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Several years ago, you might not have given a second thought to the corner of Bedford Avenue and Church Avenue in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York—overgrown grass pushing the boundaries of a chain-linked fence where a public school once stood. Today, however, signage reveals the land’s original purpose, what lies beneath its overgrowth, and what might be the key to halting gentrification efforts in Brooklyn.
From the 17th to 19th centuries, this part of Flatbush, originally Lenape land (“Lenapehoking”), later forcibly taken by Dutch settlers, served as a cemetery for the settlers’ enslaved Africans. On a chain-linked fence, the site’s name is woven with brightly colored fabric: African Burial Ground.
The Flatbush African Burial Ground was first included on a map in 1855 by Teunis G. Bergen and labeled as the “Negro Burying Ground,” which belonged to the Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church. By that time, more than two hundred years after the Dutch displaced the Lenape, nearly 70% of the residents were slaveholders, meaning nearly one-third (1 in 3) people were enslaved. (Of note, New York State “abolished” slavery in 1827.) The enslaved built farms, roads, schoolhouses, churches, and cemeteries. However, they were prohibited from being buried in the Dutch Reformed Church’s cemetery, so they were buried in a separate, segregated burial site. The land has held several public schools since, including the former Yeshiva University All- Boys High School. Notably, New York City gave the school building (not the land) historical landmark status in 2007, but by 2015, the building was demolished because of unsafe building conditions.
A three-mile walk from the Flatbush African Burial Ground, on Willoughby and Norstrand in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a fence with green covering runs the perimeter of the lot of the recently abandoned Jacob Dangler House. A white sign fixed to one side reads, “MNK Enterprises.” Designed by Theobald Engelhardt around 1897 for the prominent Brooklyn merchant Jacob Dangler, this home represented the “turn of the [20th] century” residential development and later became the long-time home of a masonic organization whose membership comprised predominantly Black women. But the fenced perimeter is no longer there. Neither is the mansion. In September 2022, a developer demolished the mansion despite residents’ protests, pleas, and petitions. However, as of this writing, the Google Maps app still shows the mansion with a Google timestamp of 2025 across the top. In reality, the corner has a gaping hole, and its developer has plans to fill it with a condominium.
“In situations like this, our history is being destroyed brick by brick. I worry about what is being lost,” Shanna Sabio, co-founder and executive director of Growhouse Design + Development Group (locally known as “Growhouse”), said to me during our chat in early spring. Growhouse is a community land trust and cultural institution that reclaims and stewards land for community benefit against gentrification in Brooklyn. “There are more locations like this throughout Brooklyn, and the hope is to acquire as many as possible to be used in service to the community,” explained Sabio.
All over the US, communities such as Flatbush, deprived of resources for decades, are now seen as lucrative land grabs displacing and disrupting Black communities. Today, and for the first time in decades, communities in historically Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, like Lefferts Gardens and Crown Heights, will have less than 50% Black residents. Along with that decrease comes less awareness and understanding of the histories and ecosystems that have formed the fabric of these communities. “People don’t always realize the history of the neighborhood,” Sabio explained. That lack of awareness is by design. Housing policies favor developers over community members; accelerated real estate deals catch community members unaware; and socio-political forces act to erase archival or historical evidence of the space’s significance.
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Shanna Sabio’s own history echoes the power of political and social consciousness, community organizing, and preserving and cultivating Black histories and stories within the land. Her great-grandfather, James Francis, was one of the first men hired to dig the Panama Canal. A Jamaican who found his way to Costa Rica, he is remembered for not only recruiting men from across the Caribbean to work on the canal but for organizing the men. “He was well-known as a scholar who admired Garvey,” Sabio shared. She remarked how he would be seen reading newspapers to men to keep them informed and “hold court” with the townsfolk. Sabio’s aunt, Eunice Wilson (Francis’ granddaughter), was one of those people watching his actions with the community. Inspired, Wilson later became a Black Panther Party for Self-Defense member, even meeting and spending time with Winnie Mandela, the activist and wife of the late Nelson Mandela, in South Africa.
