In November of 2025, Design Trust launched a Design Ideas Competition in collaboration with Van Cortlandt Park Alliance to reimagine an Enslaved African Burial Ground in the Bronx. Following a series of events with the community, Reimagining the Enslaved African Burial Ground at Van Cortlandt Park seeks to honor and memorialize the people who lived and worked in VCP, and invites other sites of memory across the city to deeply reflect and invest in ways to ensure the sacred spaces that exist on their lands are not forgotten. 

This series explores other reimagined public spaces across the five boroughs, asking the question of what it means to memorialize a space and how we can pay tribute to the lives of people who contributed to the layout of public space as we know it. 

One of New York City’s most famous public spaces, Central Park, is around 843 acres. Construction was completed in 1876 and designed by Frederick Olmsted. Before Central Park became the amazing and iconic public park it is now, the land was home to a town named Seneca Village, where formerly enslaved Black Americans and newly settled Irish immigrants found community. The land Seneca Village occupied was acquired through eminent domain and by 1857 the entire village had been extracted and residents relocated.

For decades, the memory of Seneca Village was erased and unmarked while millions of visitors enjoyed the park each year. Fast forward to 2011, archeologists from the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History, conducted an excavation and found remnants of the life once lived by the people in Seneca Village. 

One resident whose legacy in Seneca Village goes back generations was named Andrew Williams. His descendant, Ariel Williams, came together with Manhattan historians to reflect on Andrew Williams’ legacy in Seneca Village and also grapple with the history of erasure of her ancestors. Ariel, as she is looking at a plaque dedicated to Andrew Williams in a video created by Central Park Conservancy, says that she didn't know  “so many people would be interested in learning more about [her] story, [her] family, and [her] family’s involvement with Seneca Village.” Her family’s story is one that is now memorialized in one of the permanent installations honoring the community of Seneca Village.

After the 2011 excavation by Nan Rothschild and Diana diZerega, the once hidden history of Seneca Village came to life and helped inform what life was like in Seneca Village before Central Park. This excavation led to the idea of an installation. In 2019 the Seneca Village installation in Central Park created signs at 16 different locations displaying important homes and buildings in the village and their approximate location, including the home of Andrew Williams. Along with the plaques there is a scannable QR code that allows park visitors to go on a self guided tour or they can opt for a physical tour given by park guides. Through the installation, the park makes the lives of people in Seneca Village visible. Their memories are ingrained in the installation and push more public spaces to properly honor the lives of people whose history has been forgotten and invisible to the rest of the world. 

The next blog feature in this series will look at another neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where memorialization came as a result of artist activism and advocacy, coming soon! Follow our newsletter for new series notifications.