A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”
[I didn’t really plan it, but
I seem to have started an occasional series of articles on New York City tourist
sites. I’ve written about the High Line
Park, our “park in the sky” (10 October), and Governors Island, a floating park
in New York Harbor (19 November). I’ve
also covered a number of New York peculiarities, including sites that might
interest a visitor, in my collection of shorts called “A Helluva Town” (15
& 18 August 2011, 9 January 2012).
Now I’m going to publish an article on another place in the city that I
think is either unique or nearly so, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a
restored (though not by much) 19th-century apartment building in the part of
downtown Manhattan that has been home to newly-arrived immigrants for two
centuries. One afternoon last April,
when my mom was here for a birthday visit, we rode down to have a look at this
still-new (and, as far as I can tell, relatively unknown) museum of New York
City’s (and America’s) immigration experience.]
97 Orchard Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is an
unprepossessing building. If you walked
down Orchard Street back in 1997 and passed the 6-floor red-brick tenement, you
probably wouldn’t even turn your head, except maybe to have a passing glance in
the windows of the stores on the stoop level or the basement. If you did, you’d notice, perhaps, that the
building was old (after September 1992 there was a plaque identifying it as a
National Historic Landmark and putting its construction date as 1863) and,
except for the shops, empty. It would
have been exactly like many others in LES, buildings built between the middle
of the 19th century and the years between the World Wars, some of them still occupied,
others abandoned and derelict. A haunt
for bargain-hunters—its fabric and notion shops and upholsters have been a
treasury for costume and set designers for decades—and seekers of echt Jewish deli and dairy cuisine aimed
for the neighborhood. I may well have
passed by the building myself back in the late ’70s or early ’80s because aside
from the fabric stores along Orchard Street, it was also home to shops that
custom fit sheets and made and repaired umbrellas. Generally speaking, however, it wasn’t a
tourist area. Little of LES was slated
for gentrification.
In 1984, historian
and social activist Ruth Abram, the first president of the Lower East
Side Tenement Museum, came up with the idea of a museum to focus on the
American immigrant story that would stress tolerance and understanding. Three years later, looking for office space
for her new project, she happened on the largely abandoned building at 97
Orchard Street. Feeling as if she’d come
across a time capsule, the sense that the building had been sealed up with its
history for half a century, Abram knew she’d found a perfect home for her
vision. When the building was opened,
Abram found that everything was exactly the way it had been when the last
landlord sealed it up. It was just like
an urban Pompeii, a pharaoh’s tomb for New York City’s immigrant past.
The first two apartments, the second-floor homes of the
Gumpertzes (1870s) and the Baldizzis (1930s), were opened to the public in
1992. On 19 April 1994, the building was designated a National Historic Landmark
and on 12 November 1998, it was labeled a National Trust Historic Site
associated with the National Park Service.
The Italianate building,
however, is owned and operated by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a non-governmental
agency. The museum serves about 170,000
visitors a year, of whom about 40,000 are students.
Restoration has
been minimal, mostly structural to shore up floors and staircases that were in
danger of collapse from age and neglect, and, as far as the eye is concerned,
stripping away much of the accumulated layers of flooring and wall coverings
down to the oldest level to show what the building was like in its early years. The researchers, preservers, and restorers at
the Lower East Side Tenement Museum included
a demographer, genealogist, historian, urban archeologist, architectural
historian, and wallpaper conservator. Beneath
the layers of wallpaper—as many as 15 or 20 layers—and floor coverings, objects,
notes written on the walls, and other artifacts have been uncovered giving
glimpses into the world of the tenants of 97 Orchard Street. More than 1,500 items, including
kitchen utensils, toys, cosmetics, medicine vials, soda and milk bottles, family
and business papers, letters, newspapers, buttons, coins, fabric scraps, and so
on, were found in the building as it was restored, many under the flooring or
in the mailboxes. The museum conducted
an archaeological dig in the rear yard and historians and genealogists have tracked down the outlines and even many
details of the building’s occupants, examining photographs, diaries, and
letters to reveal the stories of the real people who lived at the tenement over
its 72-year history as an apartment building.
