Baked Pears in Duane Park

William P. Chappel

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Writing in the 1880s, one New Yorker fondly reminisced about the black women who stood in the streets tempting passersby with a baked pear "carried around in a deep-glazed earthenware dish, floating deliciously in a warm bath of home-made syrup." Despite the writer’s nostalgia, the baked pear sellers suffered the same lot as the rest of the city’s hucksters—a group largely comprised of impoverished blacks and white women and children who struggled to survive in the lowest rungs of society. The location depicted is Duane Street Park, at the intersection of Duane and Hudson, just north of the fashionable third ward.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art