'A LOSS OF UNDERSTANDING OF OURSELVES’ Monday, September 6, 2021
PHOTOGRAPH VIA EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL, ALAMY
By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, HISTORY
Nearly 3,000 people died on the morning of September 11, 2001, when two planes struck the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. As the towers crumbled, pieces of debris tore into an adjacent building (pictured above, at left), turning it into a smoking crater.
In the basement of that building, called Six World Trade, sat more than a million historical artifacts excavated from sites across the city. These artifacts told the origin story of New York, and the history of the enslaved men and women and the immigrant working classes who built it into a global powerhouse, Nina Strochlic writes for Nat Geo.
A decade earlier two huge archaeological discoveries were made during construction projects in lower Manhattan. Graves from an early African burial ground provided evidence of a large early African community and revealed a brutal picture of slavery, where young, expendable labor was needed to build up an industrial city. Then, under a nearby parking lot, researchers unearthed the remains of Five Points, once one of the world’s most densely populated neighborhoods and 19th-century Manhattan’s most notorious slum.
On 9/11, both those collections were stored under Six World Trade. Thankfully, the human remains from the burial ground were safe at Washington’s Howard University, but the fate of the accompanying artifacts and thousands of educational materials they’d compiled into a research library, along with the excavations from Five Points, was unknown. (Below left, the head of a clay pipe excavated from Five Points; below right, children’s marbles found at Five Points.)
PHOTOGRAPHS VIA MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
The African Burial Ground boxes were retrieved‚ allowing researchers to continue studying the lives of 419 enslaved men, women, and children who were buried there. But only 18 pieces of the Five Points collection survived that day.
“We have to remember that September 11 really did eclipse a record of that part of the city,” says Rebecca Yamin, who led the Five Points project. “The record of the past being lost is always a tragedy. It’s not the same as the tragedy of human lives. But it’s a loss of understanding of ourselves and where we came from.”