The Tenement Museum, located in New York City’s Lower East Side neighborhood, has for decades attempted to tell the true stories of immigrants nestling into America’s most populous city during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution and into the 20th century—but is only now introducing its first African American family to the museum’s tenement tour, and critics aren’t happy.
Launched in 1988, the Tenement Museum was born from a revived historic apartment building constructed in 1863 that previously housed over 7,000 residents, but had been left to ruin for 50 years, museum president Dr. Annie Polland told The Daily Beast during a private tour of the new exhibit Tuesday. Initially focusing on the stories of Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European families—many of whom were actual tenants of the building—the museum annexed an additional property in 2017 to feature Chinese and Puerto Rican families.
In 2008, a room was dedicated to the family of Joseph Moore, an Irish immigrant who worked as a waiter in the 1860s. However, while researching the Moore family, museum directors kept running into another “Joseph Moore” who was also a waiter at the same time. That man happened to be Black.
In 2019, museum directors decided to add the Black Joseph Moore after realizing the addition would allow visitors to see how free Black people lived during the Civil War, especially as racial tensions and discrimination increased at the onset of the Draft Riots of 1863.
“They’re both waiters [and] live less than a mile apart in Lower Manhattan,” museum senior director Kathryn Lloyd previously told The Daily Beast. “We realize this is really an essential opportunity for the museum to look at how the stories of Black and Irish New Yorkers are really intertwined in the 1860s.”
Union of Hope: 1869, the history of the Black Joseph Moore, his wife Rachel Moore, and their family, officially launches Christmas week. Though Joseph Moore actually lived in SoHo, his livelihood has been recreated in a tight unit within the Orchard Street museum.
Lloyd explained that the exhibit of the Black family was delayed because it occupied the top floor of the museum, and directors had to ensure the stability of the previously dilapidated building. (A few of the education rooms remain in “ruins” to show visitors how the building was found in the ’80s.)
The Tenement Museum showcases the uncomfortable, cramped living conditions some of the most vulnerable communities of New York City had to endure when moving to the area. Full families packed into units that were typically no more than two rooms and tended to be multi-functional. A common toilet in a creaky, wooden hallway was shared by tenants who sometimes may have had to wait in line. Larger common-area sinks doubled as bathtubs. Tiny streams of sunlight seep into individual units, but tenants and landlords were creative in manipulating that light to stretch farther into the apartments.
As previously reported by The Daily Beast, critics dismissed the idea of a Black family being added to the Tenement Museum, believing the addition would erase one of the white immigrant families that had already been included in the tour.
“The Tenement Museum was an unforgettable part of a trip to New York a few years ago. But now it’s being sacrificed to the gods of wokeness, because the Irish and the Jews it documented are no longer in fashion,” a social media user wrote on X in 2021.
The Daily Mail even erroneously reported in 2021 that the new exhibit was “scrubbing” the story of an Irish family.
However, Polland and Lloyd firmly stated that the exhibit is in a previously unoccupied room on the fifth floor; whereas, the Irish Moore family is situated on the fourth floor. In fact, much of the museum had been sealed off since Ruth Abram acquired the building in 1988. Poland and Lloyd also claimed that Abram had a goal to include the African American experience at the Tenement Museum—even at its inception in 1988.
“Our founders talked about wanting to tell the stories of immigrants and migrants and mentioned… that the museum is going to tell the story of a free Black family,” Lloyd told The Daily Beast Tuesday.
According to Polland, critics have always tried to dispel records of Black people’s residence in Lower Manhattan. During the tour, she referenced an 1860 article from the Black newspaper The Anglo African that challenged census reports and white media for wrongly claiming no Black people lived in the area.
“And now that the satanic press… after some six months besieging and bombarding of the negro, and after a prodigious waste of powder and ball and percussion upon him, fires this last shot and gives up. We inquire anxiously again, what is in the foreground?” read the article, titled “The Last Gun From the Satanic Press.”
“We inquire, who took the census? What interest had they or those who employed them to in accurately counting the blacks? In one section of the city…where scores of colored people resided, not one colored person was reported. So much for the census.”
More than a century before the creation of the Moore family exhibit at the Tenement Museum, “the Black press was really seeing that the white mainstream press was misrepresenting the perspectives of Black New Yorkers,” Polland said.
During the tour Tuesday, The Daily Beast was able to get a first-hand view of the new exhibit. Curators used historical context clues to determine that two beds were probably in the bedroom: one for Joseph and Rachel Moore, and another for their children. A sewing machine may have sat by the window for better lighting, since Rachel was a laundress. The kitchen probably also served as an additional work station for Rachel and, perhaps, provided extra room for a mother and son who were roommates with the Moore family. A photo of Abraham Lincoln most definitely was featured somewhere in the unit, Lloyd said. (In this case, it was on the bedroom wall mantle.)
“What Abraham Lincoln symbolize[s] is that I imagine Joseph telling his children about this moment he lives through, of seeing the end of slavery, to see what it was like for him to vote for the first time,” Lloyd said.
The final stop on the tour indicated that the Moores will not be the last Black family added to the museum. Items from another African American family that lived in 19th century New York City tenements had been placed on display in another available room. Pocket versions of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and a collection of essays and speeches from Abraham Lincoln were vital to pass down to the next generation, Lloyd said. They also served to “disprove” misconceptions about African Americans, Lloyd said.
“At the end, we really invite visitors to think about what’s been passed down in their own family over time.” Lloyd said, “and then how that also connects to what’s passed down in the sense of history—what’s in textbooks and what’s not.”
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