Central Park’s Irish Mystery

By Tom Deignan

Infamous Tammany Hall power-broker George Washington Plunkitt is most famous for his philosophy of “honest graft.”

In a book entitled Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, which came out exactly 100 years ago, this son of Irish immigrants argued that some forms of thievery are simply more forgivable than others.

More broadly, Plunkitt was a defender of how the Irish, both inside and outside of the political system, used the often-corrupt Tammany Hall.

“If a family is burned out I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats,” Plunkitt once said.

“I just get quarters for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up til they get things runnin’ again. It’s philanthropy, but it’s politics, too — mighty good politics. Who can tell how many votes one of these fires brings me?”

For better or worse, that’s what George Washington Plunkitt is most famous for.

But what about Plunkitt’s Irish immigrant parents? Not much is known about them. But an upcoming historical treasure hunt in Manhattan’s Central Park may change all that.

Plunkitt’s parents, according to the New York Historical Society, were residents of Seneca Village, a largely African American/Irish settlement which sprung up in the 1840s and 1850s in the wild woods of what was then known as upper Manhattan.

It was just a few years later that democratic-spirited master planners decided that New Yorkers deserved a public park centrally located in Manhattan — hence, Central Park.

The only problem? The hundreds of African Americans, Irish immigrants and others who called the fields of upper Manhattan home.

They had to go. Houses had been built, churches had been established and fields were planted in the village, which is located underneath what today is roughly West 83rd to West 85th Street. Still, they were evicted.

For years, it was believed that this was a squalid area, and its inhabitants deserved to be looked upon with pity at best, if not outright scorn.

In fact, even though this was still a time of slavery and legalized racial bigotry, one infamous record from 1856 suggests that Seneca Village’s Irish residents were despised even more than its black inhabitants.

In July of 1856, The New-York Daily Times ran an article headlined “The Present Look of Our Great Central Park.”

Black villagers “present a pleasing contrast in their habits and the appearance of their dwellings to the Celtic occupants, in common with hogs and goats, of the shanties in the lower part of the Park. They have been notified to remove by the first of August.

“The policemen find it difficult to persuade them out of the idea which has possessed their simple minds, that the sole object of the authorities in making the park is to procure their expulsion from the homes which they occupy. It is to be hoped that their removal will be effected with as much gentleness as possible.”

Kind of makes you understand why the likes of George Washington Plunkitt were not bothered if people looked the other way in order to get a break in life.

Fellow Irish Tammany Hall power broker Richard Croker also resided in Seneca Village for some time.

In recent years, scholars have begun to overturn the suggestion that Seneca Village was a mere camp for the downtrodden. It has been suggested that a vibrant, structured social order was constructed by the area’s desperate inhabitants. In the 1950’s a Parks Department worker even uncovered what appeared to be a Seneca Village graveyard.

Now, 150 years later, researchers from Barnard and City colleges are digging deep — that is, underground — to see if any physical evidence remains to tell us more about Seneca Village.

Using what has been described as ground-penetrating radar, researchers hope that a broader picture of this African American village with a significant Irish presence will emerge.

After all, the recent spotlight on the movie Gangs of New York illustrated black-Irish tensions. Now it may be time to see how these marginalized groups actually coexisted.

Furthermore, if the Plunkitts of New York were able to start a decent life in Seneca Village, they deserve to be remembered for that as much as for “honest graft.”

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net.)