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
#347 Steam Heat! A Gilded Age Miracle
Rewind: The City in Flames - The Great Fire of 1835
#346 The Beatles Invade New York!
Rewind: The Curious Case of Typhoid Mary
#345 LaGuardia's War on Pushcarts: The Creation of Essex Street Market
Rewind: On The Radio: A History of the Airwaves
#344 Ghostbusters (Bowery Boys Movie Club)
#343 Literary Horrors of New York City
#342 Ghost Stories of Old New York (ALIVE at Joe's Pub)
#341 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Rewind: The Mystery of the Central Park Obelisk
#340 The Real Life Adventures of Tom Thumb
Rewind: The Revolutionary Tavern of Samuel Fraunces
#339 James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal
Rewind: The American Museum of Natural History
#338 A New Deal for the Arts: Murals, Music and Theatrical Mayhem
#337 Robert Moses and the Art of the New Deal
Rewind: TESLA -- The Inventor in Old New York
#336 The War on Newspaper Row
#335 Pulitzer vs Hearst: The Rise of Yellow Journalism
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Irish Songs with Ken Murray
History Obscura
Historycal: Words that Shaped the World
The Rest Is History
Lore