Irish outsiders: Performing Irish heritage on the streets of New York

Abstract

This article analyses how the Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street in Lower Manhattan uses immersive techniques to provide visitors with an opportunity to engage with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrant experiences. My specific focus is the apartment tour entitled, Irish Outsiders, a living history installation curated as part of the Museum’s Hard Times exhibit that recreates the cramped apartment of Joseph and Bridget Moore, real-life residents of 97 Orchard Street in 1869. The Moores left an Ireland traumatized by the Great Famine only to arrive at the challenges of New York City immigrant living. This immersive recreation of Joseph and Bridget Moore’s apartment staged for a Catholic wake links this specific Irish immigrant experience with that of loss, suffering, poverty and trauma. Drawing on Alison Landsberg’s concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ alongside frameworks of heritage performance, this article examines the Irish Outsiders as an immersive performance curated to reflect and shape the narrative tropes essential to the Irish immigrant experience implicit within an Irish-American heritage identity.