How Contemporary Art and Literature Are Reviving Seneca Village

This Juneteenth, the Central Park Conservancy continues its commitment to honoring and amplifying Seneca Village: the predominantly Black community that once lived in a portion of what is now Central Park.

From 1825 to 1857, Seneca Village stood as a thriving, free Black community in pre-Civil War New York. The village had three churches, a school, and high rates of property ownership that granted some men the right to vote in the state of New York. Seneca Village’s residents were displaced in 1857 when the City invoked eminent domain to acquire the land for the creation of Central Park.

For decades, the story of Seneca Village was buried beneath trees, grass, and time—until scholars, archaeologists, and historians began to unearth its rich history in the 1990s. In recent years, the Conservancy has worked to trace this crucial chapter of the Park’s past, helping to share the memory of this community with the wider public.

As awareness of Seneca Village continues to grow, its story is surfacing more frequently in public conversation—particularly in contemporary art and literature. And for many, artwork and stories of Seneca Village can offer a powerful entry point to learn—or engage more deeply with—this crucial piece of New York City history.

The Forgotten Summer of Seneca by Camryn Garrett

One such example is Camryn Garrett’s The Forgotten Summer of Seneca, released in April 2025. Part-mystery novel, part-historical fiction, with a twist of magical realism, the story follows 12-year-old Rowan Robinson, who is visiting her aunt in New York City when she stumbles through a magical portal in Central Park and into the heart of Seneca Village.

While The Forgotten Summer of Seneca is a middle-grade novel (geared toward readers ages 8–12), Garrett’s work offers insight for audiences of all ages. After all, Garrett knows that most people—including local New Yorkers—have never heard of Seneca Village. She herself first learned about it through a New York Times piece by Brent Staples.

“I thought more people knew about it,” she said. “I thought it was just a secret everyone had been keeping, and that it was something I would learn about the more I lived in the City. But that wasn't the case. It felt like a lot of people actually didn't know about it, and that really piqued my interest.”

That sparked Garrett to write The Forgotten Summer of Seneca, which required many hours of research—including working with the Central Park Conservancy team to comb through archival information, getting a better understanding of who lived in Seneca Village and what the landscape may have looked like. Garrett spent time walking the Seneca Village site, too, reading the Conservancy’s signage about the village and its residents.

“It was hard to imagine Central Park and Seneca Village at the same time,” Garrett said. “So it was really cool to have those markers about where it was. I just love that, because you're imagining how big things were, how close together they were, and it made it feel way more real.”

Ultimately, Garrett hopes that her book will educate readers on the often-forgotten history of Seneca Village—and for young readers in particular, she aims to encourage nuanced thinking and thoughtful discussion on this complex chapter of the past.

“Obviously, the idea that Seneca Village was razed and disappeared is devastating for so many reasons, but I also don't know that anyone would say it’s bad that Central Park exists,” she said. “So I think holding two ideas in our head is really important, and that's part of why I wanted to write this book for kids, because it's an introduction to nuance ... I think it's possible to say, ‘I like Central Park and also acknowledge these negative things that happened in order to create the Park.’ And I think that's an important thing to learn as a young person, because our world is complicated.”

Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In her research for The Forgotten Summer of Seneca, Garrett also made a trip to The Met to see Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room—an exhibit that found its way into her novel.

What sets this exhibit apart is that, unlike traditional period rooms frozen in time to capture a specific historical context, this installation reflects African and African diasporic beliefs that the past, present, and future are deeply connected. The room is inspired by Afrofuturism—a creative approach that celebrates Black imagination, excellence, and self-determination. It offers just one possible vision of what Seneca Village might have become if it had been allowed to grow and flourish into the present day and beyond.

While the period room is filled with connections to Seneca Village’s history, a particularly poignant piece is Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and...), a print used as the wallpaper for the space. The piece combines the topographical survey map of Seneca Village from 1856 with 19th-century portraits of Black New Yorkers, contemporary images from the African diaspora, and imagery of an okra plant.

John Reddick, the Conservancy’s Director of Community Engagement Projects, was struck by this piece’s inventive interweaving of historic information and imagery. “The wallpaper is really marvelous in invoking the flora and fauna of the area,” he says. “You can almost move an image from the wallpaper to the area of Tanner’s Spring in Seneca Village, and they’re almost identical. So those are evocative elements that can help you see the reality of what the community might have been like. And you realize it’s all sort of an overlay of our imagination of the physical environment."

Also featured is Tourmaline’s Summer Azure, which takes an Afrofuturist approach—evoking space travel as an escape to a utopia. Tourmaline—who often works on Summit Rock in the Seneca Village landscape—says her piece was inspired by The People Could Fly, a collection of Black folktales by Virginia Hamilton, and Marsha P. Johnson and her organization STAR. In a video for The Met, Tourmaline said, “Marsha really harnessed the power of the celestial expanse and tuned to how that was unfolding in her ‘now’ moment of time. She was a person that knew that what she dreamed up was possible.”

And that’s what Afrofuturism is all about to Tourmaline: possibilities grounded in memory, joy, and purpose. “[It’s] about asking questions like, ‘What if?’ or ‘What could be? What do we want? What happened in the past that was meaningful? Where do we want to go in the future?’” she said. “And then knowing that those dreams and desires are possible.”

Garrett was halfway through her first draft of The Forgotten Summer of Seneca when she visited the period room. She was so inspired that she included the exhibit in the novel.

“I really want it to be something that kids can go visit,” she said. “A lot of kids don't know what Seneca Village even is. The period room asks, ‘What does Seneca Village look like to you?’ For me, I had a vision of what it looked like, and then going to see other people's visions made me feel like I was in conversation with not just those artists, but Seneca Village in general.”

My Seneca Village by Marilyn Nelson

With no photos of Seneca Village, and much still unknown about the people who lived there, artists and curious New Yorkers have often turned to their imaginations to fill in the gaps.

And that’s just what Marilyn Nelson did in her 2015 book of poetry My Seneca Village, in which she writes striking vignettes of Seneca Village residents. Drawing on historical information and intuition, Nelson creates a tapestry of characters that are both real and imagined.

In the foreword, she writes: “As I read about the community and the monumental work of earth-moving and landscape design that swallowed it, the book that grew in my mind was a portrait of a community, a collection of individual portraits that converge to form a communal portrait ... For several years I lived, with great delight, a sort of parallel existence, with characters I made up to fit the names and identifying labels I found in census records of Seneca Village. As I invented these characters and their world, I felt I was coming to know and love them.”

My Seneca Village invites us all to linger in our imaginations, to honor the real people who lived and worked in this space, and to dwell in the possibilities of what this community may have been.

For contemporary artists like Garrett, the story of Seneca Village still resonates deeply today because so many of the issues its residents faced—displacement, erasure, and the fight for dignity—are still with us. But for Garrett, understanding this history helps those struggles feel less isolating. It creates a sense of connection across time. That’s also why she’s drawn to the site itself. Walking through what remains of Seneca Village feels, to her, like walking alongside the individuals who once lived there—an act of remembrance, solidarity, and resilience.

“It feels really special to be in a place where Black people were and where they called home,” she said. “It feels like belonging.”

This Juneteenth, as we reflect on freedom, history, and the resilience of Black communities, we invite you to also walk through the land where Seneca Village once stood and explore its stories and spaces with our performers. Seneca Village is gone from the physical landscape—but through art, literature, and collective memory, it lives on.

Jenny Schulte is the Senior Marketing Writer & Editor at the Central Park Conservancy.