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
#262 Secrets of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine
#261 The Huddled Masses: Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty
#260 Journey to Grey Gardens: A Tale of Two Edies
#259 Crossing to Brooklyn: How the Williamsburg Bridge Changed New York
#258 Tales from Tribeca History
#257 Frozen In Time: The Great Blizzard of 1888
#256 DUMBO: Life on Brooklyn's Waterfront
#255 The Rescue of Grand Central
#254 The Destruction of Penn Station
#253 Opening Day of the New York City Subway
#252 The Underground Railroad: Escape through New York
#251 McGurk's Suicide Hall: The Bowery's Most Notorious Dive
#250 The Empire State Building: Story of an Icon
#249 Madam C.J. Walker: Harlem's Hair Care Millionaire
#248 Sitting Down with Roz Chast of the New Yorker
#247 Rodgers and Hammerstein: The Golden Age of Broadway
#246 Tales from a Tenement: Three Families on the Lower East Side
#245 The Fall of the Fifth Avenue Mansions
#244 The Rise of the Fifth Avenue Mansions
#243 New York In Neon: Signs of the City
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