The below maps are works-in-progress. Please reach out if you have any thoughts, recommendations, or questions about the data!
White flight time-lapse, 1913-1953
Time-lapse map using the “former addresses” of homebuyers on property deeds with racial covenants in Syracuse. Of over 1,100 deeds, I could geo-locate 160 distinct addresses using QGIS. The map tracks buyers’ address in the city to where they bought property to move or speculate on in the inner-suburbs – an early iteration of white flight.
The move from city to inner suburb in the 1910s and 1920s converted old white settler-owned farmsteads and military tracts on the outskirts of town into thousands of suburban homes, extending US settler colonialism. Real estate developers were viciously anti-communist. They believed white private property ownership would undermine support for communism and national liberation following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. We can see this legacy continued in the ongoing US-Israeli genocide to suppress the national liberation movements in Palestine, Yemen, and Syria.
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Rensselaerwyck patroonship, 1767
NY governor Kathy Hochul, and politicians in NYC, LA, and North Carolina, have advocated a mask ban on subways and at protests. Palestinian Youth Movement, Writer against the War on Gaza, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, and Healthcare Workers for Palestine highlighted how the ban would reinstate an 1845 law that prohibited masks in public to “crush armed uprisings by tenant farmers in the Hudson Valley.” From 1839 to 1845, tens of thousands of farmers revolted against landowners in the Hudson River Valley in eastern New York State, unceded land of the Mohawk and Lenape peoples. They withheld rent payments and demanded independence from the “patroon” system.
Dutch-descended land barons had controlled large estates, or “patroonships,” in the Hudson Valley since the 1600s. The largest patroonship was Rensselaerwyck, an 850,000-acre tract encompassing present-day Albany and Rensselaer counties. It was gifted in 1630 to Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, a founder of the Dutch East India Company. Rebellion began after his descendant Stephen Van Rensselaer III had his heirs collect outstanding debts from tenant farmers. Some descendants of patroons engaged in land speculation on the Central New York Military Tract, the basis for private real estate in Syracuse. Jeremiah Van Rensselaer, Stephen’s first cousin once removed, acquired over 54,000 acres and 71 separate military tracts.
Continuing the colonial legacy, mask bans would help surveil people supporting Palestinian national liberation. Mask bans would also continue to downplay COVID and effectively exclude immunocompromised and high-risk people from public space.
Mapwarper link: https://mapwarper.net/maps/83863#Preview_Rectified_Map_tab
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