There is no shortage of ghosts at the Tenement Museum, which for nearly three decades has explored issues of immigration, home and belonging through tours of the meticulously recreated apartments in its five-story building on the Lower East Side. But in recent years, the story of one particularly ghostly presence has lingered in the background.
In 2008, shortly after the opening of an apartment telling the story of Joseph Moore, an 19th-century immigrant Irish waiter, a museum educator noticed something interesting in an 1869 city directory. Right above Moore’s name was another Joseph Moore, also a waiter, living a few neighborhoods away.
Same name, same profession. But there was an extra designation — “Col’d,” or Colored.
The educator started inviting visitors to think about the two Joseph Moores. How would their lives have been similar, or different? As other educators picked up the story, a conversation grew about how to talk about “the other Joseph Moore” — and about the museum’s broader omissions.
Now, as the museum celebrates its reopening with a block party on June 12, it is leaning hard into the story of the Black Joseph Moore. It is researching an apartment recreation dedicated to him and his wife, Rachel — its first dedicated to a Black family. And it is introducing a neighborhood walking tour called “Reclaiming Black Spaces,” which explores sites connected with nearly 400 years of African-American presence on the Lower East Side.
The museum is also revising all of its apartment tours, to look more squarely at the ways that race and racism shaped the opportunities open to the mostly white immigrants whose struggle and striving is explored there.
“Basically, we’re taking apart everything and putting it back together again,” Annie Polland, the museum’s president, said in an interview last month, after offering a peek at the as-yet unrestored top-floor apartment that will be dedicated to the Black Joseph Moore.
“Ideas about race were important for understanding every family’s experience, at every moment in time, in New York and on the Lower East Side,” she said.