Capturing New York’s Immigrant History

Capturing New York’s Immigrant History
Manhattan’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum
By Sade Ortuzar

More than 100 years ago, immigrants moving to a New York City apartment would have lived in a small space, sharing a bathroom and other amenities with their neighbors. In those days when people lived in such close proximity to each other, the transmission of different diseases was rampant. Today, the Tenement Museum, located at 97 Orchard Street in the Bowery section, invites visitors to step inside to see recreations of what life was like for many immigrants. Even though the Tenement Museum was founded by Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson in 1988, its first restored apartment exhibit opened in the early 1990s, blossoming from an idea to a thriving institution with a mission “to promote tolerance through the presentation and interpretation of the variety of immigrant experiences on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.”
Abram and Jacobson wanted to open a museum that would honor America’s immigrants. The idea behind the formation of the museum was to pay tribute to the men, women, and children who settled America’s cities and deserved recognition as urban pioneers. Abram said that her idea came to fruition when she came across several of Manhattan’s Lower East Side tenements. While striving to bring the idea to reality, she worked with Jacobson for three years and together they joined with several others who were restoring the Eldridge Street Synagogue and stumbled on a building that was a tenement that was sealed since 1935 and which housed close to 1,000 working class immigrants from Ireland, Poland, and other European countries. In Mar 1988, the museum received its charter and the founders’ goal then was to purchase and restore the 97 Orchard Street property as a museum.
Visitors, on a walking tour around six restored apartments, learn about the experiences of immigrants to the United States who lived in the 1800s, and hear stories of the struggles that many faced during the 19th and early 20th centuries. While some rooms are empty and a few rooms consist of actors playing roles as immigrants who lived in the apartment and the single bathroom the immigrants once shared. A film is sometimes shown describing how many lived.
While on display are some photographs, which show that the apartments are small with very little space, the museum prefers to credit the people featured in the photographs and before mounting them, makes every effort to contact the descendants of those mentioned for permission to publicize their relatives’ images. Many of the personal items that belonged to the immigrants who lived at the tenement are also on display. The museum also shows how hard many immigrants worked, some worked in their apartments, while others worked in factories.
Kate Stober, the museum’s public relations manager, said that while she enjoys working at the museum, she is also learning about the life of immigrants. Her hope is that the museum would continue to encourage visitors to be open-minded about the history of ordinary people, especially connecting with the type of lives that immigrants faced. Immigrants featured in the museum, she said, tell a story of "who we are as Americans."