In 1863, 25- and 35-year-old Black New Yorkers Rachel and Joseph Moore moved into a tenement at Lower Manhattan’s 17 Laurens Street. The thoroughfare no longer exists, but their residence would have stood in present-day Soho around West Broadway, the short road that connects the World Trade Center to just south of Washington Square Park. In a recently opened exhibition at the Tenement Museum titled A Union of Hope: 1869, a version of the couple’s cramped quarters in the former Eighth Ward is reimagined on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, in the institution’s latest 75-minute guided tour.
The show has been in the works since 2019. The museum found Rachel and Joseph Moore listed on a census record next to an Irish immigrant featured in an exhibition on the floor below. The abbreviation “col’d” appeared next to the Moore’s entries, noting that they were Black. The team began a deep dive into the couple’s history: Joseph and Rachel were born in Belvidere, New Jersey, and Ulster Country, New York, respectively, and migrated to New York City as young adults. Both were widowed before meeting each other. Joseph worked as a stagecoach driver and waiter, Rachel as a laundress. The couple shared their tiny space with an Irish woman named Rose Brown, her son, and Rachel’s stepchild from her first marriage, a seamstress named Jane Kennedy.
The Tenement Museum has previously only presented exhibitions about the lives of tenants who lived in their two buildings at 97 and 103 Orchard Street. The institution purchased the latter location in 2007 and opened three exhibitions delving into the histories of Jewish Holocaust survivors and Puerto Rican and Chinese families in 2017. As the Union of Hope tour explains, the Lower East Side, where the buildings are located, did not have a large Black population in the 1860s, and so the museum broke from its mold and recreated an apartment from an another neighborhood in order to tell the Moores’s stories.
The recreated home showcases Rachel Moore’s laundry setup and Kennedy’s sewing supplies. It also includes a few common foods, such as oysters and a turkey (a detail the researchers gleaned from an essay recounting a laundress receiving one as payment). A portrait of Abraham Lincoln rests on the fireplace mantle. Two bedrolls are stacked in the closet; all five residents slept in the apartment’s two tiny rooms.
The tour delves into why the Moores may have migrated to the city: In addition to providing economic opportunity, the Eighth Ward housed a large Black population that was nonexistent in places like Rachel Moore’s home upstate, and unlike smaller towns, New York City had schools for Black children. The exhibition repeatedly emphasizes the community that Rachel and Joseph likely found in their new home. A screen shows a digital reconstruction of the tenement courtyard where the Moores would have interacted with other renters while doing laundry or using the bathroom.
“There were residents from Ireland, England, the British West Indies, France, and migrants from Delaware, Maryland, Washington, DC, Virginia, and Connecticut,” the exhibition’s lead researcher, Marquis Taylor, told Hyperallergic, adding that it was common for immigrants and migrants of different nationalities to live together.
While the Moores were born free, the specter of slavery loomed large: New York State only banned the practice in 1817, and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made it increasingly dangerous to live as a Black person in the North. In 1863, the same year the Moores took up residence at 17 Laurens Street, the weeks-long Draft Riots broke out in New York City. White mobs killed and attacked Black New Yorkers and destroyed their homes and around a quarter of the Black population left the city. Those who stayed faced discrimination from employers and landlords. The tour notes that the Moores were overcharged for rent (they paid $7 a month) and chronicles the repeated displacement of Black neighborhoods throughout New York City‘s history.
“Hope is a common thread throughout this story,” Taylor said, stating that by 1870, the Reconstruction era was “in full effect.” Slavery had been abolished, Black people were legally considered citizens, and Black men were granted the right to vote. “These were exciting and celebratory moments, but Black people were still acutely aware of the work that must be done to achieve freedom and equality.”
The Moores left the Laurens Street tenement in 1870. Rachel died soon after, and Joseph remarried and eventually moved to Jersey City. Most of the buildings that surrounded them in the Eighth Ward are no longer standing.
Taylor described the historical archive he sifted through to create A Union of Hope as “limited and often fragmented,” and explained that mainstream White press from the time period frequently employed racially sensationalized language to describe the Moores’ neighborhood.
The team relied on writings by Black individuals from the time period, and early on in the research process, they found a 1989 letter in the museum’s archives penned by a librarian named Gina Manuel. The missive detailed her family’s long history in the city and urged the co-founder of the newly established Tenement Museum to explore the stories of Black New Yorkers like herself, a request that would take over 30 years to come to fruition.
“A single letter from Gina Manuel about her family’s recollection parallels several aspects of Joseph and Rachel’s life that we know from years of research,” Taylor said. Among the commonalities, the two families attended the name Catholic church.
“Family history is important,” said Taylor. “These nuanced stories are typically absent from the school curriculum or any textbook, but it is so important to understanding this city’s history and Black history.”
Visitors can view A Union of Hope: 1869 by booking a timed tour on the museum’s website.
