NEW YORK – As many as 20,000 slaves and free blacks who helped build New York’s economy from docks to warehouses will be honored with a memorial near their burial ground.
At a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday, African drumbeats accompanied the unveiling of the $3 million design by Rodney Leon, a Yale-trained architect who has lived in West Africa.
“These people were part of a worldwide network of slavery, and they helped the New York economy run and thrive,” Leon said.
The monument’s design – a spiraling, sunken court made of granite from Brazil and Canada – includes symbols and hieroglyphics inspired by Leon’s time in Ivory Coast. Jutting up from one side will be a slender, 24-foot-tall “ancestral chamber” meant to represent “the soaring African spirit embracing and comforting all those who enter,” he said.
The colonial-era cemetery where the slaves were buried, www.africanburialground.gov, is nestled between lower Manhattan high-rise buildings, near City Hall and adjoining the building that houses the New York offices of the FBI.
Closed in 1794, the five-acre burial ground was forgotten as a construction landfill eventually buried it 20 feet underground. When the cemetery was rediscovered during construction of a federal office tower in 1991, community pressure prompted the government to abandon the project.
The government declared the site a national historic landmark shortly after, and the remains were exhumed for research in the early 1990s. They were reburied in 2003.
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