[music]

Announcer: Listener-support WNYC Studios.

Sean Carlson: Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Sean Carlson. New York State's District Attorneys Association is rallying behind a proposal to change the laws that decide how prosecutors share information about legal cases. They're backing Governor Kathy Hochul's plan to give prosecutors a break on what information they need to share with defendants right after an arrest. Staten Island District Attorney Mike Mahan says the current law is unworkable.

District Attorney Mike Mahan: It's a much-needed adjustment that will relieve prosecutors of onerous burdens and make certain that cases are not being dismissed wholesale.

Sean Carlson: Public defender groups like the Legal Aid Society oppose the plan. They argue that the current law, passed in 2019, protects people's rights.

[music]

Here in New York City. Mayor Adams is looking to open 900 more beds in Safe Havens and other low-barrier shelters as part of a $650 million housing and mental health plan. These sites are designed to bring unsheltered New Yorkers off the street by offering more privacy and fewer rules than traditional shelters. WNYC's Caroline Lewis takes us inside an existing safe haven in Harlem run by a nonprofit called The Bridge.

Speaker 2: This is the one we're going to visit?

Speaker 3: Yes.

Caroline Lewis: I'm getting a peek inside a single room with a window and a large locker for belongings. Way more privacy than you'd find at a large congregate city shelter.

Speaker 2: He welcomes the client in. The staff member to help him out [unintelligible 00:01:40]

Caroline Lewis: The building's fluorescent-lit common areas are sparse but tidy. On a weekday morning, just a few residents are up and about. Lisa Green, the chief program officer for housing at The Bridge, says many clients come here after years of living on the street and need a gentle touch.

Lisa Green: They can come in, have a nice warm shower, have a nice bed, have a warm meal, and then start working with staff. Slowly.

Caroline Lewis: City officials say safe havens are a key stop on the trajectory from the street to stable housing. They're not a silver bullet. City data shows that only about 28% of safe haven clients have subsidized housing lined up when they leave. Kenneth Harris is 60 years old. He had been homeless for over a decade when he arrived at the Harlem safe haven three months ago and said he'd been promised housing before.

Kenneth Harris: It's never happened, but the moment I got here I felt like this was where it was going to happen.

Caroline Lewis: Harris's intuition was right. He's moving into an apartment in the Bronx at the beginning of February with the help of a rental assistance voucher. He said he's most excited to have his adult children and grandchild come visit.

Kenneth Harris: Now, they can come and be with me at times instead of having to wonder where I'm at or me wondering where they are. this is going to help with the connection.

Caroline Lewis: Mayor Adams is trying to replicate the safe haven model in more shelters throughout the city. Some of the 900 beds he recently announced are already in the works and could open as soon as this summer.

[music]

Sean Carlson: That's WNYC's Caroline Lewis. Coming up, a new exhibit explores the legacy of slavery in Brooklyn. Stick around.

Announcer: NYC Now. [unintelligible 00:03:30]

Sean Carlson: A new exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library's Center for Brooklyn History goes in-depth on the impact of slavery on the borough's past and present. The exhibit, Trace/s: Family History Research and the Legacy of Slavery opened this week and it asks visitors to explore their own history and identity. My colleague Michael Hill spoke with Dominique Jean-Louis. She's the chief historian at the Center for Brooklyn History.

Michael Hill: Dominique, the history of slavery in the Northern states is not always as well known as that of the South. Would you go into some of the history in our area, specifically as it relates to slavery?

Dominique Jean-Louis: Many people would be surprised to learn what slavery looked like. Sometimes there's a misconception that slavery in the South was more plantation-based, agricultural, whereas slavery in the North was more domestic household slavery and maybe en masse. That's true, but specific to Brooklyn, you had enslaved African people working on farms, growing produce, and Brooklyn was a major supplier of produce in the North.

Those farms were critically important and pretty widespread. Brooklyn was an enormous center of slavery in the North. Numbers like 60% of what would become Brooklyn, 60% of white households owned slaves. In specific areas of Brooklyn, like Flatbush, which is covered quite a bit in our exhibition, that number was as high as 75%.

