Course:ARST575K/LIBR539H/Tenement Museum

The Tenement Museum is located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side across two restored tenement buildings at 97 and 103 Orchard Street.

Founded in 1988, the Museum took root when historian Anita Jacobsen and social activist Ruth Abram discovered the dilapidated building at 97 Orchard Street that had been shuttered for more than 50 years. Although the building was in ruins, they uncovered personal belongings and other evidence of the immigrant families who inhabited its apartment units between the 1860s and 1930s. These artifacts and the stories of the families who owned them form the foundation of the Museum’s work and collections.

Tenement Museum
Founded	1988
Location	97 and 103 Orchard Street Lower East Side Manhattan, New York City
Focus	Immigrant Experiences
Website	https://www.tenement.org/

Background

The mission of the Tenement Museum is to foster a society that embraces and values the role of immigration in the evolving American identity. Past and present are connected to create understanding of how the experiences of early immigrants compare and contrast with those of newcomers today.

The immigrants, migrants and refugees who called 97 and 103 Orchard Street and the Lower East Side home are the immediate community defined and served by the Museum, bound by their shared experiences as newcomers to America and to the locality of the buildings and neighbourhood where they lived. This combination of identifiers reflects some of the complexity and fluidity involved in defining community, which tends to have a local focus in combination with culture, faith, background or other shared identity or interest.

The Lower East Side and its tenement buildings are crucial to an understanding of American immigration. The Port of New York was the major port in the 1840s for immigrants when they arrived in America. Many stayed in New York and lived in the Lower East Side where purpose-built tenements housed poor, working class immigrants in close quarters. 97 and 103 Orchard Street alone housed an estimated 15,000 people from more than 20 nations from the time of their construction in the early 1860s to when they were vacated.

Artifacts found in the abandoned tenements make up the bulk of the Museum’s collections. Coupled with historical records such as census figures, city directories and employment records, the stories and spaces of the ordinary families who lived in the buildings were reconstructed by the Museum to be accurate to the time period.

Real-life families represented within the Museum exemplify "the minor narratives, the untold stories, the traces, the whispers, and the expressions of marginalized identities that people yearn to find in the archives" which has found expression within archival appraisal since the 1980s. Guided tours of the families' intimate, archived spaces allow their lives as newcomers to be seen, known and understood, resulting in greater representational belonging of immigrants in support of the Museum's mission.

Collections

The Museum’s collections illustrate the lives of those who inhabited 97 and 103 Orchard Street as residents, shopkeepers, landlords and neighbours. Its items are used to interpret the Museum’s stories and to aid in presenting educational programs. The Museum’s collections appear to exist wholly independent and autonomous from other archival institutions. A permanent collection is organized into over 5000 artifacts, 1500 photographs, and 130 linear feet of archival records. Its focus on images and personal ephemera bring life to the immigrant individuals and communities that “otherwise lie rather lifeless or without color in the paper record.”

Artifacts

The Museum recognizes “that the records created by [communities] may not conform to the traditional concept of records”; the bulk of its holdings are of artifacts brought to light through building archaeology, preservation and restoration projects conducted within the historic buildings. Objects include original building materials, clothing, household accessories, document fragments, food containers, furniture, photographs, textiles, and toilet articles.

Materials must have primary historical significance relating to 97 or 103 Orchard Street and/or the buildings’ former residents, shopkeepers, and owners to be included in the Museum’s collections. Periodically, artifacts are donated to the Museum from descendants of family members who once lived and/or worked in the buildings.  

Objects are also carefully selected for purchase from estate sales, antique stores, flea markets and online auctions to illustrate and interpret the narratives presented during tours or educational programs. Although they lack primary historical significance, the objects are important in bringing vivid detail to the restored apartments and helping recreate a historically accurate depiction of tenement life.

Objects selected for display in the Museum’s interpreted apartments and use in education programs comprise a study and teaching collection.

Photo Archive

A photograph collection includes over 1500 images spanning from the 1860s to the present day, featuring images of the neighbourhood, historic and contemporary photographs of 97 and 103 Orchard Streets as residences and as a Museum, and historic portraits and snapshots of former residents and their families. Neighbourhood photos include a series taken during the 1930s by Hungarian-American photographer and cinematographer, Arnold S. Eagle, and a series taken in the 1970s by Lower East Side resident, Edmund Gillion.

