Co-sponsored by the Merchant’s House Museum

Most accounts of Revolutionary War New York center on battles and founders. This one starts somewhere else: in the Meatpacking District at the foot of Gansevoort Street, where the promises and betrayals of the American Revolution played out not in meeting halls, but in mud, on water, and on land that had already changed hands long before a single shot was fired.

Here, a Lenape settlement called Sapokanikan had been erased by Dutch colonial forces a century before the Revolution began. Here, Black maritime workers knew the currents of the Hudson better than any Continental general. And here, in 1783, approximately 3,000 Black Loyalists boarded ships from this shore not in defeat, but as an act of self-emancipation, taking their freedom when the new American republic refused to guarantee it.

Join us for a this lecture that moves through sites in Greenwich Village, combining archival evidence, period maps, and documented individual stories to reframe the Revolution from the ground up.