Who Gets to Live in the Tenement Museum?

What is lost when we see history -- and try to "fix" it -- through the lens of presentism

Visiting the Tenement Museum: Immigration Museum NYC, located at 97 Orchard Street on New York's Lower East Side, is taking a literal step into history. Decades of research has resulted in the recreation and restoration of apartments that some of the all-immigrant families stayed in from the 1860s to the 1980s.

"Of the more than 7,000 people who inhabited that building over its life span, researchers established who had lived in which rooms, detailed their lives, [and] forensically reconstructed the surroundings," wrote Peter van Buren. "Some rooms had 20 layers of wallpaper applied by the different generations who had lived there."

Van Buren, an author, journalist and former educator at the Tenement Museum, wrote earlier this week, in a piece titled "Wokeness Claims a Museum," of the recent decision by museum staff to install a tenant who neither lived in the building nor was an immigrant. Joseph Moore was a real person who lived in New York City in the 1860s, but other than his working as a waiter at a fancy restaurant, there is practically nothing recorded. By the 1880s, Moore had moved to New Jersey, where, as noted earlier this year in the New York Times, "his trail, at least so far, goes cold." Nevertheless, Moore and his wife Rachel and the story of their lives inside an apartment at 97 Orchard Street will now be on display. The reason for the fabrication, created out of cloth yet unknown? Based on what van Buren experienced, it is because Moore is black (and happens to share a name with a longtime Irish immigrant and resident of the building.)

"It is a literal rewriting of history," van Buren wrote, as well as "a sidebar to a black experience that never really was."

Van Buren and I spoke by phone (pardon the technical difficulties!) about when the museum started to change its mission (spoiler alert: when Trump was elected) and what is lost when we see history -- and try to "fix" it -- through the lens of presentism.

This story is part of a new podcast, Lunch on Dimes Square, where we meet people whose work and lives ping around the Dimes Square section of East Chinatown and the Lower Eastside, location of Paloma Media and center of a whole lot of churning goodness in NYC