Shaping Public Memory in NYC Public Parks
Scholars and city officials examine how memorials in public parks are designed, reviewed, and stewarded — and whose stories they tell. Part one of a three-part series.
Why we picked this
This isn't abstract theory — it's an active reckoning with who gets commemorated in Central Park, anchored by the erasure of Seneca Village and a Mellon Foundation initiative to finally address it.
Public parks are among the city’s most democratic spaces, but the monuments within them encode particular choices about whose history gets told and how. This kick-off discussion — part of a three-part series developed around a Central Park Conservancy initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project — asks how the processes of design, review, and long-term stewardship can produce commemorative spaces that are more inclusive and transparent.
The conversation is grounded in a specific case: the effort to create a lasting commemoration of Seneca Village, the predominantly Black and Irish community that occupied the land now known as Central Park before the city displaced it in 1857. That history has been largely absent from the park’s public identity for over 160 years, and this series is part of a broader effort to change that.
Speakers include Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Architecture and a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia; Jessica MacLean, Director of Public History for the Central Park Conservancy; Jennifer Lantzas, Deputy Director of Art & Antiquities at NYC Parks; and Justin Garrett Moore of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place program. The panel brings together the scholarly, institutional, and civic perspectives that shape what public memory actually looks like on the ground.