Meet the Moore Family: American History, Hope, and Dreams

In 1989, Gina Manuel sent a letter to the recently opened Tenement Museum in New York City with a request. She urged the museum to not forget Black New Yorkers, such as her ancestors, who lived in tenement buildings in Lower Manhattan before being displaced.  

“Their spirits walk those halls, and their bones lay in the earth there,” Manuel wrote. “Most of society seems to write us off when they look at the history of New York City, and America, but my people were part of New York City long before it was a city as such.”  

Now, over 30 years later, Manuel’s wish has come true. For the first time, the museum, which teaches American history through the experiences of working-class tenement residents who moved to New York City, has a permanent exhibit on a Black family. Opened in early 2024, “A Union of Hope: 1869” tells the story of Joseph and Rachel Moore, a couple who lived in Lower Manhattan’s tenements in the 1860s and 1870s.  

The exhibit “carves out a space to explore Black history and to examine a part of New York City history that has not made its way into textbooks or collective memory,” says Annie Polland, the museum’s president. “It allows us to understand New York City at the time of the Civil War, to understand what Reconstruction means, and to understand what the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were for and what they mean today.” 

A history museum unlike any other, its exhibitions take place in two Lower East Side tenement buildings that are documented as home to thousands of immigrant and migrant families living in New York City in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is the museum’s first exhibit featuring a family that didn’t actually live in one of the buildings, but Polland says it’s a crucial story, one that’s a natural progression of their other exhibits and that provides a more complete picture of New York City’s past. “In studying Black history, we’ve gained insight on the whole city,” she says. 

The 75-minute guided tour traces Joseph’s journey from his free Black community in Belvidere, New Jersey, to Lower Manhattan, where he built a life with his wife, Rachel. On a cold February afternoon in 2025, tour guide Estefania Giraldo-Pelaez walked a group through the Moores’ recreated two-room apartment on the top floor of 97 Orchard Street. There, visitors were transported to 1869, when Joseph worked as coachman and waiter, and Rachel kept house. They shared a cramped rear tenement apartment in the Eighth Ward with three other people, including an Irish woman and her mixed-race son. The Eighth Ward (Manhattan’s present-day SoHo neighborhood) was becoming populated at that time with Black Americans and working-class immigrants from Europe.  

In telling the couple’s story, Giraldo-Pelaez provided a glimpse into how Black New Yorkers’ lives intersected with groups of immigrants, as they shared neighborhoods and sometimes, in the case of the Moores, dwellings. Besides attracting large groups of newcomers from around the world, the city was also undergoing a great transformation in the complicated aftermath of the Civil War.  

“It’s really thinking through what it was like to live through this time period, where on the one hand, New York City hosts the largest population of free Blacks in the North, but you're still living in a time of segregation when Black people are restricted from voting and they have to go to ‘colored’ schools,” says Polland. “There’s still so much segregation.”  

Marquis Taylor, the exhibit’s lead researcher, says there wasn’t much historical record about Black life in New York City between 1864 and 1870, when the Moores lived in Lower Manhattan. The exhibit was first conceived in 2019, and when development began in 2020, they did extensive research to ensure its accuracy. They worked with scholars, researchers, and genealogists and turned to sources like the city census and directories, municipal and court records, published essays, newspapers, and books. In this way, the museum found itself contributing to the scholarship of this time. 

In particular, the era’s Black-owned or operated newspapers were central to offering insights into the lives of working-class New Yorkers. This included its classified ads, with advertisements on church functions, events, businesses, institutions, and other happenings in the community pointing to Black New Yorkers’ priorities, says Taylor. The country’s first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, was published in New York City in 1827, the year slavery was abolished in the state.  

“A lot of times in the white press, there was an over-sensationalization of Black life, talking about tenement apartments being filthy and Black neighborhoods being filled with crime, degeneracy, and vice,” says Taylor. “The Black newspapers shed light on the contributions of Black people to the city.” 

The Moores’ apartment in the Eight Ward no longer exists. When the city decided in the 1870s to widen Laurens Street (today’s West Broadway), where they lived, the buildings were demolished. But the Eighth Ward was a dynamic and significant community for Black New Yorkers, says Taylor, even if its history as such is overlooked. He admits that though he went to high school in area, he had no idea then that his school was in a community with such a prominent place in Black history.  

“A lot of this is the reclamation of stories that we don’t really know,” says Taylor. “We want to have more accurate and true histories about New York, about Black New Yorkers, to say Black New Yorkers were here and they contributed to this city’s history.” 

This was one of the main takeaways for Jonathan Cox, a museum worker who took the tour and was visiting from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He said that while he’s worked in the sector for over 15 years, the tour opened his eyes to some fundamental history.

“The amount of research that went into creating the tour is really kind of astonishing,” he said. “I’m embarrassed to say, since I spent so much of my career working in history museums, that I didn’t know there was an area in Lower Manhattan that was so predominantly African American, and it’s been kind of overshadowed by ethnic European history.”  

Beyond the tour, Polland says the museum is using visitor questions and source materials to further explore the exhibit’s themes and to connect the past with the present, including through programming, events, and special programs for school-aged children. “As students think about history,” Polland says, “they can also consider their hopes and dreams for American society today.” 

At the tour’s end, Giraldo-Pelaez left visitors with a similar perspective. While history tends to be taught impersonally, she said, it’s mostly ordinary people who’ve built our communities. 

“Learning about the stories of ordinary people allows us to get a more holistic view of the past and also to start to see the human cost of things like war, housing laws, changing immigration patterns,” she said. “It allows us to see the step-by-step progress of history and see the ways that our communities have evolved into what they are today. Hopefully it allows us to see those connections, and learn from the past, and move forward.”