A new permanent exhibit at the Lower East Side’s Tenement Museum gives a 3-D view of what life was like for Black New Yorkers in the 1860s.
“A Union of Hope: 1869” takes Tenement Museum visitors on a 75-minute tour through the museum as it spotlights the lives of Joseph and Rachel Moore, Black New Yorkers who lived in lower Manhattan during the 19th century.
Black people did not tend to live in the mostly German, Russian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrant neighborhood of the Tenth Ward, where the Tenement Museum is located. During the mid-1800s, Black New Yorkers lived sporadically throughout Manhattan’s 22 wards, or neighborhoods. But according to the 1860 census, they predominated some 10 blocks to the west in Manhattan’s Eighth Ward, which is today’s SoHo neighborhood.
Eight years ago, while researching information about an Irish immigrant named Joseph Peter Moore who lived at 97 Orchard Street in 1869, museum scholars noticed that there was also a listing for a Joseph Moore who resided at 17 Laurens Street. The Laurens Street Joseph Moore was designated “Colored,” which was one way people referred to people of African descent in the 1869 City Directory.
Joseph and Rachel Moore, and the information researchers who were able to find out about their lives, gave the museum the opportunity to fulfill a part of its mission it had long neglected. When Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson founded the Tenement Museum in 1988, their original mission statement revealed that they wanted to tell the stories of all of New York’s tenement dwellers. But since establishing the museum, they’d only told the stories of 10th Ward and Lower East Side tenement residents who were primarily European.
“Over the last few years, we’ve been doing a lot of critical self-reflection as an institution,” Tenement Museum tour guide Daryl Hamilton said. “Because by focusing on telling the stories of tenement dwellers in [97 Orchard Street] only, given the fact that as far as we know, Black people never lived here, we’d shifted away from the original mission of the museum. And we’ve been asking ourselves––as an institution––questions like, do we want to continue to participate in this kind of exclusion? There are people across backgrounds whose stories we’re not telling, who were tenement dwellers in this city. So, this is a first step towards getting back to the original mission of the museum.”
Part of New York City long before it was a city
The building and even the street where the Moores lived no longer exists, so the Tenement Museum has attempted to recreate the atmosphere of their apartment for the tour.
African enslavement had been abolished in New York in 1827, and Joseph, who was originally from Belvidere, New Jersey, and Rachel, who was from Kingston, New York, had each moved to New York City where there was the promise of employment and opportunities to join in community with larger numbers of Black people.
But New York, even in the mid-1800s, was a place where access to housing and security remained precarious for Black people. The Moores took an apartment located down an alley, behind another building, and not far from horse stables. But they were able to turn their two-room unit into a home for themselves and an adult daughter, and had even made room for an Irish mother and her biracial son to stay with them.
The recreation of what the Moore’s home looked like shows that Rachel—and the Irish woman living with them—had to store and clean the dirty laundry they took in as washerwomen in the front parlor room. This same room served as their kitchen and living space, and at night became the bedroom for the Irish woman and her son. Rachel, Joseph, and her daughter slept in the bedroom, where there were two beds and more space to relax.
“What we’ve been trying to do in recreating this community that no longer exists, is to think about looking at the classified sections of Black newspapers and to get a sense of the businesses and institutions that existed,” Marquis Taylor, head researcher for “A Union of Hope: 1869,” told the AmNews. “There is the Shiloh Baptist Church, which we know will eventually make its way to Harlem. The original African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church is located on Bleecker Street. The other church, St. Phillips, is on Sullivan Street. A lot of these churches, which will then make their way to Harlem, they start down here, by and large. And that’s because there is a significant Black community that is living in this area. There’s a school, just one block north of where Joseph and Rachel Moore lived at 17 Laurens Street, which is a major sort of hub for what’s going on in the Black community at the time. There’s a lot of lectures that are hosted there, school-aged children are performing, they’re raising money for anti-slavery causes. So, a part of our conversation of the Eighth Ward, too, is really elevating the colored school that was there and talking about the activities of the students.”
The story of Rachel and Joseph helps the museum focus on one specific Black family, but by extension it allows the story of Black New Yorkers in the 1800s to come into focus. One part of the tour centers on Gina Manuel, a New Yorker who wrote a letter to the Tenement Museum in 1989 urging it to tell the stories of Black people like those from her family who could trace their history in New York back to the 1700s.
“We lived in tenements with gas lights and coal stoves…They lived in the tenements, on the old Bowery and related to us about the old Tong gangs and how the first Catholic Church […] was St. Anthony’s in the village. They were pushed out by the new immigrants in the beginning of the century, and moved from the Lower East Side to Hell’s Kitchen (Chelsea), the Tenderloin (West ’40s), and finally to the West 50s which was called Old San Juan Hill. Grandpa got out the vote for Tammany.
“So when you are planning your museum, I beg of you, please, please, don’t forget them. Their spirits walk those halls, and their bones lay in the earth there, and we remember them. 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 long before it was a city as such…”
The “A Union of Hope: 1869” tour is currently available for adult tours. The museum is planning to expand its curriculum and have the tour available for High School students in Fall of 2024 and will have a tour ready for Elementary/Middle School field trips by Spring 2025. For more information, contact the Tenement Museum at (877) 975-3786 or www.tenement.org.