Private African American Heritage Downtown Walking Tour

Built by Africans to protect the Dutch settlement, Wall Street Housed NYC’s First Slave Market where African and Native Americans were bought, sold, and leased as day laborers.(15 min)

Archives from June 1696 mention that the church used slave labor to construct a thirst church. They also practiced services for slaves and free blacks like catechism, burials, in its churchyard and were the precursor to the African Free School.(20 min)

See some of the oldest architecture and the largest concentration of restored early 19th-century commercial buildings in the city. New York was a major player in the Tans-Atlantic Slave Trade which persisted despite it being outlawed.(30 min)

Workers on a construction site uncovered the remains of more than 419 Africans buried during the late 17th and 18th centuries; the largest colonial-era cemetery for people of African descent. The memorial was dedicated in 2007 to commemorate the role of Africans and African Americans in colonial and federal New York City, and in United States history.(20 min)

Originally the site of New York City's first free black settlement, by 1850 the Five Points district in lower Manhattan had instead become infamous for its dance halls, bars, gambling houses, and its mixed-race clientele.(15 min)

Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side and Lower Manhattan was the home to North America’s earliest free Black settlement in the 1640s. Minetta Lane, Street and Place were called “Little Africa” . Mother AME Zion Church was the first Black church in New York City.(22 min)