For 35 years, the Lower East Side’s Tenement Museum has hewn to a strict methodology for its historical exhibits: It recreates the lives and apartments of families who actually lived in its two tenement buildings at 97 and 103 Orchard St.
Now, the museum will break from that tradition for the first time by featuring an apartment tour dedicated to a Black family who lived in a tenement across town.
“The story we found in doing research was so rich that it challenged that methodology, and made us go back to our mission, which is more important: to tell the variety of immigrant and migrant stories,” Polland said.
The new tour, titled “A Union of Hope: 1869,” centers on Joseph and Rachel Moore, a free Black family who lived in a tenement building at 17 Laurens St., or present-day West Broadway in SoHo.
The Moores lived on the site that is now the SoHo Grand Hotel, according to lead researcher Marquis Taylor, a history Ph.D candidate at Northwestern University.
The museum’s new tour recreates the two-room apartment they shared with a sister-in-law, as well as a white Irish woman, Rose Brown, and her half-Black son.
“If you look on the census record, there are a few households that are headed by Black men, but with Irish wives,” Taylor said. “That challenges a lot of what people think about New York City during the time.”
The museum has been conducting small pilot tours and focus groups to tweak the exhibit before it opens on Dec. 26. Polland said the early feedback has been instructive.
“We’re so into the details it’s hard for us to realize how little Black history has been taught and how much background is needed for this tour,” Polland said.
For example, she said, early visitors, including born-and-raised New Yorkers, have been surprised to learn that slavery existed in New York at all.
“There’s still a sense that the South was where slavery was and the North was the good guys,” Polland said. “And it’s a little more complicated, right?”
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