February 3, 2007 / Brooklyn Heights–Downtown / Perspective / Heights Lowdown

City deaf to Railroad’s call

By Christie Rizk

The Brooklyn Paper

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It’s easy to ridicule Bruce Ratner for partnering with a slavery-linked British Bank on his Atlantic Yards mega-project.

But as Lewis Greenstein and Joy Chatel are finding out, Ratner isn’t the only one ignoring America’s slave-owning past.

Greenstein and Chatel live on Duffield Street in Downtown Brooklyn. And like a couple of lone Yankee soldiers battling General Lee’s troops, these two activists are fighting to keep the city from destroying their buildings, which they claim were once stations on the Underground Railroad.

The city would rather have an underground parking lot.

It’s all part of the Downtown Brooklyn Plan, which is designed to make the area more tourist- and rich-person friendly. A few luxury skyscrapers are already going up and other buildings are being converted from offices to high-end apartments.

“They want to turn Downtown Brooklyn into a little model of Manhattan,” said Greenstein. “No matter what kind of information we dig up to show them the history here, they say it’s not enough.”

The city says that Chatel and Greenstein can’t prove that their basements were once a safe haven for slaves headed to Canada. But Greenstein and Chatel say that the fault is the city’s, not theirs.

“We need archeologists in here to excavate and certify what they find,” says Greenstein, who showed me a spot in his basement that looks like a capped well, and another spot that looks like it maybe could have possibly been a quick-hide spot for the fugitives in case someone came looking.

There are also shafts leading to the street, and two alcoves with flues that once housed cast-iron stoves used for cooking.

“Anybody in their right mind can see that this was part of the Underground Railroad,” said Greenstein.

The strongest part of his case is the historical fact that Thomas and Harriet Truesdell, two heroes of the abolitionist movement, once owned 227 Duffield St. And the entire block was well known as a hotbed of anti-slavery activity in the 1800s.

“There’s history here,” added Chatel. “You can feel it.”

Greenstein and Chatel gave me a rundown of the activity they think took place in these buildings — slaves fed and temporarily housed on their way to freedom, meetings at the black churches surrounding the street, abolitionists doing their best to free as many people as they could.

Whatever else they are, Greenstein and Chatel are dedicated to preserving an important part of America’s past.

In 2004, an Economic Development Corporation official was caught lying at a hearing to determine the houses’ historical value. He testified that he had consulted with dozens of experts and black culture research institutions and that they had agreed that the Duffield Street homes didn’t deserve to be saved.

But he hadn’t and they didn’t.

The lie was bad enough, but what really bothers Greenstein is that the city would tear down his building simply to create a parking lot for the New Brooklyn, chasing, as he called it, “the Almighty dollar.”

Who knows if these houses were really part of the Underground Railroad? Who knows if fleeing slaves once gratefully ate dinner in Lewis Greenstein’s basement?

But the fact that these are even questions provides us with Greenstein and Chatel’s most-compelling argument: Why won’t the city help them find the truth, instead of tripping them up at every turn?

Don’t they deserve that? Doesn’t the past, at least, deserve that?

The Kitchen Sink

That crazy Frenchman at Almondine Bakery in DUMBO has done it again! Herve Poussot is now offering smoked salmon, capers and cream cheese on a poppy-seed baguette. It’s a Gallic bagel and lox! …

A freshman at St. Francis College is ranking at the top of her sport: women’s bowling. Alexandra Stein closed out 2006 as the top female bowler in the nation and now ranks fourth out of 350. Knock ’em dead, Alexandra. Or maybe just knock ’em down… Congratulations to our favorite Heights celebrity, Gabriel Byrne, on his new HBO series, “Treatment.” He plays a rage-filled therapist — but doesn’t everyone in the Heights?

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper