Living side by side

If you get the opportunity to visit New York City, I would recommend a visit to the Tenement Museum in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The museum is housed in two historic tenement buildings, within which several apartments have been restored to the condition in which they were inhabited by impoverished residents at various dates between the 1860s and the 1930s. The tenements were home to low-income New Yorkers, including African Americans in the first generation after emancipation from slavery, and immigrant families from across the world. The buildings were taken over by the museum in a state of disrepair, and personal belongings recovered during the restoration – toys, library notices, dolls, hairpins, tickets – help to piece together the stories of ordinary people who didn’t leave formal archives.

On a recent trip, I visited apartment 4A which has been re-created as the home of Joseph and Rachel Moore, Black New Yorkers who moved from a free Black community in New Jersey to live in the tenements during the 1860s and 1870s. New Jersey was the last northern state to enact the gradual abolition of slavery in 1804, but full freedom to families such as the Moores arrived painfully slowly. Life was hard, and money was in short supply: Joseph worked as a coachman and waiter, and Rachel kept house. They shared their tiny 2-room apartment with Rachel’s stepdaughter, Jane, as well as an Irish immigrant, Rose Brown, and her 14-year-old son Louis.

The story of the Moore family demonstrates the closely interwoven lives of the free Black community in New York with their immigrant Irish neighbours. I was surprised that, at that time, Black and Irish people would share an apartment. When I asked our guide about this, her reply made me feel foolish: ‘These people were dirt poor. They had bigger problems than racial difference’.

Duncan McCall