Explore the story of Joseph and Rachel Moore, Black New Yorkers who made their home in Lower Manhattan’s tenements in the 1860s and 1870s. Joseph Moore moves from New Jersey to Manhattan in 1857, his wife Rachel from Kingston, New York in the same decade. They lived in a rear tenement in today’s SoHo neighborhood, in a building with both Irish and African American New Yorkers.
Years in the making, the Joseph and Rachel Moore exhibit traces Joseph’s history from his free Black community of Belvidere, New Jersey, through his family’s migration to New York City, and the community he and his wife Rachel built in their neighborhoods and workplaces.