Queens Borough President Donovan Richards Jr. this week sent letters to Mayor Zohran Mamdani and two government agencies demanding they intervene to transform a parking lot built on top of an African burial ground into a respectful memorial commemorating the sacred ground.
Richards, joined by eight Queens elected officials, asked Mamdani and the city to buy the lot and join a growing effort to turn the privately owned lot at 47-11 90th St. in Elmhurst into a memorial. It’s believed more than 300 freed slaves are buried there in a cemetery that dates to the early 19th Century.
“In unity with dozens of community leaders and local preservationists, we urge your administration to acquire the lot and transform it into a proper memorial to the nearly 300 individuals who are interred there,” he wrote to the mayor Tuesday.
In August, The City Reporter revealed that a limited liability corporation that owns the site had paved it over and was renting it out as a parking lot. It held cars and trucks towed under an NYPD effort to rid city streets of abandoned vehicles.
The account inspired a wave of outrage by officials and local leaders at what they saw as a disrespectful treatment of the site.
On Tuesday Donovan and the other elected officials also fired off missives to Lisa Kersavage, chair of the city Landmarks Preservation Commission, asking the agency to designate the site as landmarked, and another letter to Kathy Moser, commissioner of the state Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation department, asking her to consider placing the site on its registry of historic sites.
Those who signed on included the U.S. Rep. Grace Meng, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, state Sen. Leroy Comrie, Assemblymembers Catalina Cruz and Larinda Hooks and City Councilmembers Shanel Thomas-Henry, Ty Hankerson and Shekar Krishnan, all Democrats.
In his letter to the mayor, Borough President Richards emphasized his ongoing conversations with City Hall about the fate of the site. On Wednesday City Hall did not respond to questions about the status of those talks.
The site dates to 1818 and was taken over by the founders of what would be St. Mark’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1828, the year after New York State abolished slavery. The church sold off the lot in the 1930s and it was for years the site of a factory.
In 2009 the factory owner sold it to 90 Queens LLC, a developer who planned to build luxury condos there. While digging a foundation, workers hit an iron coffin containing the remains of an African American woman believed to have died of smallpox around 1835. Subsequent archaeological exploration uncovered hundreds of other graves.
The Rev. Kimberly Detherage of St. Mark’s has called on Mayor Mamdani to get the city to buy the plot and back the creation of a memorial that would honor the individuals buried there. A local group, the Elmhurst History and Cemeteries Preservation Society, has a pending request for examination filed with the city’s landmarks preservation agency. On Wednesday the LPC did not immediately respond to questions about the status of that examination.
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