(The most well-known of the tenants at 97 Orchard was Sam Jaffe, the
late actor who played the title role in Gunga
Din in 1939, but whom I’ll always remember from my childhood as Dr. Zorba,
the title character’s boss on the 1961-65 TV series Ben Casey. Jaffe, who was also featured in one of my
favorite moves, the 1951 original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, was born in the building in 1891.)
A tenement, when
97 Orchard Street was built, wasn’t the slum building the word conjures
today. It was simply a word that meant a
building with multiple dwellings rented to “more than three families living
independently of one another and doing their own cooking upon the premises,” as
New York’s Tenement House Act of 1867 defined it. This differentiated it, I suppose, from a
boarding house or a rented room in someone’s home. The original tenement houses, which began to
appear in the 1840s and ’50s, weren’t intended to be slums, though they were
deliberately inexpensively built with few, if any, amenities to keep down costs
and quickly became associated with poor tenants and shoddy conditions. The word became derogatory and newer
accommodations became known as ‘apartment houses’ instead, until that phrase
was seen as ordinary and upscale home seekers began flocking to ‘condos’ and
‘co-ops.’
The building at
97 Orchard Street, valued at about $8,000 when it was erected, was, in fact, nicer than many others
built at around the same time. In fact,
the owner himself, tailor Lukas Glockner, chose to live there, having moved
from St. Mark’s Place in what is now the East Village. There was no indoor plumbing yet, but that
was common in the 1860s; the backyard privies were clean and the stairs, while
narrow and unlit (also common), were well-built. Interior rooms had no windows, but there were
transoms that brought in light from the front and back windows; a later law
required these small windows but the ones at 97 Orchard seem to have been
original construction. The front and
rear windows also let in more air than was usual for mid-19th-century
tenements.
Between its construction by Glockner, a Saxon immigrant who fled the European unrest of 1848, in
the middle of the Civil War and 1935, on the eve of World War II (which began
in Europe in 1939), 97 Orchard Street was home to some 7,000 tenants, mostly
families, from over 20 different countries. (LES wasn’t David Dinkins’s “gorgeous
mosaic”; it was the original melting pot.
Russians, Italians, Germans, Letts, Irish, Poles, and scores of other
nationalities, were all crowded together in the same buildings on the same few
blocks—and they came out Americans as their children and grandchildren moved
on. Later Chinese, Vietnamese,
Caribbeans, Latin Americans occupied these same tenements in a continuing cycle.) Glockner lived on the second floor and rented
the rest of the building out. There are
22 apartments in the building which has five stories above street level,
starting with a stoop level a short flight of stairs up, and a basement whose
separate entrance is a few steps below the sidewalk. The basement originally housed a saloon and
restaurant run by the Schneider family from Bavaria from 1864 to 1886. (The museum has plans to “reopen” Schneider’s
saloon in the future.) Over time, the
building was altered to meet the changing laws of the city and the basement was
converted into two apartments and then into commercial space; the four
stoop-level apartments also became stores; one of the rear units was Professor
Dora Meltzer's Palmistry Studio at the turn of the 20th century (and which the
Tenement Museum may also open to tourists).
When the rest of the building was vacated, these spaces remained
occupied.
There are four
apartments per floor in the building, two in front and two in the rear. Between the two north and two south dwellings
runs the dark, narrow corridor and staircase.
Each apartment has three rooms, a large front room (11 x 12½ feet),
called the living room or parlor, a kitchen, and a tiny bedroom (8½ square
feet). Only the front room gets direct
sunlight and outside air (the rear units looked out over the backyard). The apartments, which typically housed
families of six or seven, cover about 325 square feet. The Confino family who moved onto the fifth floor
in 1913, had ten family members at 97 Orchard Street, the largest family to
live in the tenement. As you might
imagine, sleeping arrangements took some careful and clever maneuvering. There’s no toilet or bathroom—privies were originally
located in the rear yard—and no running water in the apartments. Heat was supplied by the kitchen fireplace,
which burned either coal or wood. (Gas
was piped in later.) Coal-burning stoves,
which may have been the apartment’s source of heat as well, had to be purchased
by the tenants.
