First look: The Tenement Museum’s first exhibit about a Black family
For more than 30 years, the Tenement Museum shared stories about the people who once lived in the building it now owns. But that meant that some groups—particularly Black New Yorkers—were excluded, as there’s no record of a Black family living in the apartment building at 97 Orchard Street.
Now, with an aim to explore the full breadth of immigrant and migrant experiences, the Lower East Side museum is highlighting the stories of a Black family for the first time with a new tour titled “A Union of Hope: 1869.” The exhibition tells the story of the Moore family who lived in Soho during and after the Civil War, making it the city’s first exhibit to center Black Americans during this era. The newly launched experience will offer an expanded schedule during February for Black History Month; reserve tickets here for $30/person.
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On the Tenement Museum’s other tours, you’ll stand in the apartments where the featured families lived. In this case, museum staff worked meticulously to recreate what they believe the tenement at 17 Laurens Street would have looked like. That’s where Joseph and Rachel Moore lived in the 1860s-1870s. However, the building has since been demolished, and Laurens street itself doesn’t event exist anymore. (For reference, the tenement would have been where the Soho Grand Hotel now stands around West Broadway between Canal and Grand Streets.)
To envision the Moores’ lives, Tenement Museum researchers studied 200 historical artifacts to create an interactive tour. In addition to walking through re-creations of the family’s two-room tenement, visitors can also see a neighborhood map from that time, explore Census records, and hear readings of newspaper excerpts.
During the process of creating the tour, researchers also “were intentional about ensuring Black New Yorkers are at the forefront of telling their own stories,” Marquis Taylor, lead researcher for the exhibit, explained in a statement.
Joseph Moore worked as a waiter and a coachman, while Rachel worked as a a “washer woman,” or what we’d today describe as laundry work. While details are scarce about the specifics of the Moores’ day-to-day lives, the exhibit instead focuses on the context of the era in which they lived. Both Joseph and Rachel Moore migrated to New York during the Civil War—that positioned them at the center of major historical moments, including the New York City Draft Riots, the birth of Black media, the development of mutual aid networks, urban development and community displacement, and the ratification of the 15th amendment.
They lived in present-day Soho, which was then the epicenter of the city’s Black community before they were displaced, left to move north or leave New York City altogether, the museum explained.
Too often the stories of Black New Yorkers in the 19th century have been written out of history.
“Our mission is to elevate the stories of everyday immigrant and migrant families to promote a more inclusive vision of what it means to be an American,” said Annie Polland, president of the Tenement Museum. “Too often the stories of Black New Yorkers in the 19th century have been written out of history. With ‘A Union of Hope’ we expand our understanding of migration to New York City, by highlighting an untold story from the Civil War era. Decades before Harlem became a Black neighborhood, Lower Manhattan had the largest Black neighborhood in the north, with a crucial network of churches, mutual aid associations, schools and newspapers.”
The 75-minute tour flows through the newly-opened fifth floor of the building, which recently underwent a $7 million restoration project.