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With St. Patricks' Day around the corner, we wanted to update you on the progress of our next exhibit, the restored tenement apartment of the Irish immigrant Moore family. After years of research and restoration, the Moore's home will be open to the public in the Fall of 2006. Set in 1869, the Moore Apartment will focus on the experiences of Joseph Peter Moore and Bridget Meehan Moore, two young Irish immigrants who met and married in New York. Like other immigrants of the day, the Moores lost a number of their children to illness and disease. One of their daughters, Agnes Mary Moore, died of maramus, a form of malnutrition, when she was only five and a half months old. Some of the Moore's children did survive, including their daughter Jane, pictured here circa 1895. At the time of this photograph, Jane Moore was 29 and had just married Roger Hanrahan, who was also the child of Irish immigrants. Join us in future issues as we delve deeper in to the Moore's story and the restoration of their tenement home. For most of the 19th century, a career in medicine was open to all who wished to try their hand. A doctor did not need a college diploma, a medical education, or a license in order to begin practicing medicine. While H.F. Topping, the doctor who signed 97 Orchard Street resident Agnes Moore’s death certificate in 1869, was a graduate of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1850, even a medical education did not adequately prepare physicians to effectively treat patients. With few regulations governing the profession, commercially oriented medical schools with no admission standards proliferated and accepted any student who could pay. No more than a handful of medical schools were tied to a university or hospital, and most medical educations consisted of eight months of lectures in which students neither saw patients nor performed autopsies. Before the discovery of germs in the 1880s, diagnoses were not made with any precision or certainty. Effective medical therapies were thus quite rare, leaving infectious diseases untreated. Kevin Baker will visit the Museum Store on March 15th to read from Strivers Row. A vivid reimagining of Malcom X's first days in Harlem, Strivers Row is a great follow-up to Baker's Irish-in-New York epic, Paradise Alley. Read a bit of Strivers Row and see what you think: "Malcolm had already stopped listening, staring out at the amazing sidewalk scene emerging all around them. Suddenly there was color everywhere, as if someone had just switched the screen to Technicolor, like in The Wizard of Oz, which he had seen six times back in Michigan. Men wearing green, and yellow, and red sports shirts. Men wearing porkpie hats, and Panamas, and fedoras, men in white and lemon-lime and peach ice-cream suits—even men wearing sharper zoots, he had to admit, than what he had on himself. “And women. He was sure that he had never seen so many beautiful women in his entire life. There were women everywhere, at least two for every man...Women wearing gold and ruby-red glass in their ears, and open-toed platform heels that made them sway with every step..." ‘What—they on fire?’ Malcolm asked in bewilderment..." ‘Mm-hmm, you bet they are,” the cabbie laughed up front. “Those Thursday girls, they always on fire! Even when they ain’t gettin’ their hair straightened—” > Read more of Strivers Row. > RSVP for the Strivers Row Book Party on March 15th 14,000 According to the Irish Government, that's the approximate number of Irish immigrants who have returned home from the United States since 2001. The Irish Government estimates that half of the returnees came from New York. The bullish Irish economy and fears regarding post-9-11 immigration restrictions helped trigger the surge back to Ireland. There's A Typical Tipperary Over Here (Abner Silver) "There's a typical Tipperary, a typical Dublin Bay, A typical County Kerry in the good old USA There's Jim A'Little O'Ryan and Michael Donaghue, George M. Cohan then there's Thomas Dempsey too, Then there's wonderful John McCormack and Gibbs L. McAdoo, And they're Irish through and through. And if you want an Irish street just walk up along Delancey Street, You'd think that you were home in Ireland." --Lyrics transcribed from Edison Diamond Disc #50683-R (issued in 1920) and found at Richard Densmore's Edison Diamond Disc and 78 rpm Record Collection.