Modernizations were made periodically: indoor plumbing was
brought in, but only cold water ran into the apartments—the original meaning of
“cold-water flat”—and there were two toilets on each floor; an airshaft was created
to provide the interior rooms with light and air; gas was installed around 1905
and then electricity sometime in the early 1920s. (Interestingly, an exterior fire escape was
required by an 1862 law, so the tenement was built with one, though the present
structure, a replica of the original, was mounted by the museum in 1997.) These improvements were costly to the landlord,
cutting into his rental profits, and in 1935, instead of continuing the
process, then-owner Gottlieb Helpern, whose family continued to own the
building until 1988, evicted the residents.
The upper floors were closed off and boarded up; only the commercial
shops in the basement and the stoop level remained open. (Even today, with the museum’s renovations,
parts of the upper floors are still closed.)
97 Orchard stayed in that state of suspended animation until 1988 when
the East Side Tenement Museum took control of the premises. Though it slowly deteriorated as unoccupied
buildings tend to, 97 Orchard had in a way become the amber that’s preserved a
glimpse back into the way New York’s immigrants lived in the last third of the
19th and first third of the 20th centuries.
Visitors can only enter 97 Orchard with a tour group and a
guide from the museum. There are three
different way to visit the Tenement Museum: take a tour the building and see
the restored apartments, including period-accurate furnishings, of several
residents from different decades; meet some of the building’s residents
portrayed by costumed “interpreters”; or take a walking tour of the neighborhood and
learn about the Lower East Side and the life of the immigrants that shaped its
culture. (Unfortunately, because of the
limitations of the 150-year-old structure, the building itself isn’t
wheel-chair accessible. The neighborhood
tour, however, is fully accessible to wheelchairs.)
To visit the building, there are six different tours, each
one with a different focus. In “Exploring
97 Orchard Street,” the museum guide takes you behind the scenes to display the
“layers of history” revealed by the building’s many alterations and
improvements. The tour shows how the
restorers stripped away the overlays of paint and wallpapers to find ever-older
appearances of the tenement and how these revelations have been interpreted by “urban
archeologists.” (This tour covers parts
of the first, second, and fourth floors of the tenement. Keep in mind that the first, or stoop, floor
is nine steps above street level.)
“Irish Outsiders” uses period-appropriate objects in the home
(though not original to the family or the building) to tell the story of the
Moores, Irish Catholics on the fourth floor who suffered the malnutrition death
of five-year-old Agnes in 1869. The tour
compares the Moore’s efforts to keep their family healthy with those of the
Katz family, Jewish immigrants from Russia who lived at 97 Orchard in the 1920s
and ’30s.
With “Sweatshop Workers,” visitors experience the lives of
the Levine and Rogarshevsky families on the third floor. At the turn of the 20th century, the Polish
immigrant Levines, who arrived in 1870, ran a dressmaking shop in their home, a
common practice in LES, and Abraham Rogarshevsky, who, with his large family
from Lithuania moved into 97 Orchard in 1901, worked as a presser in a garment workshop
in the first decades of the 20th century.
The Rogarshevskys later changed their name to Rosenthal.
In “Hard Times,” visitors learn how immigrants living at 97
Orchard survived the economic depressions of the era, starting with the
Gumpertz family on the second floor, German Jews whose patriarch, Julius,
disappeared during the Panic (stock market crash) of 1873. He worked cutting heels for Levi’s cobbler
shop nearby and left for work one October morning in 1874 and never came home,
leaving Nathalia, his wife, to work as a dressmaker to support their children. The tour then visits the second-floor apartment
of the Sicilian-Catholic Baldizzi family who lived in the tenement during the
Great Depression of the 1930s. Adolfo
tried to find work as a mason while his wife, Rosaria, did piece work sewing at
home, but like so many in those years, the Baldizzis survived on welfare. Adolfo and Rosaria’s daughter Josephine was
located by museum historians and helped restore the Baldizzis’ apartment.
