In 1711 New York's Common Council ordered that enslaved Africans and Native Americans hired out by their owners be hired at the market house at the Wall Street slip, where the street then met the East River just east of Pearl Street. For the next fifty years the city's official market for enslaved labour stood at the foot of Wall Street. It was a wooden shed with a roof and open sides, renamed the Meal Market in 1726 for the corn, grain and meal also traded there, and the city taxed every transaction. People were sold there as well as hired: a 1751 advertisement offered newly imported slaves at public vendue at the Meal Market. By the middle of the eighteenth century roughly one New Yorker in five was enslaved.
The market's role ended in 1762, when its business moved to the Broadway market near Cortlandt Street. Every block east of Pearl Street is later landfill, and the site now lies under the roadway of Wall Street among office towers, with nothing to mark the exact spot. In June 2015 the city dedicated a historical marker a block east, in Mannahatta Park at Wall and Water Streets, after a campaign begun in 2011 by the artist Chris Cobb. The marker also recalls the slave uprising of 1712, which broke out a few blocks away near Maiden Lane within months of the market opening.
Getting there
40.7054, -74.0078
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