Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New York City

Magazine Antiques, August, 2001 by Diana L. Linden

"The tenement is the the basic facade in New York, the face of the slums, a slab of tombstone proportions, four to six stories pocked by windows," [1]

Since the mid-nineteenth century successive waves of American immigrants have made their homes in the crowded, dimly lit, and poorly ventilated tenements of New York City's Lower East Side. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is housed in one such building, at 97 Orchard Street. In contrast to many historic buildings that commemorate noted for exemplary architecture and fine decorations, the museum is in a once ordinary, pre-regulation tenement that now interprets the city's working-class and immigrant history from 1863 to the Great Depression.

A plain brick structure lacking in both stylistic flourish and fine details, this National Historic Landmark is an example of the fairly recent impact of the work of social historians on the museum field. [2] It encourages visitors to think critically about the past and present rather than wrap themselves in patriotism. As part of its mission the museum seeks to promote tolerance and provide historical perspective on immigration in New York City. Situated in a rapidly changing neighborhood that is still home to tenements, the museum disproves the myth that upward mobility is the fluid experience often pointed to in tales of immigrant success. [3] For many Americans, and for many former residents of 97 Orchard Street, life never did get much better than this.

Visitors to the museum discover that for immigrants and working-class New Yorkers, home was an active site of both assimilation and cultural continuity. [4] Industrial urban New York City altered traditional notions of family housekeeping, education, and ritual. In crowded tenements pungent with odors and with competing languages and cultures, these new Americans made many changes in their daily lives. Women now bought bread at neighborhood stores rather than baking it in stone hearths as they had done in Sicily Their American mattresses needed sheets and blankets unlike the straw and feather mattresses of the old world. And the dirt and pollution of the streets meant constant laundering, which American women did not carry in baskets to the stream. [5]

Along with the unwelcome street noises, much unsolicited advice made its way into the immigrants' apartments either through the personal visits of reformers, instructive columns published in the many immigrant newspapers, or through children bringing their lessons home from school. The maintenance of a hygienic household was of the utmost concern to reformers at such institutions as the Educational Alliance and the Henry Street Settlement, where Lillian D. Wald's (1867-1940) model tenement, known as the Flat, schooled newly arrived women in proper American decor and cleaning hearth and home. [6] Reformers lectured the immigrants against decorating their walls with cheap ethnic calendars, wedding photographs, or knickknacks from home. They objected to wallpapers such as those that decorated the walls of 97 Orchard Street, for it was believed that the floury wallpaper paste invited vermin and disease and collected grease and grime. Instead reformers encouraged austere modern apartments maintained by "efficient " American housekeeping methods. [7]

The museum celebrates the daily life and hardships of immigrant women whose primary role was maintaining the home and caring for the family. However, these same women were engaged in the public, social, and economic spheres as well, traveling up to Union Square for labor rallies, leaving the neighborhood to work in factories and shops, going to the movies and ethnic theaters, and learning the ways of their new homeland in settlement houses.

Since opening in 1988 the museum has re-created four apartments based on the lives of actual families who lived at 97 Orchard Street: the Gumpertz family from Germany, who were there in the 1870s and early 1880s; the Rogarshevsky family, Eastern European Jews, who began to live at 97 Orchard Street in 1910; the Confinos, Sephardic Jews from what was then Turkey, who lived in the building between 1913 and 1916; and the Baldizzi family from Sicily, who lived at 97 Orchard Street from the late 1920s until 1935. [8]

The immigrant families were distinguished by their ethnic origins, race, and religion. Visitors to the museum learn about their world mainly through the experience of the women. The histories of working-class women and children differed from those of men and boys. As the historian Elizabeth Ewen has written:

Working class history is shaped by a totality of experiences, including work and home, mothering and child-rearing family relations, community activities, shopping leisure, and recreation--in short, all the details and rhythms of everyday life. [9]

The lives of the women in these families revolved around the maintenance of daily life. They depended on each other to help with child rearing and household tasks, and they provided a safety net for each other when difficulties arose. [10] Hanging wash together and socializing on the rooftops of the tenements as romanticized by John Sloan (Pl. V), playing in the city streets, [11] preparing holiday meals in crowded kitchens that doubled as workshops and bedrooms, or laboring in the garment factories--these were the milieus and activities of these young girls and women.