(The “Hard Times” and “Sweatshop Workers” excursions both
offer an extended, two-hour tour and discussion version. The simple visit is an hour, as is “Irish
Outsiders”; “Exploring 97 Orchard Street” takes 90 minutes. Note that for most of these, there are stairs
to climb—no elevator has been installed in the Tenement Museum—and the
staircase is narrow and quite steep.
Visitors should also be aware that no additional lighting has been
installed, either, so hallways and stairs are also fairly dim.)
To walk the neighborhood, the museum also offers three
alternatives. “Outside the Home” (1½
hours), which doesn’t go into any neighborhood buildings, explores LES the way
immigrants have experienced it for 150 years.
Sites that had significant impact on new Americans include the Jarmulowsky
Bank building, where prospective citizens put their life’s savings, which many lost
when the bank failed in 1914 when German depositors caused a run by withdrawing
their money to send to family at the start of World War I; the Daily Forward building, the socialist-oriented
Yiddish newspaper (now published as a weekly with an English-language edition)
that fought for worker rights; and P.S. 42, the area school that taught
generations of immigrants how to become “American.”
In “Then & Now,” the two-hour tour explores the
district’s history with a focus on why it became such a center of immigrants,
comparing its present day with its past.
(This tour also doesn’t visit any buildings.) For “Foods of the Lower East Side,” visitors must bring not just their
appetites, but their culinary adventurousness.
As the museum describes this two-hour tasting tour, it explores “the
immigrant experience and some of the ways immigrant foods have shaped American
food” by sampling the cuisine of the Ashkenazi Jewish, Chinese, and Afro-Caribbean
newcomers, among several others, who have resided in LES in their turns and are
represented in the neighborhood by the many ethnic restaurants. Tour participants sample about a dozen
different foods at various stops and you learn some of the hidden histories of
common American dishes that have perhaps surprisingly evolved from immigrant
traditions.
On the first floor of 97 Orchard, museum-goers can visit
with “Victoria Confino” in the Meet the Residents program, an hour-long encounter
with the 14-year-old resident of 97 Orchard Street in 1916. Played by a costumed “interpreter,” known in
the museum business as a “first-person character,” Victoria answers questions
from visitors, always remembering the year and her circumstances (or, as we say
in the theater: staying in character),
about her life in LES as an immigrant learning to negotiate her new
environment. The Confinos, Sephardic
Jews from Kastoria, Greece, in the days when it was still part of the Ottoman Empire,
came from comfortable circumstances, but her family became the object of
scrutiny during the Balkan Wars in 1912 and ’13, so they packed up and
emigrated to America in 1913. Victoria,
who grew up speaking Ladino, the Spanish-based vernacular of the Sephardim, has
begun to learn English in her new school, a part of the role the museum
interpreter has to internalize as visitors go back in time to meet her.
The meeting with Victoria Confino requires the visitors to
play roles along with the interpreter.
They are expected to put themselves into the time and place of the young
girl, assuming the roles of new immigrants themselves. (The interpreter won’t answer questions on
topics outside her time period or her age group. Take, for instance, World War I: at her age,
Victoria wouldn’t be likely to know much about it a year before the United
States became involved beyond the fact that the Great War, as it would have
been known then, was being waged in Europe.)
Though it’s the most creatively demanding, Meet the Residents isn’t the
only inter-active visit in the Tenement Museum’s program. All the guides at 97 Orchard Street ask tour
participants questions and prompt them to relate anecdotes from their own histories
or recall things they might have learned in history classes or out of their own
experiences. Objects and artifacts are
often the catalyst for stories or historical details someone might
remember.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is open seven days a
week throughout the year (except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Days)
from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The times of the
different tours vary, so it’s necessary to call in or go on line to plan a
visit (and some tours can be reserved on line in advance). Tours, limited to 15 visitors, are booked and
assembled and tickets are purchased at the Visitor Center at 103 Orchard
Street, a few doors north at the corner of Delancey, which also houses the
Museum Shop (providing many books on the subject of LES and immigration, among
other pertinent topics) and the
newly-opened Sadie Samuelson Levy
Immigrant Heritage Center.
