The Joseph and Rachel Moore Tenement Home

FAIN: BR-285415-22

Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Inc. (New York, NY 10002-3102)
David Favaloro (Project Director: August 2021 to present)

Implementation of a sixty-minute guided tour and interactive media exploring the lives of African Americans and Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century New York City.

The Tenement Museum seeks a $400,000 Public Humanities Projects implementation grant to complete permanent exhibit fabrication and tour development for the “Joseph and Rachel Moore Tenement Home.” The new permanent exhibit takes the form of a recreated apartment in the Museum’s 97 Orchard Street tenement. Today a National Historic Landmark, the building was home to nearly 7,000 people from 15 different nations between 1863 and 1935. Now the Museum will recreate the tenement home of Joseph and Rachel Moore, a Black family who lived in Lower Manhattan during the 1860s. The exhibit will trace Joseph’s history from his free Black community of Belvidere, New Jersey, through his family's migration to New York City for economic opportunity, and the community they built in their neighborhoods and workplaces. It will also employ interactive digital storytelling to examine the era’s Black press, contextualizing both the Moores’ story and the Museum’s research.