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
#400 Jacob Riis: 'The Other Half' of the Gilded Age
#399 The Changing Lower East Side: A View From Seward Park
#398 Marilyn Monroe in New York
Rewind: Birth of the Five Boroughs
#397 Ghost Stories of the Hudson River
Rewind: An Evening at Sardi's
#396 Samuel Tilden and the Presidential Election of 1876
#395 Jefferson Market and the Women's House of Detention
#394 New York Calling: A History of the Telephone
#393 Ric Burns and James Sanders on "New York: A Documentary Film"
Rewind: The Story of the Yellow Taxi Cab
Invisible Magicians: Domestic Servants in Gilded Age New York
#392 The Bowery Boys Podcast 15th Anniversary Special
#391 A Walk through Little Caribbean
#390 The Story of Flatbush: Brooklyn Old and New
Now Playing: Cautionary Tales
#389 The Ruins of Roosevelt Island
#388 The Hudson River School: An American Art Revolution
#387 Hyde Park: The Roosevelts on the Hudson
#386 On the Trail of the Old Croton Aqueduct
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