“New York, a city whose development had been so decisively shaped by slavery. In 1860, the city’s 12,472 blacks were widely dispersed among eight different wards, in enclaves that, while often separate, were not sharply demarcated in the manner of segregated ghettos of twentieth-century Northern cities.
Black New Yorkers’ choice of where to live was hardly a free one: they clustered in certain neigborhoods because few white landlords would rent to them.” -From, “Slavery In New York”