In 2020, when the pandemic hit, Sabio began thinking back to her ancestral roots, having family members who were able to steward property and hold property. How could she create opportunities for young people to become owners and stewards in their neighborhoods and halt the gentrification of Brooklyn? They had already started a creative incubator project with her son and Growhouse co-founder, Warner Sabio, Jr. “He and his friends created and produced an experimental film about life in these neighborhoods,” she said. The film premiered at Growhouse’s first event, an artist showcase, which was well-received and became the spark for GrowhouseNYC’s existence. The relationship between living histories, the land, and their responsibility to steward both became clear.
In October 2020, Growhouse intended to respond to a Request for Proposal (RFP) from New York City to convert unused land (including the African Burial Grounds) into affordable housing and youth programming. GrowHouse first learned of the Flatbush African Burial Ground while researching city-owned land for the creation of its youth-led community land trust. Strikingly, city officials did not clearly promote it as a former burial ground. Further, they realized that the list of potential land sites was out-of-date, and private developers had already acquired properties whose priorities greatly differed from the community’s own. “We realized information existed that we were not privy to,” Sabio recounted.
Recommended reading: An Artist’s Antidote to Gentrification
At that time, Growhouse learned of the Bedford Church Lot community group’s mobilizing efforts to halt the city’s gentrification plans on the Flatbush African Burial Ground and preserve the site in Brooklyn. They joined forces alongside other community groups, and on Juneteenth 2021, Growhouse led the first-ever walking history tour of the burial ground to strengthen community preservation efforts of the burial site. (These organizations are now part of what is known as the “FABG Coalition.”) The coalition’s organizing, walking tours, teach-ins, and town hall efforts aim to ensure that the land is appropriately memorialized.
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The start of Sabio’s advocacy in Brooklyn against the toxic combination of history erasure and gentrification was a harbinger of future politics. Five years later, the US re-elected a real estate developer as president who, since his inauguration, has issued executive orders that undermine the preservation and telling of America’s complete history in public spaces–whether in schools, museums, or even burial grounds. History, however, is resilient. This rings truer and is more palpable in public spaces. In Brooklyn, as in many neighborhoods across the country, where history is etched into public land, embracing that history can be the difference between the preservation and gentrification of communities where Black (and Indigenous) people have lived for centuries.
The Sabios founded Growhouse to ensure that the ecosystems of Black communities aren’t erased and gentrified but sustained and nurtured for the benefit of present and future Brooklynites. To achieve that, Growhouse NYC has created three initiatives that form the foundation of its work: a non-profit Community Land Trust and a for-profit Collective, both designed to preserve and reclaim black spaces and the cultural work of The Black History Corridor, born of the organizing efforts around the Flatbush African Burial Ground.
The Black Land Access Community (“BLAC”) Land Trust is a 501(c)(3) organization that aims to own and develop the land, removing it from the profit-driven real estate market. While the land trusts stabilize the market and provide housing security for locals in the area, they can also preserve the community’s cultural heritage. The Black Land Access Collective focuses on repurposing land and private real estate acquisitions for mutually beneficial use. It pursues the building of community wealth through the ownership of commercial and industrial buildings and mixed-use buildings. They plan to share the generated profits with community members and support GrowhouseNYC and the Community Land Trust. “We want to get ahead of the speculative market,” Sabio shares. “We’re proactively investigating potential future private sales.” They are also seeking investors to support the organization’s efforts and hope to conduct a membership drive in the near future.
The third significant component of this endeavor is the historical walks through the Black History Corridor. This Corridor “transcends mere preservation” and seeks to protect and connect nodes of Black historic sites and to Black-owned businesses to support community longevity and sustainability. Signage, paintings, and storytelling along the Corridor alert passersby of Flatbush’s rich Black history. The Black Utopia Project prioritizes the interconnectedness and creativity of being in the community through social events such as happy hours, and activities around the Black History Corridor.
Sabio explains that these three initiatives together actively weave “cultural and economic ecosystems” preventing displacement of Black peoples from Brooklyn and allow Growhouse to be an incubator for creative, sustainable actions that preserve and restore community histories and land. With the success and momentum of the Black History Corridor and other initiatives of Growhouse, there’s hope that the erasure, destruction, and burial of a people’s history will be undone, and the generations of people targeted for displacement will remain and thrive.
