In 2016, archaeological excavations at the 126th Street MTA Bus Depot uncovered over 100 fragmented human remains, confirming the existence of a 17th-century African Burial Ground. Once a thriving marshland, today the ground registers accumulated layers of violence and erasure imposed by colonial regimes of property.
Current plans for the site adopt a western institutional memorial typology that will legitimize more of the same speculative development that has displaced Black Harlem. Instead, this project evokes alternative ways of relating to matter and memory, reframing the buried wetlands as a living assemblage of memory that, despite neglect and contamination, still holds the potential to nurture life.
Drawing from the historical significance of the wetlands as spaces of Black fugitivity and resistance, it imagines spaces of refuge for the descendants of those buried here, as well as those continuously excluded from Harlem—spaces where they can craft, tell, and retell their own narratives grounded in the land.
Instead of erasing the bus depot, the project acknowledges the scars and imagines collective rituals of healing with the soil, welcoming the rising waters of the Harlem River and allowing the cycles of decay and regeneration to slowly dissolve the architecture back into the earth, where new life can flourish.
