In today’s episode, Tom visits the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side to walk through the reconstructed two-room apartment of an African-American couple, Joseph and Rachel Moore, who lived in 1870 on Laurens Street in today’s Soho neighborhood.
Both Joseph and Rachel moved to New York when they were about 20 years old, in the late 1840s and 1850s. They married, worked, raised a family – and they shared their small apartment with another family to help cover costs.
Their home has been recreated in the Tenement Museum’s newest exhibit, “A Union of Hope: 1869.” The exhibit reimagines what their apartment may have looked like – and it also explores life in the Eighth Ward of Manhattan, and, specifically, within the black community of the turbulent and dangerous decades of the 1850s and 60s.
This is the first time the museum has recreated the apartment of a black family – although, as you’ll hear, the museum’s founders had long planned for it. And the exhibit is also the first time the museum has recreated an apartment that wasn’t housed in one of their buildings on the Lower East Side, but in another neighborhood.
So, just who were Joseph and Rachel Moore? And how and why did the Tenement Museum choose to put them at the center of their new exhibit?
FURTHER LISTENING:
Tales from a Tenement: Three Families Under One Roof (episode #246)
Nuyorican: The Great Puerto Rican Migration to New York (episode #384)
The Deadly Draft Riots of 1863
Seneca Village and New York's Forgotten Black Communities
#290 Bagels: A New York Story
Blood and Shakespeare: The Astor Place Riot of 1849
#288 The World of Tomorrow: The New York World's Fair of 1939
Greenwich Village in the 1960s
Uncovering Hudson Yards
#285 Boss Tweed's House of Corruption
Scott Joplin in New York: A Ragtime Mystery
Walt Whitman in New York and Brooklyn
Taxi Driver (Bowery Boys Movie Club)
#281 The Treasures of Downtown Brooklyn
#280 House of Mystery: The Story of the Collyer Brothers
#279 A New Year in Old New York: From Times Square to Chinatown
#278 Newark vs. LaGuardia: The Tale of Two Airports
#277 The New York Comedy Scene: A Marvelous History
#276 Murder on Bond Street: Who Killed Dr. Burdell?
#275 Return to Tin Pan Alley: Saving American Music History
#274 Ghost Stories of Hell's Kitchen
#273 Peter Stuyvesant and the Fall of New Amsterdam
#272 Life in New Amsterdam
#271 Counter Culture: Diners, Automats, and Luncheonettes in New York
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