A founding member of this church was enslaved by the first minister

Good morning. It is Friday. We’ll look at how a Manhattan church reckons with the discovery that one of its founding members was an enslaved woman. We’ll also learn about a proposed change to how restaurants dispose of waste.

The room where the trustees of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church meet each month, on the fifth floor of the building on West 55th Street next to the sanctuary, was always referred to as the boardroom. As of Sunday, it will be known as the Betsey Jackson Boardroom.

The name honors one of the 26 founding members of the church in 1808—the one who, church leaders discovered, was an enslaved woman.

They also discovered that she had been enslaved by the church’s first minister, the Reverend Dr. John Brodhead Romeyn.

The current senior pastor, the Rev. Dr. Scott Black Johnstonappointed a task force. The recommendations, in effect, said the church could no longer remember Romeyn—long memorialized by the Romeyn Room on the same floor as the boardroom—without also remembering Jackson.

But the church had few details about her. “Everything we know (or think we know) about Betsey Jackson can be told in a single paragraph,” it says on his website.

Born about 1782, she was one of two enslaved people in the Romeyn household in Albany before being called to Manhattan as the first pastor of Cedar Street Church, which later became Fifth Avenue Presbyterian. She was released by Romeyn’s family in 1811 and died in 1825.

Dr. Black Johnston said he asked the church archivist, Dale Hansen, to read all of Romeyn’s sermons, looking for mentions of slavery, “because I was curious: was he an apologist for slavery?”

“He wasn’t, as far as I could tell,” said Dr. Black Johnson. “He never said anything positive about it, but he also wasn’t someone like Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn who was an abolitionist. Again, this was 1808.” That was five years before Beecher was born.

Romeyn apparently mentioned slavery only once in the sermons he delivered in 17 years as pastor of the church. “He called it a sin,” said Dr. Black Johnson. “This was after she was released. He’s not a hero in this story, but he’s not quite the villain some might want him to be either.”

The church was not aware of the disturbing connection between the first pastor and the last name on the original membership list until 2018, when John Jay College of Criminal Justice Index of Slavery Records in New York, listing enslaved persons and those who enslaved them from 1525 through the Civil War. A search of the house turned up a record of release, which showed that Jackson had been released by Romeyn’s family.

In addition to renaming the boardroom, the church commissioned a portrait of Jackson, even though Dr. Black Johnston that some members of the congregation were afraid they didn’t have an image of her for an artist to work with. “I said, ‘There are millions of portraits of Jesus and nobody had a picture of him,'” said Dr. Black Johnson.

The Church enlisted Clayton Singleton, a painter from Norfolk, Virginia, who used a retired teacher he knew from a theater production as a model. “She has the spiciness that was described in the writings I read,” he said. “Perfect casting, if you will.”

The Church has also prepared a package for Sunday School children. “Sometimes we need to say sorry for things we’ve done that are wrong,” it says. “Sometimes the church has to do this too!”

Singleton said he visited the boardroom the last time he was in New York. “I was standing there, and I thought, it can go on that wall over there — that’s the spot,” he said.

“I thought, wow, this is where Betsey is going,” he said. “It was moving and it reminded me of my mother and my grandmother and my great-grandmother and my great-great-grandmother and all the things I know that led them to me. And I stood there in awe of this woman who did these wonderfully beautiful things that led to everyone who’s in that church now.

Weather

Enjoy a mostly sunny day with an elevation of nearly 67 and light winds. At night, prepare for cloud cover and a chance of rain with a minimum of about 58.

ALTERNATIVE SIDE PARKING

Effective until May 26 (Shavuot).

The latest Metro news

Trash and rats. Rats and garbage. All too often the two go together, but on Thursday the city proposed another way to break them up: requiring restaurants and bodegas to put their trash in containers instead of bags.

The rule could apply to 40,000 food-related businesses — “everything from Dunkin’ Donuts to Tavern on the Green,” Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch told City Hall chief Emma G. Fitzsimmons. “We want people to understand that bags on the street attract rats,” Tisch said, adding that everyone should “get the black bags of rat food off the street.”

There is no doubt about the connection between rats and street litter. “The reason we have so many rats is that we have so many bags on the street,” the author of “Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York, the Last 200 Years,” told me earlier this month. From 1989 to 1992 he was director of policy planning at the Sanitation Department.

The new rule change is part of the city’s plan to get rid of smelly garbage bags by moving to containerization, which places trash in sealed containers that rats can’t chew through. Cities like Barcelona and Buenos Aires have embraced that idea. But containers take up space. A report on dumpsters released earlier this month by the city said introducing them citywide would mean the disappearance of some 150,000 parking spaces — as much as 25 percent of parking spaces on some blocks.

Oftentimes, restaurant waste—garbage bags stuffed with leftover food—is left on the sidewalk for hours, giving rats enough to loot until commercial garbage trucks take them away. The city is notorious for leaving towers of smelly bags along the streets. Currently, many restaurants and bodegas put their waste out as early as 8 p.m

The Sanitation Department is holding a public hearing on June 22 on the proposal for food-related businesses to use containers. The rule could come into effect as early as July. The move comes a month after Mayor Eric Adams’ new rat czar, Kathleen Corradi, said she would focus on reducing the presence of food waste on the streets, a move experts say would do the most to control the rat population. .

METROPOLITAN Diary

Bailey Puddin

Dear Diary:

I lived in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn and I would walk my silky smooth terrier, Bailey Puddin, around the neighborhood.

On my walks, I often met an elderly neighbor, James, sitting on his doorstep a block away. One day I asked him if he knew anyone who could help me move.

Mary, he said, I’ll ask around and call you.

A week later, James saw me walking Bailey Puddin and told me that he had tried to find me in the phone book and even called telephone assistance, but there was no entry for one Mary Puddin.

James, I said, my last name is McLoughlin, not Puddin.

—Mary McLoughlin

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here And read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you on Monday. — JB

PS Here’s today’s Mini crossword And Game match. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero, Jeffrey Furticella, Rick Martinez, Olivia Parker, and Bernard Mokam contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.

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