David Ruggles Home and Boarding House

David Ruggles was the leading, and possibly the most hated, abolitionist in New York City. His courage, activism, and writings made the city a safer place for fugitives and free blacks. Ruggles sheltered runaway Frederick Douglass here at 36 Lispenard Street. 

Ruggles also ran a boarding house at 67 Lispenard that was NYC's 1st Black Reading Room and an antislavery bookstore. It was also a meeting place for abolitionists, until it was destroyed by a mob. He wrote hundreds of articles and bought a printing press and published his own pamphlets and a magazine called Mirror of Liberty. It was the first periodical published by a black American.