Episode 429 of the Bowery Boys,

The Moors, a Black family in 1860s, New York.

Hey, it's the Bowery Boys.

Hey. Hey! Hello and welcome to the Bowery Boys. This is Tom Myers. Greg Young is off

this week but in a moment we'll be heading out of the studio to visit the home of an African-American

couple, Joseph and Rachel Moore, down on Lauren Street in today's Soho neighborhood in the year 1870.

Now both Joseph and Rachel moved to New York when they were about 20 years old.

Rachel from Ulster County, New York in the late 1840s and

Joseph from New Jersey in the 1850s. They married, raised a family. He worked as a waiter and a porter, and their family shared

their small apartment with another family to help cover costs. Their home has been recreated in the exhibit A Union of Hope, 1869, which has recently opened

at the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side.

The exhibit carefully recreates what their two bedroom apartment may have looked like, and it also

explores life in the 8th ward of Manhattan and specifically within the

black community during the turbulent and dangerous decades of the 1850s and

60s. Now the museum has been leading tours in their Orchard Street Tenement

building since they opened in 1988. But this tour of the Moors Home is different.

It's the first time that the museum has recreated

the apartment of a black family.

Although as you will hear, the museum's founders had long planned for it.

And the exhibit is also the first time that the museum has recreated an apartment that wasn't housed in one of their buildings on the

Lower East Side but rather in another neighborhood entirely. So just who were

Joseph and Rachel Moore and how and why did the Tenement Museum choose to put them at the center of their new exhibit?

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