Institutional Archive

The Museum maintains records created by staff that document the formation of the Museum, development activities, research projects and exhibitions, and interpretive content including biographical materials about former residents. Audio-visual materials include oral histories of former residents, shopkeepers, and others associated with the two buildings or the Lower East Side, and their descendants. Historical documents collected to research and contextualize the buildings’ residents consist of primary sources obtained from archives and libraries, including ship manifests, census records, city directories and newspapers, as well as personal documents such as report cards.

Programming

The Museum’s programs explore immigration, identity, public policy, urban development, architecture and other themes through the true stories of the ordinary families of 97 and 103 Orchard Street and of the Lower East Side. Its flagship program consists of guided tours of the Museum’s recreated living and work spaces.

Inside 97 Orchard Street, seven apartments and a storefront shop have been restored to offer five different tours of varying themes such as how families persevered through the Great Depression, their time working in unsafe factories, and the challenges of building a new community as an immigrant in a new country. Its families include those of:

• John and Caroline Schneider (1864-1886), German immigrants who ran Schneider's Lager Beer Saloon while living in an adjoining apartment
• Bridget and Joseph Moore (1869), and their Irish immigrant family who were considered outsiders in a predominantly German neighbourhood
• Nathalie Gumpertz (1870-1886), an East Prussian immigrant and her children who were abandoned by Nathalie's husband during economic depression
• Harris and Jennie Levine (1892-1905), Eastern European Jews who ran a small garment factory out of the front room of their apartment
• Abraham and Fanny Rogarshevsky (1908-1941), originally Abram and Zipe Heller of Lithuania, who worked in a garment shop
• Rachel and Abraham Confino (1913-1917), Sephardic Jews from present-day Greece, whose customs differed from those of the Lower East Side's predominant Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish community
• Adolfo and Rosaria Baldizzi (1928-1935), who immigrated from Sicily before the Johnson-Reed Act effectively ended Italian immigration

103 Orchard Street shares the stories of newer families who came to America after World War II seeking a new chapter in their lives. Its Under One Roof tour features the stories of families living alongside one another in the mixed neighbourhood of the Lower East Side:

• Kalman and Regina Epstein (1947-1961), Holocaust survivors who were among the first World War II refugees to be allowed into the United States
• Saez / Velez Family (1969-2011), who were among close to a half million Puerto Ricans who migrated to New York City between 1940 and 1960
• The Wongs (1968-2014), whose family was reunited after the 1965 lifting of legislation that prevented Asians from entering the United States

In addition to tenement tours, the Museum offers guided tours of the surrounding Lower East Side area. Key neighbourhood stops important to immigrant families at the time include Seward Park, the first municipal playground in the United States.

Other educational programs include lesson plans, teacher resources and programs for secondary and post-secondary educators. The Museum also offers a “Shared Journeys” program, which offers tours to immigrants who are learning English in hopes of connecting their own experiences to a larger historical context.

COVID-19 Changes

In-person tours of the Museum’s tenement spaces are suspended during Covid, with neighbourhood walking tours available to single household groups of up to 8 people.

Tour experiences inside 97 and 103 Orchard Street have been adapted into virtual tour groups and virtual school field trips. A number of virtual exhibits are also housed on the Museum's website, as well as other online resources including a blog and a podcast. Blog posts range from brief history lessons to fun posts about the pets in the tenements, while the podcast explores the impacts of immigration visible in contemporary food, music and other culture.

Online Exhibits

The Museum hosts a number of online exhibits including:

Your Story, Our Story- This interactive program collects stories outside of the Museum's Lower East Side focus. Participants are asked to submit a story relating to an object or tradition important to their family or to their heritage.

Beyond Statistics: Living in a Pandemic- This exhibit explores the lives of 5 former tenants who died from contagious diseases. The exhibit offers biographies of these tenants, as well as histories of the diseases.

Tenement Women: Agents of Change- This exhibit provides a window into the lives of immigrant women and the diverse roles they played, ranging from homemakers to union organizers to suffragettes.

Access

In-person research access to the Museum’s collections is available by advance appointment only. Appointments are typically available Monday to Friday, 10AM to 5PM, and require researchers to submit a general summary of their research and materials they would like to access. A Researcher Application must also be completed prior to an appointment. Upon a research appointment, compliance must be made to the Museum's set guidelines, including staff accompaniment when working with research materials and adherence to the Museum’s reproduction and copyright guidelines.

A wide variety of the Museum's collections are also available for access online, including their vast, searchable photo archive and their digital exhibits that often feature photos and descriptions of objects held in their collections. Permissions to use photos from the Museum must be obtained directly from the Museum.

Affiliations

The Tenement Museum is an affiliate of the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a National Trust Historic Site. It is also an affiliate of the National Park Service as a National Historic Site.