The Heritage Center hosts readings, lectures, panel discussions, films,
and other presentations. Tickets for
most tours are $22 ($17 for students and seniors); the “Foods of the Lower East
Side” tour costs $45 ($40 for students and seniors). The museum offers memberships that provide
deeper discounts as well. There are also
educational programs, including both actual tours and virtual tours, geared to
students and school groups for ages 8 to 18.
There are also resources for teachers, and the website lists books and
other sources for research and reading.
The museum is accessible by bus and subway (and many of the
sightseeing buses stop at the museum, though street parking in LES is difficult
and limited as the streets are narrow and it’s still a busy shopping area. There are lots and garages, some of which
offer free or discounted parking for museum visitors with validation.) Keep in mind, as I said, that the building tours
are not wheelchair accessible. Some of
the outdoor tours offer indoor alternatives for inclement weather and there are
also alternative and supplemental arrangements to accommodate visitors with
physical limitations such as blindness or deafness. A good
place to start exploring this interesting museum is on its website, http://www.tenement.org, which has links to
specific information about the museum and the programs, including advice on
group tours and other special arrangements that are available; the National Park
Service (which doesn’t operate the museum), has a Tenement Museum site as well:
http://www.nps.gov/loea/index.htm. The general information phone number is (212)
982-8420 and the general e-mail address is lestm@tenement.org.
[I must add that one visit to
the Tenement Museum isn’t enough to get a real impression of what surprises it
holds. Since you have to visit the
building with a guide, the operators have planned several different tours, each
with a slightly different perspective.
You get a different narrative with each visit and a different view of
the immigrant experience in lower Manhattan is revealed.
[I’ll also point out that
this isn’t the first museum about which I’ve written on ROT, though it is the first in New York City (not counting the brief
description of The Cloisters I included in the first installment of “A Helluva
Town”). On 25 March 2010, I described a trip to the International Spy Museum in
Washington, D.C., in “Spook Museum.” There
was a private aspect to that visit, as you’ll see if you read the report, but
even outside of that, it’s a potentially more exciting experience than is the
Tenement Museum. Not less revealing or
instructive, just more lively. One
important difference, though, is that the Tenement Museum is about the way
people connected to many of us lived—my dad’s parents and grandparents, for
instance. (My grandparents and
great-grandparents didn’t live in LES—they went up to Massachusetts to join
other family members—but they did come through Ellis Island and eventually
lived in similar neighborhoods in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx.) Not many of us know people engaged in the
life displayed at the Spy Museum. Well,
I do—but you probably don’t. (I’d tell
you more, but then . . . well, you know how that goes!)
[I’d
also like to note that the life of 97 Orchard Street is almost precisely the
same as the heyday of Yiddish Theater (which I recount in “National Yiddish
Theatre – Folksbiene,” Parts 1 and 2, 23 and 26 August), many of whose patrons
lived in this very neighborhood. Many
different waves of émigrés lived on the Lower East Side and the flavors,
smells, and sounds changed accordingly, but in the era of the Tenement Museum, it
was largely Ashkenazi Jewish, German and East European, and Italian. Unsurprisingly, there was an émigré theater
and entertainment scene that represented each national and language
community. (See also my report “Farfariello”
on 6 June for a glimpse at an Italian-American performance form that was
popular at the same time.)
[And
since ROT is
ostensibly a theater blog, I’d like to point out an interesting article about
the “living history” interpreters, the “first-person characters” like those
portraying Victoria Confino at the Tenement Museum: Nahma Sandrow’s “The Actors Who Make History Live” in the New York Times on 30 December 2001 (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/30/arts/the-year-in-review-theater-the-actors-who-make-history-live.html; originally in the Arts & Leisure
section). Though Sandrow introduces the
article with a depiction of an encounter with Victoria, she covers many similar
living history programs like Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg.]
