How the Tenement Museum Got a New Tenant

New York City’s history is full of doppelgängers, look-alikes, and repetitions. Is there any experience as universal as moving here from a small town, working a crappy job, and spending half your keep to rent a shoebox apartment that you share with a roommate? Take, for instance, the story of a waiter named Joseph Moore. He moved to the city from Belvedere, New Jersey. He wasn’t on StreetEasy—this was 1857. The best he could afford was a two-hundred-and-seventy-square-foot apartment he shared with four others. Moore is the subject of the Tenement Museum’s latest exhibition, “A Union of Hope.” On a recent Sunday, two historians who consulted on the project, Tyler Anbinder and Leslie Harris, met with Annie Polland, the museum’s president, to take a tour. The three joined up on Orchard Street, outside one of the walkups that house the museum. Since its founding, in 1988, the museum has focussed on its buildings’ former residents. Moore is the first subject who lived elsewhere. Polland, who has a cascade of graying hair, explained why he was chosen for the honor. Reason one: in 2008, an exhibition about Irish inhabitants featured a different Joseph Moore—another waiter. Attendees were given a page from an old city directory. It listed two Joseph Moores. “The visitors are, like, ‘Well, wait, who’s this other Joseph Moore?’ ” Polland said. “ ‘Why does it say “col’d”? He lives on Laurens Street. Where is Laurens Street?’ And so we looked into this.” “Col’d” meant “colored”; Laurens Street is now West Broadway. Reason two: in the eighties, a woman named Gina Manuel sent a letter to the museum’s founders, asking them not to forget her Black ancestors. “Their spirits walk those halls and their bones lay in the earth there,” she wrote. (She added, “Forgive typo’s, on coffee break.”) Recently, the museum looked into Manuel’s ancestry. “We have her great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother living at Laurens Street,” Polland said. “That was, like, ‘Whoa,’ because that’s the same address as Joseph and his wife, Rachel!” Manuel’s great-grandmother, Parthenia, overlapped with the Moores. “You’re making that up!” Anbinder, who is wiry, […]

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