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
#317 Vaccinated: New York and the Polio Outbreak
#316 Jenny Lind at Castle Garden
#315 Abandoned Pantheon: The Hall of Fame for Great Americans
#314 Tillie Hart - The Holdout of London Terrace
#313 The Straw Hat Riots of 1922
#312 Has Jack the Ripper Come to Town? A Gilded Age Hysteria
#311 Uprising: The Shirtwaist Strike of 1909
#310 1918: The Harlem Hellfighters
#309 What Gets Saved? Landmarks & Historic Districts Explained
#308 Andrew Carnegie and New York's Public Libraries
#307 The Holland Tunnel: The Wonder of the Jazz Age
#306 Just Desserts: The Origins of New York Cheesecake, Cannoli and More
#305 Christmas in New York: The Lights of Dyker Heights
#304 The Miracle on Eldridge Street
#303 Building Stuyvesant Town: A Mid-Century Controversy
#302 Gangs of New York (Bowery Boys Movie Club)
#301 Haunted Houses of Old New York
#300 The Forgotten Father of New York City
#299 The Promenade and Preservation of Brooklyn Heights
#298 The Story of Brooklyn Heights
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