Duffield Street Houses – Despite Museum – still slated for demolition
From the Downtown Brooklyn Star
House-Turned-Museum Still Faces Wrecking Ball
By Nik Kovac
Dateline : Thursday, February 08, 2007
“There’s no marker on that house,” regretted Brooklyn College teacher, Dr. Stephen Leberstein, on the same day he’d been given a tour by the building’s owner, Joy Chatel. She lives in the attached, antebellum building with several of her grandchildren. Earlier this week, the house on Duffield Street – squeezed between Fulton Mall and MetroTech – officially became a museum, although there’s still quite a bit of work left to do in order to get the place properly ready for historically curious visitors.
“We’d like to get this declared a landmark,” declared the historian now in charge of the museum, Dr. Robert Swan, who specializes in the African-American history of Manhattan and Brooklyn. “We would like to salvage what artifacts can be discovered here.”
Deep in the lower levels of 227 Duffield Street, in the cisterns and underneath the since raised cellar floor, certainly rest objects and evidence from the 1850s, when slavery was still legal in the South, and the criminal penalties for a northerner harboring a fugitive slave was six months in jail plus a $1,000 fine.
There may be evidence that fugitive slaves hid there as part of the journey on the legendary Underground Railroad. Already the circumstantial and human evidence is beginning to pile up.
“The important thing to remember here,” cautioned Swan, immediately after he’d taken the tour with Leberstein, “is that it’s not the tunnels that make the Underground Railroad. It’s the people.”
Joy Chatel immediately nodded in enthusiastic agreement, and began rattling off some of the 19th century history she has recently become very familiar with. “It’s a known fact,” she said, “that Garrison and Truesdell were traveling buddies.”
That’s William Lord Garrison, publisher of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator out of Baltimore, and Thomas Truesdell, who used to live in Chatel’s home with his wife, Harriet in the 1850s. “Yes,” agreed Swan, “there were several known abolitionists on this block.”
“This whole block is full of abolitionists,” continued Chatel. “And abolitionists and conductors [on the Underground Railroad] go hand in hand.” Then, speaking of Thomas Truesdell again, she said, “Look at the people he ran with: Tappan, Bowen, and especially Garrison.”
“William Harned lived just half a block away,” said Swan, picking up of the many strands of this very old and very American story, “just across the street. He was the treasurer of the American Missionary Association, a Quaker abolitionist group founded by Louis Tappan. In 1850 his name is on a newspaper article that talks about returning James Hamlet [a Williamsburg resident] to freedom, the first slave captured under the Fugitive Slave Act. This was all part of a clandestine activity and no one would put their name on anything, but he did. That tells you something.”
Given the necessarily underground nature of the Underground Railroad, it was hard at the time and it’s even harder now to discern exactly what was going on: to know which escaped slaves were hid where. “That just burns me,” admitted Chatel, “when people say there’s no evidence. It was a secret society!”
The reason it burns Chatel so is that the city wants to demolish her historic house to build a ramp into a hotel and underground parking garage – part of the redevelopment and rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn passed by the City Council in 2004. The case of Chatel’s home and its three abutting rowhouse neighbors was referred to the Landmarks Commission by the Council back then, and is still officially under investigation.
In the meantime, however, Chatel and other abolitionist history buffs are not simply waiting around for the government to see it their way. Dr. Swan is helping her convert the home into a museum, and Dr. Leberstein will be incorporating her home and block into a graduate course he is currently teaching called, “Abolishing the Slave Trade: Chattel Slavery in the 19th Century, Human Trafficking and Debt Peonage Today.”
Leberstein is quick to point out that a very important anniversary is coming up, and nobody seems to know about it. In March of 1807, after decades of international advocacy, both the United States and Great Britain passed laws abolishing the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “Even though it’s about to be the 200th anniversary,” he observed, “nobody’s saying anything. Why? Is this connected to a callousness toward physical memories of the Underground Railroad?” he added suggestively, referring to the house and museum he had just toured, which the city wants to tear down.
Leberstein was joined on his Duffield Street tour last Monday morning by a modern trans-Atlantic alliance, in the form of two labor leaders from either side of the ocean, both of them particularly concerned about the increasing prevalent modern incarnations of human trafficking.
“Just the age of the building,” commented Bill Henning, vice president of the AFL-CIO’s New York local, “was pretty significant to me. It’s certainly not in the public’s interest to be paving over our history like that.”
His colleague from Yorkshire, England, was equally offended by this American city’s development plans. In the current United Kingdom, explained Bill Adams, regional secretary for the Trades Union Congress, “When a redevelopment plan goes on, its part of the planning to investigate this type of thing. If there’s any kind of smell of history about the place, it doesn’t necessarily stop development, but it would have to go around it.”
In Britain, such buildings are preserved and often converted to museums at government expense. In the port towns of Liverpool, Bristol, Hull, and London, each has its own museum devoted to the towns’ slaving history and African immigrant experience. In the 17th and 18th century, both Britain and its colonies got rich off the backs of slaves, but Brooklyn had no such museum – at least until this week when Chatel and Swan have begun the effort with no help from the government.
“All around the ports,” explained Adams of his home country, “there’s been a will on the part of the city councils to preserve houses like this, and to put up plaques and create museums. It also happens to be good for the economy, because of tourism.”
The history of slavery is about as ugly as it gets, but preserving its physical artifacts can be a beautiful thing, a so-called “win-win” for everybody, if civic leaders can manage to think past the next development cycle.