Somehow, despite having a whole extra day to February, this month has still managed to fly by. I’m grateful we’re getting closer to warmer weather and earlier sunsets, but holy heck it feels like time is fucking flying by. Somehow nearly all of my month of March is full too? What is life, y’all?
Anyways, I had a super busy weekend so I’ve got some fun stuff in this week’s issue. Paid subscribers will get to read what I thought of the new Avatar series on Netflix and learn whether or not I thought the S’Moosh Your S’Mores experience at Hershey’s was worth it. It only costs $5/mo to read all of my words and that’s 1/3 of the price of a giant Hershey’s S’Mores, so it’ll honestly save you money in the long run. I’m all about those deals, baby!
1. Learning 🧠
I mentioned Seneca Village when I wrote about the Afrofuturist Period Room and Weeksville a while back and I almost didn’t dedicate a section to it because I figured everyone know about it by now. But I didn’t want to just assume that and I also think it’s an interesting example of how the city truly tried to bury the existence of a group of people for its own benefit. If that could happen to Seneca Village, what’s to stop it from happening to any other group who are deemed “less than” in the future? Nothing, probably.
Seneca Village sprang up as a free Black community in 1825 after Andrew Young and Epiphany Davis purchased land from John and Elizabeth Whitehead, but by the time it was razed in 1855 the demographics had expanded to include a good amount of Irish-Americans. This area of Manhattan was still only lightly developed, so it was a great place to have a little space and fresh air and get away from the densely populated downtown. In those 30 years, the residents built 3 churches, 2 schools, 3 cemeteries, and numerous gardens. They had homes filled with very normal stuff - dishware, clothing, books, toys for children. Records showed that most residents paid taxes; folks needed to own $250 worth of land to be eligible to vote and 10% of Black New Yorkers who were eligible to vote were residents of Seneca Village. Everything that we have come to discover about Seneca Village shows that it was a thriving community filled with people who were just going about their lives.
But then the city decided it wanted to build a park. This park would be a grand achievement that would provide beautiful green space to allow New Yorkers to escape all of that dang urbanism that was smelly and disease-y and gross. Since most of upper Manhattan was still largely undeveloped, the city decided to square off a big chunk of land and get to building. Except, that land wasn’t all uninhabited; there was a pesky plot of land on the western edge that was in the way.
Instead of fairly compensating the residents of Seneca Village to gain their land, like the city did with other residents that needed to move, they instead engaged in a smear campaign against the village. Newspaper articles at the time described it as a shanty town full of squatters. No photographs of the village exist, but there are some newspaper drawings that depict the area in this negative light. This made it easy for the residents of NYC to turn on Seneca Village and demand that they get the heck outta there to make way for their beautiful future park. And so the residents were removed, often violently, and the village was razed to build a park.
After we got our park, the village was forgotten until the 1970s when Peter Salwen noted a discrepancy in city maps of the village's impressive architecture that seemed to contradict the historical descriptions. Later, the NY Historical Society launched an initiative to uncover the history and artifacts of the site and excavations took place that uncovered tiles, shoes, and pottery. The Central Park Conservancy now offers tours of the site and has a lot of info plaques up all around. So it seems like we’re coming to terms with this very shitty thing that happened. And I hate to end things on a downer, but I just feel like it was entirely too easy for the press to sway everyone’s opinions of this village and result in pain and destruction and I don’t think that’s a lesson that we’ve learned just yet.
2. Exploring 🛼
Switching gears here: I attended a very fun Wowza Hangout over the weekend at The Escape Game. It was an escape room y’all! I know I know, is this 2008? I feel like there was a boom of escape rooms around then, suddenly popping up all over the place. They were based on the “escape the room” computer games of yore and some are pretty technically advanced now. I absolutely love solving puzzles, so this type of activity is very up my alley. However, I’m not always able to corral a group of friends to solve puzzles with me and since it’s no fun to do an escape room alone (it would also be really hard), I was grateful to have my Wowza pals along for the ride!
We were booked in the venue’s Gold Rush room and had to find out grandpa Clyde’s treasure before time ran out. I was the only member of our group who had done an escape room before, so I knew that you had to basically touch everything in the room: pick up rugs, turn signs around, etc. The first clue that I was very excited to solve was a code that we had to enter by knocking on a tree trunk - how fun! Other clues included counting the amount of birds scattered about, completing a number puzzle with the clues found on various bottles of booze hidden around the room, and a math puzzle that was way too hard to occur in the last 3 minutes of the game. One activity that tripped us up a bit involved shooting a bb gun; sadly we were all soft liberal NYers who did not know our way around guns 😅
This is honestly one of those activities that could go either way with a group. You might find that you all compliment each other wonderfully - one person is great with numbers, another is great with logic puzzles, and maybe someone else is just awesome at noticing small details. It’s like forming a well-rounded trivia team, you need a variety of folks who can handle anything thrown your way. On the flip side, it does require a good amount of communication and cooperation. You won’t get anywhere if one person decides that they’ll go off and just solve everything on their own. I was super thankful to be partnered up with an amazing group of people, chosen pretty at random by the Wowza organizers.
This was honestly a great way to spend an hour of my life and like $40ish. I was completely engaged the whole time and sweat more in those last 3 minutes than I ever had in a spin class. When we finally freed ourselves from the room we were all so hyped that we went for a walk around Bryant Park and followed that up with burgers from 7th St and fancy French treats from Marvelous by Fred. If you’ve managed to corral a few friends, I definitely recommend checking out this escape room venue for a fun activity. I know lots of companies use escape rooms as team building activities and to that I say, I hope your coworkers won’t mind yelling and sweating with you for an hour.
3. What’s Good 😎
Yu & Me Books has reopened in their original location in Chinatown and they have a whole calendar of great stuff planned for March!
Brooklyn Museum’s First Saturday this month will feature a market lineup of female vendors for Women’s Month! Shop the Night Market, explore the Museum after hours, and dance! Entry is free, but you must RSVP at Brooklyn museum.org
We have our first reader-submitted event - Volar Dating is having a launch party on March 7 and you’re invited! They’re an AI dating app that helps take those first few uncomfortable steps for you. They’ve kindly provided a promo code for BCLF readers - use BIGCITY for 20% off the ticket price. Please let me know if you go and meet the love of your life there!
Sad news for fans of Flaco the owl - our “symbol of self-reliance” is dead after a building collision. Flaco was freed from the Central Park zoo a year ago and had been living his best rent-free life perched amongst trees from the East Village to the Upper East side.
BCLF’s favorite Seltzer Museum is having an Egg Cream Invitational on March 15! Get your tickets now - they’re $25 and you’ll probably get to try some sick egg creams.
I usually don’t post same-day events, but this one was just shared by my buddy Andy: a poetry reading at Art Cafe Brooklyn! I was also told there will be cake, so you know I’ll be there.
Are you hosting an event you want included here? Or have you just heard about something cool coming up that you want to share? Let me know!
4. Watching🍿
Do I have fans of Avatar the Last Airbender here? That show is absolutely near and dear to me and is something I’ve rewatched multiple times. It looks like a kid’s show on the surface, but the themes it deals with are real AF: grief, genocide, war - sounds like what’s on the news today but nope, that was a children’s cartoon on Nickelodeon in 2005. When Netflix announced they were doing a live action remake I cringed; not only did M Night do us so wrong in 2010, but live action remakes are generally bad (see every live action Disney movie). Reviews on the new series have been super mixed ranging from calling it a beautifully crafted disappointment to claiming it’s everything fans hoped it would be. So, is it any good?
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