A Historic Brooklyn House With Ties To Underground Railroad Faces Demolition

227 Duffield Street

Community activists and elected officials in Brooklyn are mounting an urgent campaign to halt the demolition of a 19th-century building that is believed to have been used as a safe haven for fugitive slaves during the abolitionist movement.

In June, the city’s Department of Buildings received an application to demolish 227 Duffield Street, which sits on a small lot in Downtown Brooklyn that has long been eyed for development.

“This should be a national landmark,” said Michael Higgins, an organizer at Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, one of the organizations lobbying the city to landmark the building. “Why can’t we figure out a way to save it?”

Another activist group, Circle for Justice Innovations, launched a petition urging the city Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate 227 Duffield as a landmark.

The house at 227 Duffield Street has been buffeted by surrounding development. (Jake Dobkin / Gothamist)

This week, 20 local elected officials, including Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, signed a letter to the LPC in support of giving the building landmark status. "With a lack of African American historical sites in Brooklyn, we cannot stop at the installation of statues recognizing historical figures," the letter read. "We must also work to preserve the physical movements of our ancestors."

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the LPC said they had "received a request to evaluate 227 Duffield Street as a potential landmark and it is currently under review.”

Earlier this month, Brownstoner reported that the current owner is Samuel Hanasab, a small developer, who has over the years acquired the building from individual owners who each owned stakes in the property.

Attempts to reach Hanasab by phone were not successful.

For more than a decade, the house has been the center of a debate over its history. Its late owner Joy Chatel had long insisted that the property had been a stop along the city’s Underground Railroad, a loose network of homes, businesses and churches that assisted black fugitives making their way north to upstate New York and New England and Canada. Although slavery was abolished in New York in 1827, harboring an escaped slave from the south remained illegal.

Around 2006, Kelly Anderson, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker chronicled the efforts to save the home along with a neighboring one at 233 Duffield Street from eminent domain, which the city was seeking as part of a plan to build a public park on the site. During the making of “My Brooklyn,” Kelly shot images of what the owners said had been part of an underground tunnel between 227 and 233 Duffield.

The city hired a planning and environmental firm which disputed the owners' claims, but the report was heavily criticized by experts.

“There was a lot of evidence that the houses were part of the Underground Railroad,” Anderson said.

Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, said verifiable evidence of Underground Railroad activity is often difficult to obtain because of its clandestine nature. Those who participated in harboring escaped slaves put themselves at great peril, he said.

But the house, he pointed out, was in fact owned by two abolitionists, Thomas and Harriet Truesdell, which he said provides a strong case for its role as an Underground Railroad stop.

The lot next to the house. (Jake Dobkin / Gothamist)

The city would seem to agree. In 2007, it backed off its eminent domain request and also renamed the street Abolitionist Place, further cementing its historic significance. Construction on the planned public space, Willoughby Square Park, has proceeded next door but has faced significant delays due to a dispute with the former developer. The city opened a temporary green space at the site last week.

Should the Landmarks Preservation Commission move to landmark the property, it would not be the first time the city has intervened to protect buildings associated with the Underground Railroad. In 2009, following a contested renovation of a mid-19th-century row house at 339 West 29th Street deemed to be the only surviving documented Underground Railroad stop in Manhattan, the city landmarked both the property and neighboring ones as part of the Lamartine Place Historic District. Bankoff, however, noted that the Chelsea property had historic records of its association with the Underground Railroad.

Over the years, the area surrounding 227 Duffield has been caught up in a development frenzy. There are two hotels, one on the same block and another across the street. Around the corner, residential buildings have been demolished and several businesses have left, according to Higgins.

Back in 2004, when the city rezoned Downtown Brooklyn, the plan for the neighborhood called for offices.

“We have this structure that was saved from being a casualty of Downtown Brooklyn [rezoning] but there weren’t really any protections,” he said.

UPDATE: A previous version of this story misstated the status of the demolition permit. The DOB received it in June but no approval was granted.