BY ALBERT AMATEAU | Two events last week hearkened back to the days when New York was a station on the Underground Railroad and a center of the abolitionist movement that led up to the Civil War.
One of those events was a reunion in Greenwich Village of the descendants of Sydney Howard Gay, the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard weekly newspaper, and of Louis Napoleon, a free man of color who conducted hundreds of fugitives from slavery through New York City to freedom in Canada and elsewhere.
The June 14 reunion at the home of Otis Kidwell Burger, great-great-granddaughter of Gay, was organized by Don Papson, co-author of “Secret Lives of the Underground Railroad in New York City: Sidney Howard Gay, Louis Napoleon and the Record of Fugitives.” Attending the reunion was Angela Terrell, great-great-granddaughter of Louis Napoleon on her mother’s side.
Napoleon, born in 1800 and who signed his name with an X, nevertheless was instrumental in filing writs of habeas corpus in New York courts to enable fugitives from slavery to escape the clutches of slave catchers.
The other event was the June 18 rally by Chelsea activists and local officials to preserve the Hopper-Gibbons House, at 339 W. 29th St., Manhattan’s only remaining Underground Railroad site.
Demonstrators at the rally demanded that the owner of the 1846 building, Tony Mamounas, remove the fifth floor that he and his late brother illegally added in 2009. The building had been landmarked as part of the LaMartine Place Historic District.
Preservationists won a court order to remove the fifth floor and the ruling was upheld on appeal in February 2015.
“Still, after seven years, nothing has happened,” said Fern Luskin, an art history lecturer at LaGuardia Community College and a leader of Friends of the Hopper-Gibbons Underground Railroad Site. Luskin noted that Mamounas has lost the right to appeal further, but the Department of Buildings has failed to enforce the order to remove the addition.
What’s worse, the owner recently applied to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission with new plans to legalize the addition, according to Kelly Carroll, of the Historic Districts Council.
“The persisting presence of the illegal fifth floor is an affront to our history, our culture and the law,” Carroll said.
Preservationists especially resent the illegal fifth floor because the house was under siege during the Draft Riots of July 1863. The Hopper-Gibbons family climbed to the roof of the four-story building and fled east from rooftop to rooftop to Eighth Ave., where friends had a carriage waiting to take them to safety.
Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer told the rally that she had just come from a Juneteenth celebration in Harlem. The holiday commemorates June 19, 1865, when federal troops landed in Galveston, Texas, to announce that the Civil War had ended and that all former slaves were free with rights equal to their former masters.
“This building is part of our history and we don’t want to forget our history,” said Brewer, who remembered voting for the LaMartine Place Historic District when she was a city councilmember in 2009.
Lesley Doyel spoke for Save Chelsea and the Council of Chelsea Block Associations.
“We are all stunned that the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission is providing the scofflaw owner of this building with the opportunity to present new legalization plans for 339 W. 29th St.,” she said.
City Councilmember Corey Johnson and aides to state Senator Brad Hoylman and Assemblymember Richard Gottfried also called for the removal of the illegal fifth story of the Hopper-Gibbons house.
“Why isn’t this guy in jail?” Johnson asked of Mamounas, adding that L.P.C. must not “reward bad behavior.”
“Enough is enough,” he declared. “The city needs to come down with its full force of power and law [now] to stop this from happening in the future.”
Pat Waldo, a tour guide who is studying historic preservation at Pratt, said that the house’s history in the Draft Riots provides a symbolic warning during the “rise of Fuhrer Trump,” as he put it, of “how white working-class fears can be provoked in ugly and deadly ways. Now, more than ever,” he said, “it’s important for us to examine that connection.”
Don Papson’s book about the Underground Railroad in New York City narrates the link between the families of Sydney Howard Gay and James S. Gibbons, owner of the house at 339 W. 29th St. Gibbons’s wife was Abby Hopper, the daughter of Isaac Hopper, a Quaker abolitionist known as “The Father of the Underground Railroad.”
Gay’s wife, Elizabeth Neall, was the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia Quaker and abolitionist Daniel Neall.
The Gay and Gibbons families were close in the tight little community of abolitionists and free people of color in a mostly hostile New York City.
At the time of the Draft Riots, Gay, who had given up the National Anti-Slavery Standard, was managing editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. The angry mob besieged the Tribune because Greeley, although not a supporter of President Lincoln, had come out in favor of the draft, with the option of allowing draftees to opt out by either providing a substitute to serve for them or paying $300. Gay, contrary to Greeley’s orders, brought arms into the Tribune office to hold off the mob.
Greeley was also a friend of James Gibbons and a frequent visitor to his house at what is now 339 W. 29th St. Among the Draft Riots mob that attacked the house were men who egged them on shouting, “Greeley! Gibbons! Greeley! Gibbons!”
The close association of Louis Napoleon and Gay is first documented, according to the book, in October 1846 in connection with George Kirk, who fled slavery as a stowaway on a ship from Savannah, Georgia.
Napoleon and Elias Smith, a journalist with Gay’s Anti-Slavery Standard, conducted Kirk to court to prevent his return to Savannah.
On Oct. 23, 200 black men gathered in New York City at City Hall Park to support Kirk’s bid for freedom. At one point, Kirk hid in the Standard office and was spirited out in a box. He was recaptured but freed after a trial in front of a sympathetic judge.
Gay and others hired John Jay, the son of one of the Founding Fathers, to defend Kirk, who continued on to Boston.
Papson’s book is based on the 79 boxes of Gay’s papers in Columbia University’s Butler Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts.
The trove of documents was sold to the library 50 years ago by the mother of Otis Kidwell Burger, who hosted the June 14 reunion at her Bethune St. home.
Sydney Howard Gay, born in 1814, died in 1888. He was buried in Hingham, Massachusetts, the town where he was born. His wife died in 1907 and is buried beside him.
Louis Napoleon died in Brooklyn in 1881, three days short of his 81st birthday. He was survived by his third wife and was buried in Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, but the exact location is not known.
Although filled out years after the end of slavery, his death certificate lists his occupation as “Under Ground R.R. Agt.”
With reporting by Sean Egan
