[Last 19 December, I
published “Lower East Side Tenement Museum” on ROT, a report on
the unusual museum of the immigrant experience here in New York City and across
the country from the middle of the 19th century through the pre-World War II
years of the 20th. On 8 February, the New
York Times ran an exhibition review by
Edward Rothstein of LESTM in the “Weekend Arts II” section. I’m republishing the article below as a follow-up and supplement to my original
report because Rothstein not only adds some additional information about the
museum and the era it covers, but he reports on a new installation (which I
noted was in the planning at the time I posted “Lower East
Side Tenement Museum”). As Rothstein intimates, LESTM is
an extraordinary experience, and I still strongly recommend making a visit to
97 Orchard Street. (My original article
includes information about arranging a visit, buying tickets, and getting there,
including phone numbers and websites.)]
Something
exciting happens in a museum when its objects and displays take on a life of
their own, when they seem almost too large, too various or too unruly for
scripted roles or predicted places. Sometimes this happens because they are
seen with new eyes or because they are understood in new contexts; sometimes it
is because they possess an aesthetic grandeur that resists any interpretive
grid.
But at the Lower
East Side Tenement Museum, which has begun a major new venture in its remarkable
excavations of New York’s past, it happens because the themes explored are
actually too ordinary. They are mundane and usually go unnoticed, yet as
uncovered here they cannot be easily contained, nor will they fit into some
ready form, which may be part of the point.
It is daily life
we are asked to imagine here, in all its plainness and struggle, its dirt,
noise and passions. It is also a daily life of the past—really of a series of
pasts. And the main theme is as vital now as at earlier moments: immigration.
And how is this
accomplished? What is the focus of this excavation? In a word: shops. Half of
this new installation, “Shop Life,” is a lovingly detailed re-creation of the
kind of German saloon that the immigrants John and Caroline Schneider opened in
1864 in the same spot we see it: the basement of the tenement at 97 Orchard
Street. The neighborhood was then called Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), and
New York had the third-largest German-speaking populace in the world (after
Vienna and Berlin). There are brass musical instruments on shelves (John played
in a Union Army regiment), beer steins ready for the opening of a keg, plates
heaped with ersatz sausages and cheeses. (Food came with the purchase of
lager.)
The method of
recreating a historical space based on city records, the Census and found
artifacts has already been used upstairs in the living quarters of 97 Orchard,
where some 7,000 people from more than 20 countries lived, at one time or
another, from 1863 until 1935. The Tenement Museum, founded in 1988 by Ruth J.
Abram, purchased the building in 1996 and was prepared to create model
apartments based on different periods of immigration
But records about
residents were so extensive, and the details so suggestive, that there was no
need to invent anything. The actual history could be excavated. Now about
200,000 visitors a year take guided tours of many of these 350-square-foot
apartments, restored to reflect the lives of tenants at different times.
In one, in 1897,
Harris Levine ran a small dressmaking factory, where he and his wife, Jennie,
reared their family. Other tours visit the 1869 rooms of an Irish family, the
Moores, whose infant daughter died of malnutrition, and an Italian family, the
Baldizzis, whose daughter helped the museum recreate the apartment of her 1930s
childhood. Some apartments were kept as “ruins,” showing how their peeling
layers of paint and wallpaper were interpreted. And there are plans to tell the
stories of the neighborhood’s more recent Chinese and Hispanic immigrants,
perhaps in an adjacent building.
But now the
museum has done something more elaborate, overseen by its vice president for
programs and education, Annie Polland. A sequence of about 30 shops had been in
the basement between 1863 and 1988. One of these was restored—the
saloon—including a room where, in the 1870s, German patrons might have gathered
for meetings of immigrant fraternal associations, a small kitchen where
Caroline prepared the saloon’s food, and the couple’s bedroom with windows
looking out on the privies serving the 83 residents of the five-story tenement.
The saloon was
more than just a business (and there were at least three others on the block).
It was a meeting place, even a living space outside of the cramped three-room
apartments. Politics was debated. Families were welcomed. And in 1870 some of
the 29 or so children living upstairs must have been expert carriers of metal
growlers filled with lager.
The re-creation
also conveys a sense of the Schneiders themselves, teased out of newspapers (in
The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung in 1864 John announced the saloon’s opening “to
his fine friends and acquaintances as well as the honorable musicians”), city
records (John had been living in New York for 22 of his 34 years) and other
documents. (Caroline died of tuberculosis in 1885; John died in 1892 in a
public hospital.) Through the narrative we sense the ambitions, the community
ties and the precarious positions behind the saloon’s public face.
In the other half
of the basement space the museum does something quite different. First it shows
a room in its half-ruined state. A cabinet contains the few items that digging
had uncovered: a shattered beer stein from the saloon era and cosmetics from a
1920s store. There is also a large red leather-bound book: “Solution for Retail
Merchandising Problems.” Its credited author, Max Marcus, was a proprietor of
an auction house here during the Depression. Inside, the book is hollow, hiding
a bottle of Ambassador Scotch.
Max turns out to
be one of the characters introduced in the final gallery, which uses high-tech
video-display tables to survey the lives of three storekeepers who used the
space. Max (shown in that very room in the 1930s) was the kind of spirited
entrepreneur who might have found a solution for merchandising problems by
buying someone a drink. And these well-executed light tables also tell the
story of the butcher and his family from the turn of the last century, and the
underwear salesman from the 1960s, whose family gave the museum photos and
samples. Additional videos of current store owners in the area, including one
from the Dominican Republic, echo a hundred years of immigrant narratives.
In all, such care
is taken with the setting, the artifacts, the interpretation and the guides’
interaction with visitors that we begin to feel, as in fine novels, plays and
histories, some understanding of these individuals and their relationships to
the larger theme.
This connection
is also worth examining more closely. The museum declares that its purpose is
to “promote tolerance and historical perspective” by presenting a “variety of
immigrant and migrant experiences.” But initially Ms. Abram seemed to have a
more polemical perspective, drawing on 20th-century working-class histories and
their theories of exploitation. In 1999 the museum organized the International
Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, which included the Tenement
Museum; the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa; the Gulag Museum at
Perm 36 in Perm, Russia; the Terezin Memorial in the Czech Republic; and
others. The coalition’s mission is “to help sites the world over inspire
visitors to become actively engaged in issues from slavery to poverty.”
This suggests
that the Tenement Museum was partly conceived to demonstrate a series of
injustices that should trouble contemporary consciences. But even by looking at
the most horrific of tenements (which 97 Orchard clearly was not) the implied
comparison to some of these institutions is grossly disproportionate.
Much of that
polemical spirit has been shed. But even now there is sometimes an edge, as if
we were being offered a lesson that we should be more welcoming and tolerant of
contemporary immigrants.
But is that
really an issue? There may always be some resentments of newcomers. But the
passionate contemporary debates are not about immigration but about how to deal
with large-scale violations of immigration law that dwarf earlier examples. As
for legal immigration, since 2000 both the number of immigrants admitted to the
United States and the number naturalized are stunningly greater than during any
other period. The country is not wary of immigrants; it is welcoming them at an
astonishing rate.
As far as the
museum experience is concerned, though, this doesn’t really matter. Its
imposing achievement in these new shop installations, and in at least two
tenement tours I have taken, is that the daily lives become far more important
than any arguments. Historical understanding is found in the details. And amid
the travails, sweat and sorrows, we find the continuing pulse of aspiration.
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