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
#440 When Longacre Square Became Times Square
#439 The Ticker-Tape Parade: A Very New York Celebration
#438 The Ramones at CBGB: Revolution on the Bowery
The Hidden World of Gramercy Park
#437 Haarlem, Breukelen, Utrecht: Exploring New York's Dutch Roots
#436 Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: Finding Peter Stuyvesant
#435 Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: The Radical Walloons
#434 Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: Empire of the Seas
#433 New Amsterdam Man: An Interview with Russell Shorto
The Bowery Boys Adventures in the Netherlands TRAILER
#432 The Lenape Nation: Past, Present and Future
Rewind: History of the New York City Subway
#431 Park Avenue: History with a Penthouse View
#430 The Story of Flushing: Queens History, Old and New
The Age of Innocence: Inside Edith Wharton's Classic Novel
#428 The New York Game: Baseball in the Early Years
#427 The Chrysler Building and the Great Skyscraper Race
#426 Behind the Domino Sign: Brooklyn's Bittersweet Empire
#425 It Happened at Madison Square Park
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
American Scandal