Honoring the Lyons family
Their
Land Became Part of Central Park. They’re Coming Back in a Monument.
Julia Jacobs, October 20, 2019, The New York Times
In Central Park, about a mile from land that was once home to
Seneca Village, a mostly black community forced out by the park’s
creation in the 1850s, the city is planning a privately funded monument
to a revered black family from that time.
The new addition to New York’s landscape, honoring the Lyons family,
is part of the de Blasio administration’s push to diversify the city’s
public art and recognize overlooked figures from its history.
The Lyonses were Seneca Village property owners, educators
and dedicated abolitionists, running a boardinghouse for black sailors
that doubled as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The monument will
include the figures of Albro Lyons, Mary Joseph Lyons and their daughter
Maritcha Lyons, who was significant in her
own right as a teacher, suffragist and racial justice activist.
“We traverse towns and cities across this country, and we’re often
unaware of the history and the artifacts literally beneath our feet,”
said Michelle Commander, an associate director and curator at the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
The city brought the idea for the monument to the center earlier this
year and gained its support.
“This is a positive step in recognizing the history and cultures that
have been covered up in the service of having Central Park,” she said.
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“Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s belief…The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.”
– William Sargant “Battle of the Mind”
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