From the Irish who fled their country’s great 19th-century famine to Holocaust survivors, the Tenement Museum preserves the memory of the immigrants who shaped New York City. Now, it will also tell the story of an African-American family, so that the narrative is “more honest”.
It is a narrow two-room apartment, with rustic floors and wooden furniture, impeccably tidy, where visitors enter. Clothes hang in the kitchen and two beds occupy the other room. On the mantelpiece hangs a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States and architect of the abolition of slavery in 1865.
Welcome to the reconstruction of the space of Joseph and Rachel Moore, a black couple who stayed here, without running water, along with three other residents: Jane, Rachel’s sister-in-law from her first marriage, Rose, an Irish immigrant, and their son Louis , aged 14, said Kathryn Lloyd, who is leading a pilot visit before the official launch of the exhibition after Christmas.
Joseph worked as a waiter or coachman, depending on the season, while Rachel was a maid for wealthy families.
“They arrived in New York at a young age and lived in Manhattan during one of the most tumultuous decades in the country’s history, during the Civil War (1861-1865), […] and as black Americans gained rights for the first time,” highlighted Lloyd, vice president of programs at the museum.
– Accused of “rewriting history” –
Its story enriches the Tenement Museum, where 200,000 visitors a year immerse themselves in some of the destinies of millions of immigrants who settled in New York in the 19th and 20th centuries. A mission that resonates at a time when the megacity is struggling to urgently accommodate more than 100,000 new immigrants who arrived last year from Latin America.
The museum has a peculiarity: everyone, from the Schneiders, German owners of a brewery between 1860 and 1880, to the Baldizzi, Italian immigrants who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s, actually lived at 97 or 103 Orchard Street, the two buildings of bricks located in the Lower East Side neighborhood where his apartments were recreated.
All except Joseph and Rachel Moore, who lived in a similar building in the SoHo district, a 20-minute walk away, where the African-American community had settled, with its own parishes and newspapers.
In city records, Joseph Moore appears with the mention “col’d”, a reference to “colored” (“of color”, in English), alongside another Joseph Moore, also a waiter, but Irish, whose story of arrival in escaping a great famine is also included in the “Housing” exhibition.
When the project was announced, Tenement was accused of “rewriting history” in an article in the conservative New York Post because the black, American-born Moores had not lived on Orchard Street.
– “American Identity” –
But after the visit, Vanessa Willoughby, 28, a Harlem resident who works in finance, said she was “delighted” that a “black family” was included “in the description of the working classes of late 19th century New York.” The museum also organizes guided tours of the neighborhood, including one on African-American spaces.
For Lloyd, telling the Moores’ story is “crucial” to understanding what led the families to move “within the United States” and better understanding “American identity”.
Rachel Moore, “the first generation of her family born free” and not a slave like her ancestors, arrived in New York in 1847 from a rural region; Joseph arrived 10 years later from the neighboring state of New Jersey, where slavery had not yet been abolished, unlike New York. The risk of being captured for sale may have influenced his decision, the museum suggests.
However, in July 1863, the draft riots against enlistment in the army during the Civil War broke out, which turned into racist massacres against Americans in New York. The violence left at least 120 people dead and forced 20% of African Americans to leave the city.
The museum lost track of Rachel starting in 1870 and found Joseph in New Jersey, where he returned to live years later. Her apartment is described in a newspaper article from the time, along with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.