It’s official. This downtown Lexington park is now Henry A. Tandy Centennial Park
A downtown Lexington park that once was the site of slave auctions and now is frequently used for festivals will be renamed for a freed slave and Black entrepreneur.
The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council voted unanimously Thursday to approve the name change from Cheapside Park to Henry A. Tandy Centennial Park.
Tandy was a freed slave who eventually moved to Lexington in the late 1880s. Tandy joined Alfred Byrd to form Tandy & Byrd, a leading masonry contractor in Lexington. The company did the masonry work for the 1899 former Fayette County courthouse.
Tandy’s work is also part of other key Lexington buildings and landmarks — including the Lexington Opera House and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. In the 1880s, Tandy began buying investment lots around town. He built and rented some of the best houses in Lexington’s Black neighborhoods at the time.
In July, a parks advisory board voted unanimously to rename the park. The council had to sign off on the name change.
The name change had been in the works for months.
But the reimagining of the park and the adjacent former Fayette County courthouse started in 2017 when the Urban County Council voted unanimously to move statues of Confederate Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge and Confederate general John Hunt Morgan from the courthouse lawn.
Those moves were pushed by the citizen group Take Back Cheapside. Take Back Cheapside has also asked the city to issue a formal apology for the slave auctions conducted there and to accept and display Fayette County lynching monuments from the Equal Justice Initiative’s memorial in Montgomery, Ala.
A historical marker, sponsored by the Lexington Alumni Chapter of the Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, has been returned to the site. The marker details the Cheapside slave auction held on the site and the history of slavery in Fayette County. Cheapside Park on Main Street dates back to 1780 when the area was set aside as a public square for a market and a courthouse.
Henry A. Tandy Centennial Park will join nine existing Lexington parks honoring Black Americans, including George Washington Carver, Charles Young, Frederick Douglass, Paul L. Dunbar, Isaac Murphy, Lou Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young and William Wells Brown.
