Tenement Museum shows an apartment of a black family for the first time

For the past 35 years, the Tenement Museum has told the stories of immigrants and migrants who lived in New York City during the 19th and 20th centuries to help visitors better understand the city through the lives of the working class.

For the first time in its history, the museum will soon exhibit the apartment of a black family a permanent exhibition.

“A Union of Hope”, the new exhibition at the Lower East Side museum will include the recreated apartment of Joseph Moore, a coachman, and Rachel Moore, a housekeeper. The limited tours begin on December 26 and fully open in February.

The Tenement Museum has a history of highlighting Black history, including during walking tours and public lectures, said Kat Lloyd, the museum’s vice president of programs and interpretation. But the families that have been featured since the museum opened in 1988 are largely immigrants and refugees from Europe. This is partly because the museum has focused on people who lived in the two buildings where the museum is located, Ms. Lloyd said.

But that is changing.

“The most striking gap for us was the story of black New Yorkers living in tenements,” Ms. Lloyd said. The new exhibition will help the organization “achieve this goal of restoring history and telling a fuller, broader story.”

The museum heard from the Moore family in 2008. One of the exhibits featured an Irishman, also named Joseph Moore, who had lived in one of the museum’s buildings at 97 Orchard Street. Over the years, visitors were curious about another Joseph Moore who was featured in the city guide and was part of the exhibit. That Joseph Moore had “col’d” next to his name, short for “colored,” indicating he was black.

In 2019, the museum decided to create an exhibition about Joseph Moore. He was born in Belvidere, New Jersey, and moved to New York City in 1857, where slavery was already outlawed. 30 years. He married Mrs. Moore in 1864, and they lived for at least six years in a two-room apartment at 17 Laurens Street, in what is now SoHo.

In addition to the Moores, three other people lived in the apartment: Jane Kennedy, a seamstress and Mrs. Moore’s sister-in-law from her first marriage; Rose Brown, an Irish immigrant who worked as a laundress; and Louis Munday, Mrs. Brown’s son who was Irish and black.

The exhibition’s curators used a number of sources, including published essays and newspaper clippings, to recreate the two-room apartment.

In one room there are two beds against the walls, one of which the Moores would have shared and the other for Mrs. Kennedy, Mrs. Lloyd said. Near a window is a sewing station for Mrs. Kennedy. Museum curators also placed a framed photo of Abraham Lincoln on the mantel after discovering that a newspaper article about another of Mr. Moore’s apartments from 1889 had noted such a portrait.

“It is very rare that we have a description of an actual apartment where one of our subjects lives,” Ms. Lloyd said, adding that the portrait encourages visitors to consider “what kind of symbolism Lincoln would have for Joseph can have, because others within his community.”

The only other room of the apartment contains a turkey carcass, stored in a pantry, according to an essay, part of ‘Heads of the Colored People’, published in Frederick Douglass’ Papers, by Dr. James McCune Smith, the first African-American to receive a medical degree, about a woman who receives a turkey carcass from her employer as part of her paycheck.

“The washerwoman essay is actually the closest we have to a source describing a black residence during this period,” Ms. Lloyd said.

The second room also features a stove with enough space for a large pot of water for laundry. Oysters, which were a kind of “pizza slice of the 1860s,” Ms. Lloyd said, rest in a pan on the stove.

To give visitors an idea of ​​what conversations among black Americans in the 1860s might have sounded like, the Tenement Museum collaborated with the Black Gotham experiencean organization that offers walking tours through the city.

In one such conversation, two school-age children discuss “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which was published in 1852. Another conversation features adults crowding around a newspaper discussing the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, paving the way for black men to vote.

Marquis Taylor, the exhibition’s lead researcher, said photographs, speeches and newspapers, including the half-dozen or so black newspapers in New York in the 1850s and 1860s, were essential to constructing the conversations.

The newspapers reported a “diversity of opinion,” he noted, reporting on events in black churches, efforts by black New Yorkers to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and efforts by black women to pass property requirements for voting Pull.

Recently, Ms. Lloyd wondered aloud what a black woman named Gina Manuel would think of the exhibit. In 1989, Ms. Manuel wrote a letter to Ruth J. Abrams, one of the museum’s founders, after listening to her on WNYC AM Radio, Ms. Lloyd said.

In the letter, Ms. Manuel told Ms. Abrams about her ancestors who lived in tenements on the Lower East Side before being “driven out” to Hell’s Kitchen. She begged Mrs. Abrams not to forget them at the museum.

“Their ghosts walk those halls, and their bones lay there in the earth, and we remember them,” Ms. Manuel wrote.

“Most of society seems to write us off when they look at the history of New York City and America, but my people were part of New York City,” she said. They ‘deserve to be remembered’.