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
#367 The Ice Craze: How the Ice Business Transformed New York
#366 North Brother Island: New York's Forbidden Place
Rewind: The Historic New York City Hall
#365 Do The Right Thing (Bowery Boys Movie Club)
#364 The Very Gay History of Fire Island
#363 The Sunny Saga of Jones Beach
#362 Gatsby and the Mansions of the Gold Coast
#361 Landmarks of Coney Island (Extended Funhouse Mix)
#360 The Botanical Gardens of New York City
#359 The Magic of the Movie Theater
#358 The Muppets Take Manhattan (Bowery Boys Movie Club)
#357 Edith Wharton's New York
#356 Pfizer: A Brooklyn Origin Story
#355 The Midnight Adventures of Doctor Parkhurst
#354 Who Wrote the First American Cookbook?
#353 Harlem Before the Renaissance
Rewind: Harlem Nights at the Hotel Theresa
#352 The Birth of Black Harlem
#351 Auntie Mame (Bowery Boys Movie Club)
#350 The World Trade Center in the 1970s
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