NEWS: LPC Commisioner Supports Underground Railroad Sites
From the Brooklyn Papers:
FREEDOM ROAD
Fresh support for Underground RR siteBy Ariella Cohen The Brooklyn Papers
The destruction of a row of houses near Fulton Mall would “continue a legacy” of losing valuable bits of black history, a member of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission charged last week.As reported recently in The Brooklyn Papers, preservationists have stepped up a two-year-old fight to save two Downtown Brooklyn homes where the city wants to build a parking lot, but they claim is a historic site where well-known 19th-century abolitionists lived and harbored slaves on their way to freedom. In a letter to the consulting team hired by the city to evaluate the site’s history, Christopher Moore urged the city to keep the houses intact. “Nearly all [Underground Railroad sites] … where most of the African-Americans resided have been destroyed,” Moore, research coordinator at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture, wrote in an April 15 letter to the consultant, AKRF. “Destroying the houses on Duffield Street would certainly continue that legacy,” said Moore, who claimed in 2004 that the city was ignoring the real history of the site. Moore says the city is better at preserving history in white neighborhoods than in black neighborhoods. “My analysis of 34 Underground Railroad-related sites [shows] that almost all still survive in Brooklyn Heights,” he wrote.
For full story: http://www.brooklynpapers.com/html/issues/_vol29/29_17/29_17nets2.html