Michael Hill: In what ways has slavery shaped the borough of Brooklyn throughout time?

Dominique Jean-Louis: Brooklyn really grows as a place and eventually as a city. It will become the third-largest city in the United States. Before it joins greater New York, it becomes a borough. That growth is really facilitated by the plantations and the farms that are growing all this produce. That's really allowing for Brooklyn to rise in prominence. It's drawing people to move to Brooklyn and of course, it's increasing wealth for the families that were slave-owning families.

On the other hand, speaking of that wealth, that's really going to shape Brooklyn while slavery exists. That's roughly from the mid-1650s to 1825, where slavery thrives in Brooklyn. Over the course of that long period, wealth is concentrated in the hands of just a few families, those larger slave-owning families. They're keeping all the profits that their farms are generating. They're intermarrying so that wealth is being consolidated generationally.

People are inheriting enslaved people. People are inheriting wealth. At the same time, those who were enslaved and those who didn't have the means to become slave owners, they are continually not able to generate wealth, not able to preserve and pass down those funds. Some of the social inequality that we've seen in Brooklyn's history throughout the years really has its beginnings in the system of slavery that thrived for so long.

Michael Hill: The exhibit also features some large-scale portraits of two families important to this story. Who are those families?

Dominique Jean-Louis: We're so excited for people to see these portraits. They are really the center of the exhibition. On the one hand, we have a portrait that has long been in the collections of the Center for Brooklyn History of John A. Lott. John A. Lott was a prominent Brooklyn lawyer and then a state judge in the state of New York. He was very influential in building up the infrastructure of what will become the city and then the borough of Brooklyn. He's a very influential Brooklynite. As such, his portrait is in our collection. It also hangs in Borough Hall. It also hangs in Albany.

He represents the prominent Brooklyn families that were also prominent slave owners. John A. Lott grows up in a household with enslaved people. He is also the nephew of a man named Jeremiah Lott, who owns, among other enslaved people, a young man named Samuel Anderson. The other portrait we have in our gallery is the great, great-granddaughter of that enslaved man, Samuel Anderson. Her name is Mildred Jones.

We discovered this connection she has with the Lott family, with her family's experience of slavery. Her brother was a very talented genealogist, discovered this connection, published about it. Sadly, her brother, Gus Anderson passed away. But we were able to get in touch with Mildred and she agreed to have her portrait painted at the same scale as the John Lott portrait, which is pretty large scale. This is about 4 feet long or 4 feet high. This is a large portrait. Seeing these life-sized portraits side by side of these two families that were changed by slavery, we hope is really impactful.

Michael Hill: Dominique, as we mentioned, the exhibit is titled Trace/s: Family History Research and the Legacy of Slavery. Are you encouraging people to come there to help trace their family history?

Dominique Jean-Louis: We've definitely recognized that family history and researching it can be painful. Sometimes you uncover things that you didn't know that you maybe didn't want to know. What we're trying to do is explain why it's valuable to do so. In conjunction with the exhibition, we'll also be holding a number of genealogy workshops in partnership with OGS New York that will help train people to use the various research databases and other resources that are available through the Brooklyn Public Library to trace their own family history.

On the other side, the exhibition really underscores how important it is for people to be doing their family history because it teaches all of us a little bit more of a fuller picture about the past. There are things we know, and some of that is in the exhibition about how census documents or slave bills of sale can explain to us the who, what, when, where, why of slavery. Some of that family history and the way people go about the care people put into researching their own family's history really helps us to tell a fuller story.

Michael Hill: Our guest has been Dominique Jean-Louis. She's the chief historian at the Center for Brooklyn History. Dominique, thank you so much for this.

Dominique Jean-Louis: Thank you so much, Michael. This has been lovely.

[music]

Sean Carlson: That's Michael Hill in conversation with Dominique Jean-Louis, the chief historian at the Center for Brooklyn History. Thanks for listening to NYC Now from WNYC, I'm Sean Carlson. We'll be back on Monday. Have a good weekend.

[music]

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.