duffield Street homeowners. Sirefman shared that “none of the early owners or occupants’ names can be traced to a known African American family or to an abolitionist activist who may have offered their home as a safe house, nor to anyone associated with historic events.”[viii]
At the hearing, Mama Joy testified that “no one has come down… to my house to ask me if they can come in.” Additionally, several of the organizations mentioned by Sirefman, including the NYPL’s Schomberg Center for Research on Black Culture, the Weeksville Society, and the Bridge Street Church, denied ever being contacted by AKRF about Duffield Street.[ix] Days later, at a Council Hearing on June 10, the Schomberg Center’s Exhibits Research Coordinator Chris Moore testified “had any representatives of your firm actually spoken to me, I would have informed them, without hesitation, that the entire length of Duffield Street is one of the city’s most promising areas for the study of the Underground Railroad.”[x]
Two years later in 2007, AKRF released an updated report on the Duffield Seven repeating the same findings from their first. Eight of twelve peer-reviewers criticized the update’s methodological oversights. AKRF did not hire an archaeologist and they did not cite their oral history sources. The authors, who were never named, seemed unfamiliar with Brooklyn’s abolitionist history. East New York Councilmember and Duffield Street ally Charles Barron called the report “bogus,” overly biased, and “a blatant attack on an integral part of American history.”[xi]
Mama Joy switched tactics in the fight to save her block. In 2007, South Brooklyn Legal Services filed an article 78 lawsuit on her and FUREE’s behalf. Article 78 suits challenge the legality of an action taken by the State—in this case, the taking of the Duffield Street homes. Speaking to The Brooklyn Rail about her experience challenging the city, Mama Joy said “after three-and-a-half long years in the forefront, I wouldn’t be able to continue without the power of my ancestors who came before me.”[xii] In the spring of that year, she won her lawsuit reversing the eminent domain decision. The remaining Duffield Seven, however, were not spared. One year later, the city voted to rename Duffield Street “Abolitionist Place,” as a memorial to the history that now stood alone in the house at 227.
In 2014, Mama Joy passed suddenly from a respiratory illness. Lee recalls the challenges her mom faced in her final years, and attributes her death to living with mold after repeating floodings from neighboring construction. At her funeral, Charles Barron said Mama Joy “put her heart, soul, every penny she had, blood sweat and tears in this struggle.”[xiii] She was one militant link in a century-spanning fight for liberation. The Friends of Abolitionist Place, and their allies at the Flatbush African Burial Ground Coalition, the Lefferts Historic House, Weeksville Heritage Center, and beyond, work in her legacy.
Leading walking tours about Brooklyn’s abolitionist and suffragist history is one facet of the Friends’ Work. While many of the schools, Churches and homes of freedom fighters like Henry Highland Garnet, Sarah Smith Garnet, Dr. Susan McKinney Steward, Amos Freeman, and Rev. Dr. James and Elizabeth Gloucester have been lost, their stories remain relevant. Lee said sharing that “there were Black doctors, ministers, lawyers, principals, politicians who look[ed] like me is important in this day when all we think is we were all enslaved. The reality is totally opposite.”
Today, 227 Duffield Street stands in disrepair hidden by blue construction fencing. After years of fighting, the property was finally landmarked in 2021 and purchased by the city. The Friends hope to accomplish Mama Joy’s dream of turning her home on Duffield Street into the Abolitionist Heritage Center, where Lee says people “can have ownership of their histories.” They are also actively working with Bridge Philanthropic, consultants to the EDC, to advise the city on how best to honor Downtown Brooklyn’s history through an art installation planned for Abolitionist Place. While reflecting on his positive experience with Bridge after years of challenges with other city-hired consultants, Friends of Abolitionist Place co-founder Raul Rothblatt shared “you never know when you’ll find an ally.”
When asked if he considers the Friends to be urban planners, Rothblatt chuckled before responding “yeah, absolutely. And FUREE was explicit in that. Maybe we’re guerilla urban planners. Urban planning is supposed to be urban, it is supposed to include a lot of people.” Rothblatt and Lee know intimately that “there is power in a sense of place.” They want the Abolitionist Heritage Center at 227 Duffield to become “a place where you can go and touch history. Know that where you are, somebody else who fought for freedom stood in the same spot.”
Dr. Chery LaRoche, an archaeologist and expert of 18th- and 19th-century free Black communities, wrote “history precedes heritage; to destroy one is to destroy the other.”[xiv] As the city metabolizes itself for higher and greater use, we stand to lose ourselves. The fight for 227 Duffield, a “door to freedom” in the valley of giants, is our opportunity to be found.
Endnotes
[i] “Ida B. Wells,” The Historical Marker Database. 19 March 2024. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=242968
[ii] “The Old Bridge Street Church,” The Historical Marker Database. 12 March 2024. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=242927
[iii] Vicki Weiner and Randall Mason, “Fulton Street Mall: New Strategies for Preservation and Planning,” Pratt C enter for Community Development, March 2006, 22, https://prattcenter.net/uploads/0923/1694200339697600/prattcenter-fultonmall_fullreport.pdf
[iv] NYC Planning, Zoning Resolution Chapter 1 – Special Downtown Brooklyn District, sect. 101-00, amend. 2 Feb 2011. https://zr.planning.nyc.gov/article-x/chapter-1#101-00
[v] Mat Probasco, “Historians in push to save Duffield Street” The Brooklyn Paper, 23 June 2007, https://www.brooklynpaper.com/historians-in-push-to-save-duffield-street/
[vi] Interview with Shawné Lee and Raul Rothblatt, December 16 2024.
[vii] “Joy Chatel,” New York Preservation Archive Project, Accessed January 2025, https://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/joy-chatel/
[viii] City of New York, City Council, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises, 8 June 2004, 84.
[ix] Ron Kopnicki, Matt McGhee, and Christabel Gough, “Village Views, Vol X:1,” Village Views, 2006, page 8. https://villageviews.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/duffield-st-vv-x.1-1.pdf
[x] City of New York, City Council, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises, 14 June 2004, 24.
[xi] Helen Klein, “More Complete Report on Duffield Street,” Historic Districts Council, 11 May 2007, https://hdc.org/more-complete-report-on-duffield-street/.
[xii] Emma Rebhorn, “The Case of the Duffield Street Homes,” The Brooklyn Rail, September 2007, https://brooklynrail.org/2007/09/local/the-case-of-the-duffield-street-homes/
[xiii] “Charles Barron Speaking at Mama Joy’s Funeral,” 24 July 2019, 0:2:25, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGUu_xMQ_Bk
[xiv] Cheryl LaRoche, “Archaeology, the Activist Community, and the Redistribution of Power in New York City,” Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, 2011, page 631.
Emma (she/her) is a Master of Urban Planning student at Hunter. She received her bachelor’s degree in Marine Vertebrate Biology from SUNY Stony Brook University and has worked as an e environmental educator at the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, and the South Street Seaport Museum. She champions community-based solutions to urban climate adaptation.
