City celebrates new plans for Bethel Burying Ground art memorial at Weccacoe Playground

More than two years ago, Philadelphia sculptor Karyn Olivier was selected to create the Bethel Burying Ground Historic Memorial at the Weccacoe Playground in Queen Village.

The public art project, Her Luxuriant Soil, will be a formal recognition of the more than 5,000 African Americans buried beneath the playground’s asphalt.

Last Saturday, Mayor Jim Kenney, Olivier, officials with the city’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy (also known as Creative Philly), and members of the city’s Bethel Burying Ground Memorial Advisory Committee gathered with neighborhood residents to celebrate that the memorial project is finally scheduled to be built next year.

Originally, the project was to begin construction in the summer of 2021. Now, requests for construction proposals are to go out in March and construction is to begin in the fall of 2024.

A spokeswoman for Creative Philly said that the project, originally estimated to cost about $1.15 million, was delayed “due to challenges posed by COVID-19, staff changes at OACCE, and a long contracting process.”

The city will not know the new cost of the project until bids are received next spring, she said.

The memorial project is one for which a group comprised mostly of Black activists has been advocating for more than a decade.

In 2012, independent historian Terry Buckalew notified the city that the playground at 400 Catharine St., where Queen Village neighborhood organizations were planning major renovations, had been built over a historic burial ground for Black Americans.

Bishop Richard Allen and trustees of the nearby Mother Bethel AME Church purchased the land in 1810 to create one of the oldest independently owned Black cemeteries in the United States. The church stopped using it as a cemetery in 1864, and trustees sold the land to the city in 1889.

The cemetery fell into disrepair and became a horse stable, a dumping ground and finally, after it was sold to the city, a neighborhood park.

For more than a century, there was largely no public memory that the playground had been a cemetery until Buckalew announced the discovery.

The title of the memorial, Her Luxuriant Soil, came from an 1817 quote by Allen, the founder of Mother Bethel Church, during a time when some white Americans were advocating that free Black Americans colonize in Africa:

“Whereas our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America, we, their Descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxurious soil.”

Olivier said the quote will be etched into a bronze stone near the burial ground’s entrance.

She told the crowd Saturday that she wanted to honor the memories of the people who were buried beneath the playground, “who lived and worked in Philadelphia, in this neighborhood.”

In his remarks, Kenney said he was proud his administration took action to commit to the project. The activists began lobbying for a memorial during former Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration.

“It is so important to use public art to shine a spotlight on untold stories and forgotten histories,“ he said.

The mayor acknowledged that a onetime member of the advisory committee, former City Managing Director Joseph Certaine, who died earlier this year, had been a relentless advocate.

Advisory committee member Karen Warrington said that Certaine, who cofounded the independent Friends of Bethel Burying Ground in 2014, had grown so frustrated with the city that he resigned from its advisory committee.

Before his July 27 death, Certaine called Warrington to ask about the project.

“The last thing that Joe Certaine said to me a few weeks before he died was to ask how this project was proceeding,” Warrington said. “He wanted to know had they torn the [recreation center] building down.”

In 2013, the burial ground was placed on the city’s Register of Historic Places, and in 2016, it was recognized on the National Register of Historic Places.

» READ MORE: Bethel Burying Ground, a National Historic Site, faces neglect, damage

On Saturday, Karen Smith, a storyteller and drummer, and the Philadelphia Heritage Chorale performed; artist Qiaira Riley helped children create art from leaves; and the Rev. Mark Kelly Tyler, pastor of Mother Bethel Church, offered remarks.

Olivier, an internationally known artist and a professor of sculpture at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, used the delay in the original timeline to make changes to the project to reduce costs.

She cut back on the number of white granite pavers, which will include the names of those interred, and also eliminated a brick wall intended as a boundary between the memorial and adjacent tennis courts.

The wall will now be replaced by a garden to serve as a green, natural barrier.

“People ask, ‘What’s taking so long?’ when we are trying to come correct,” Olivier said. “[We want] to create something that is going to have this lasting beauty, that will be able to withstand and endure over changing generations.”