By Teri Berg and Brian Henderson

      Joy Chatel is the rare Brooklyn resident protesting a massive city development plan that most Brooklynites welcome. That dissent gives the black community activist something in common with the white abolitionists that once populated her neighborhood.

      In antebellum New York City, opponents of slavery chanced six months in jail and a $1,000 fine if caught helping runaway slaves. In Chatel’s fight to preserve her house, which once may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad, she sees a city and a people at risk of losing an important part of their history.

      Chatel is not willing to entrust that risk to City Hall, so the longtime community activist is converting her property into a museum.

      “Slavery was our holocaust,” Chatel said. “If the city tears down these houses, the African-American community loses out.”

      Chatel’s four-story house at 227 Duffield St. is one of seven pre-Civil War homes in Downtown Brooklyn that have been under review twice by the City’s Economic Development Corporation since 2004. EDC spokeswoman Janel Patterson said the agency hoped to release a final report soon.

      Whatever history lies beneath these once proud row houses, a chronicle of the past that Chatel and her neighbors argue is priceless, the city will likely decide its development project is worth the risk, according to Underground Railroad historian Fergus M. Bordewich.

      The city plans to seize the properties and raze the distressed buildings to make way for an urban renewal project that promises 5.4 million square feet of commercial space and 1,000 new apartments. Abutting Duffield Street to the east, on a patch of land that will become Willoughby Square Park, will be a hotel and retail space.

      The row houses that once may have had ties to the Underground Railroad are slated to become an underground parking lot.

      The owners of the “Duffield 7” say they have found intriguing artifacts and structural anomalies that prove their houses served as temporary living quarters for slaves fleeing the South.

      Lewis Greenstein, who owns 233 Duffield St., said he discovered old cauldrons and stoves in the basement of his 157-year-old house. The longtime Brooklyn resident said fugitive slaves used the rudimentary appliances to cook their own meals.

      Several of the houses have shafts in their cellars leading to the street. The owners insist these dark voids are hideaways and tunnels; investigators hired through the city’s landmark preservation office said the small dugouts were merely coal shafts.

      According to a previously undisclosed preliminary report, evidence tying the properties to the Underground Railroad is too limited and largely circumstantial.

      A team of researchers assembled the report after a six-month investigation of the Duffield Street properties; vetting those conclusions was a review panel of 12 historians specializing in the Underground Railroad as well as the culture, artifacts and architecture of the antebellum period.

      Alterations done over the years to Chatel’s building have destroyed the integrity of the original 19-century structure, the report concluded. Also, city property records show that while Thomas Edwards owned 233 Duffield St., the known abolitionist never lived in the building now owned by Greenstein. These findings and others prompted investigators to conclude that none of the houses in dispute merited historic recognition.

      After Duffield Street owners disputed the report’s findings, the city commissioned a second study.

      Local historian Robert Swan, who recently teamed with Chatel to form the Black Brooklyn Historical Society, said people in the neighborhood have not had enough time to dig up the archeological evidence he’s sure is there.

      Swan himself has been leafing through city records. He found that the slaves’ flight to freedom in the 1830s and ‘40s was aided by a loose affiliation of abolitionists living or working in the Duffield neighborhood.

      “The history of the Underground Railroad in Brooklyn has never been written, and we can’t document that much of it,” Swan said. “But we can document relationships between famous abolitionists in the area.”

      Among those anti-slavery activists were Thomas Truesdell and his wife, Harriet, who once owned Chatel’s house. The Truesdells, said Swan, sometimes hosted movement leader William Lloyd Garrison at 227 Duffield. Also, Quaker and slavery protester William Harned lived less than a block away.

      New York City was a layover on the Underground Railroad, said historian Fergus M. Bordewich, author of “Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America.”

      “The rivers here made the city one of the main arteries of the Underground Railroad, going north to Albany and Troy,” said Bordewich, a native New Yorker. “There was a steady flow of fugitive slaves along that route for decades.”

      Bordewich noted that most runaway slaves who made it to the Northeast were directed further north via Manhattan, where black newspaper publisher David Ruggles hosted the city’s most famous safehouse.

      That Railroad “station,” a small building once located at what is now an empty retail space in Tribeca, was recently awarded a plaque from the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission commemorating the site’s history.

      According to Bordewich, runaway slaves were known to take refuge in Brooklyn. Just over a mile west of Duffield Street is Plymouth Church, the home pulpit of the fiery abolitionist Henry Beecher Stowe. Another noted safe haven located five blocks from Chatel’s and Greenstein’s houses was the African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church on Bridge Street. The renovated building is now the admissions office for Polytechnic University.

      “The surrounding area was home to a number of people active in the abolitionist movement – they could very well have been doing the work,” Bordewich said. “But that is not proof.”

      Bordewich pointed out that the area never saw more than a trickle of the runaway slaves that passed through New York City.

      “We’re talking about modest numbers here, not thousands,” he said.

      Bordewich has toured the Duffield buildings, and said he respects the owners’ campaign to save what he says could be a small part of black history in New York City.

      But he did not see enough compelling evidence to convince the city that the houses were worth saving.

      “The folks on Duffield Street love history, and can be proud of the facts they have found,” Bordewich said. “They may lose those houses, but they have opened the door for further research about the area and the people involved in the Underground Railroad.”

Links:

National Undergound Railroad Freedom Center

New York Public Library Schomburg Center

Plymouth Church

David Ruggles on Freedom Forum

noLandGrab.org

The New York City Department of City Planning's Official Brooklyn Development Plan Site