Harlem African Burial Ground Project Put On Hold

Nick Garber
Updated ·2 min read

HARLEM, NY — A long-planned project to construct a memorial at the site of a historic African burial ground on 126th Street has been put on hold due to the pandemic, a community board leader told members this week.

Angel Mescain, district manager of East Harlem's Community Board 11, said Wednesday that the city's Economic Development Corporation has put the project "on pause" like many other development projects across the city, which is facing a $9 billion budget deficit due to the coronavirus.

The project has not been canceled, Mescain told CB11's Land Use Committee, adding that "they're just not rolling along the same schedule they had anticipated."

Earlier this year, the city had sought proposals from cultural organizations interested in operating the 18,000-square-foot memorial on East 126th Street between First and Second avenues. The city planned to pick a developer for the project once the operator was chosen, but that selection process is now on hold until the city has a better sense of when construction can resume, Mescain said.

The full-block burial ground site dates back to the founding of the village of Harlem by the Dutch, whose Low Dutch Reformed Church of Harlem maintained separate cemeteries for people of European and African descent.

In the ensuing centuries, the site was subjected to a "long tradition of disrespect," with the building atop it being used as a beer garden, army barracks, a movie studio and, most recently, an MTA bus depot, according to the Harlem African Burial Ground Task Force's website.

The City Council rezoned the block in 2017 to accommodate a large new residential and commercial development, also stipulating that a memorial to the burial site be included. The memorial is planned for the original site of the burial ground and no new development will overlap it, according to the city.

Plans for the memorial date back to at least 2015, when the city created the The Harlem African Burial Ground Task Force and Bus Depot Task Force to propose a memorial that would also meet East Harlem's growing need for new housing.

Last spring, an exhibition detailing the history of the site opened at La Marqueta.

Also on Wednesday, Mescain told the board that demolition at the site of the former Pathmark supermarket on East 125th Street would begin "imminently." The site will be developed into a nine-story office tower.

Brendan Krisel contributed to this report.

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This article originally appeared on the Harlem Patch