Few could speak with the authority of Seneca Village like Celedonia Jones.
Seneca Village? Celedonia Jones? Both of these names should be etched in Black history, although they fly well under the radar for today’s readers.
Historian Jones became a leading authority on the predominantly Black village that thrived from 1825 to 1857 in what is now Central Park. And were it not for a recent December obituary of Jones in the New York Times, we would still be unaware of his passing back on April 15 from leukemia, according to his daughter, Diane Jones Randall, who said he was 93 when he died.
Jones was a fastidious, self-educated historian who, at any given moment, could provide chapter and verse about Manhattan’s history, and had a special understanding of Seneca Village and its inhabitants.
Jones was born on February 21, 1930, in Harlem, and his family moved around the community often to avoid eviction. He received his unusual name from his Cuban-born maternal grandfather, and like James Baldwin, was a student of poet Countee Cullen. According to Jones, in an interview with the Central Park Conservancy, Cullen once told him, “If you had done a little more research…you could have gotten a 90.”
After graduating from high school in 1949, Jones worked as a bookkeeper at the New York City Board of Transportation, later the NYC Transit Authority. He became director of fiscal operations and director of fiscal services of the Human Resources Administration for the Office of the Comptroller.
Meanwhile, he earned a bachelor’s degree in business management and economics from Empire State College (now University) in 1975. Given his background and knowledge of Seneca Village, some of which he learned firsthand from people who lived there, Jones was sought out and hired as an adviser to the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History in 2007. Cynthia Copeland, the institute’s president, said Jones helped the group navigate its requests with the city’s Parks Department and the Central Park Conservancy to get approval to perform an archeological dig.
One depiction of Seneca Village is cited in Edward Robb Ellis’s book “The Epic of New York City,” where he noted that “the trustees had acquired property in Central Park along the westside of Fifth Avenue from 80th to 96th Street. This had been a disgraceful area; nearby Seneca Village, the largest and foulest squatter camp in the park, had stunk up the neighborhood.”
When students were taken on tours of the Museum of the City of New York in Manhattan, they would be entertained by a Jones lecture that was always embellished with humorous commentary and asides. In 1997, Ruth Messinger, the Manhattan borough president, received a recommendation from the museum’s director, Robert McDonald, that Jones be named as Manhattan borough historian, an unpaid position that she enthusiastically endorsed him for.
In this capacity, Jones recruited many historians and authorities to join him in presentations and seminars. He also created and edited a publication about African American history and culture in Manhattan. Historian Kenneth Jackson and professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, said in an email that Jones “was a public historian in the best sense.”
According to his daughter, one of the last projects Jones was working on was to identify the locations depicted in the photographs in “Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929,” a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jones also consulted on an earlier exhibition at the Met inspired by Seneca Village.