How the Tenement Museum Got a New Tenant

(January 29, 2024)

The New Yorker

New York City’s history is full of doppelgängers, look-alikes, and repetitions. Is there any experience as universal as moving here from a small town, working a crappy job, and spending half your keep to rent a shoebox apartment that you share with a roommate? Take, for instance, the story of a waiter named Joseph Moore. He moved to the city from Belvedere, New Jersey. He wasn’t on StreetEasy—this was 1857. The best he could afford was a two-hundred-and-seventy-square-foot apartment he shared with four others. Moore is the subject of the Tenement Museum’s latest exhibition, “A Union of Hope.” On a recent Sunday, two historians who consulted on the project, Tyler Anbinder and Leslie Harris, met with Annie Polland, the museum’s president, to take a tour.