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Since its founding nearly one hundred years before the Revolutionary War, New Rochelle, New York has undergone several transformations. Variously a colony for Huguenot refugees, a hotbed for abolitionist movements, a hub of European immigration, and a classic American suburb, New Rochelle’s diversity and proximity to New York City have induced physical as well as social changes. Urban renewal projects in the mid-twentieth century tore apart the community’s historic African American neighborhoods. Today, visionary residents and ambitious urban planning projects offer opportunities for equitably rebuilding this cultural landscape.

History

Often perceived as a classic American suburb, the historic town of New Rochelle in Westchester County, New York, pre-dates the Revolutionary War by a hundred years and has borne witness to great social, political, environmental, and developmental changes in the three centuries following. New Rochelle was unique among New York colonies for its founding by French Huguenot refugee families, alongside a relatively large population of enslaved African Americans. Thirty-three Protestant Huguenot families fleeing Catholic pogroms in La Rochelle, France, arrived in this region in 1688, purchasing land from John Pell, whose ancestor Thomas Pell had forcibly overtaken the land from the ownership of the Siwanoy Indians a few decades earlier.

Through the mid-eighteenth century, New Rochelle remained largely populated by French refugees. The first national census, conducted six years after the Revolutionary War in 1790, records a population in New Rochelle of 693 residents, of whom 136 were African American. Thomas Paine, the essayist and abolitionist (and perhaps the town’s most famous resident), settled in New Rochelle after the Revolutionary War, joining an existing population of abolitionist Quakers and one of the earliest and largest populations of free African Americans. By the 1820 census, the African American population in New Rochelle had increased slightly to 150. Though slavery was not abolished in New York State until 1820, notably, only six people were counted as being enslaved.

Following the Civil War, in which both Black and white soldiers from New Rochelle served the Union cause, the town completed its transition from a rural farming community into a sophisticated suburb and resort community with several glamorous hotels, gardens, and attractions luring wealthy white families to this and other neighboring New York City suburbs. Glen Island Resort, which featured bathing beaches, an exotic animal zoo, a natural history museum, and a miniature steam train, was considered America’s first summer resort, with annual attendance of nearly one million people by the turn of the twentieth century.

Over the next several decades, New Rochelle experienced large waves of immigration, especially of Jewish, Italian, and African American families seeking economic opportunities. Redlining and other forms of restrictive building and development codes excluded African Americans and some non-Protestant immigrant populations from living in New Rochelle’s luxurious waterfront villas or fashionable new suburban developments, but this did not prevent their communities from thriving.

Lincoln Avenue became the vibrant center of African American life in New Rochelle, supporting a lively commercial corridor of successful small businesses, surrounding residential streets of single-family homes, and the segregated Lincoln Elementary School. Several prominent African Americans, including Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Whitney Young, Jr., actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, jazz musician Branford Marsalis, and Olympic athletes John Woodruff and Lou Jones, hailed from or settled in New Rochelle. In a landmark 1961 desegregation case, the first school desegregation case outside of the American South, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Lincoln Avenue School was unlawfully segregated, and it was subsequently closed and finally demolished in 1965.

In the mid-twentieth century, urban renewal efforts swept through urban centers like New York and extended into smaller communities like New Rochelle. Robert Moses’ ambitious pursuit of constructing a massive New England thru-highway began in earnest in 1951, with Interstate 95 built in 1957 to connect New York City with surrounding towns. As was the case with many American cities, the construction plan for Interstate 95 tore through the African American neighborhoods of New Rochelle, leading to the displacement of families, many of whom had roots in the community for several generations, and the closure of many businesses within the Lincoln Avenue corridor.

Memorial Highway, originally designed to connect Interstate 95 with two other regional parkways, was only partially completed, necessitating a complex matrix of roadway solutions to be built to direct its intended traffic. The tangle of resulting roadways disconnected the historic Lincoln Avenue community and created unsafe conditions for pedestrians. By the 1960s, desegregation and urban renewal efforts had already spurred many white residents to leave New Rochelle for some of the nearby wealthier, whiter towns of Westchester County, creating a geographic, demographic, and economic divide that has persisted for decades.

Today, Black neighborhoods that were splintered around Memorial Highway are urban palimpsests with layers of erasure, resettlement, and redevelopment. Understanding, recording, and visualizing these invisible layers of cultural history and heritage—both spatially and temporally—fortifies residents, city leaders, and designers in efforts to chart an equitable vision for new developments. New Rochelle is the recipient of a large New York State grant under its Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI) to fund traffic studies and planning and development projects to connect the Lincoln Avenue Corridor to the massive re-development occurring downtown, on the other side of Memorial Highway. In addition, the city is engaging community participation in its plans to re-route traffic and convert sections of Memorial Highway to public space in the form of a linear park, called The LINC, which would showcase African American culture, art, and history. However, the re-zoning of the area and private development incentives will also have a profound effect on the community, and community engagement on re-zoning initiatives is superficial.