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
#242 New York and the Dawn of Photography
#241 Edgar Allan Poe in New York
#240 The Ghosts of Greenwich Village
#239 Murder at the Manhattan Well
#238 Astoria and Long Island City
#237 Columbus Circle: A Century of Controversy
#236 Times Square in the '70s
The Crash of 1929: New York In Crisis
Queen of the Speakeasies: A Tale of Prohibition New York
#233 The Roaring '20s: King of the Jazz Age
#232 The Story of SoHo
The Bowery Boys Present: The First Broadway Musical
#231 The Stonewall Riots Revisited
#230 Before Harlem: New York's Forgotten Black Communities
#229 Live in Brooklyn! The Bowery Boys: Ten Years of Podcasting
#228 The Pirate of Pearl Street: The New York Adventures of Captain Kidd
#227 The Hindenburg Over New York
#226 The Beauty Bosses of Fifth Avenue
#225 P. T. Barnum and the Greatest Show on Earth
#224 The Arrival of the Irish: An Immigrant Story
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