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. Then people lived in proximity disease were remit. Now you can step inside a museum where all of that had occurred. The tenement museum located at 97 Orchard Street was founded in 1988 but its first restored apartment exhibits opened in the early 1990s. It blossomed from an idea to a thriving institution.
Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson was the founder of the Tenement Museum. They 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 deserve recognition as urban pioneers. The idea becomes an institution when Abram came across the lower east side tenements. The Lower East Side is associated in the publics mind with immigrants. During the formation of the tenement museum, she worked with Jacobson for three years and joined with people who were restoring the Eldridge Street Synagogue. Jacobson stumbled upon the tenement museum that was sealed since 1935, and in March of 1988, the museum received its charter. Their goal was to purchase and restore 97 Orchard Street.
At the Tenement Museum, visitors take a tour around the museum learning about the experience of immigrants from the 1800s. The Tenement Museum was once a home of about 10000 working class immigrants from Ireland, Poland, and other European countries.
The museum tells stories of the struggles that immigrants faced during the 19th and early 20th centuries by visitors taking a tour around the six restored apartments that immigrants once lived in. Some rooms are empty and a few rooms consist of an actress playing a role of an immigrant who lived at that apartment. A film is sometimes shown to visitors showing how immigrants lived and their history. The museum shows one bathroom, in which the immigrants once used. The apartments are small with no spacing and some photographs are on displayed. To use a few photographs, workers from Tenement Museum will have to contact the family of the person in the photograph. Some items that belonged to immigrants that lived at the tenement are on display. The museum shows how hard the immigrants worked. Some of them worked in their apartment while many of them worked in factories.The P.R. manager Kate Stober enjoys working at the museum learning about the life of immigrants. Stober hopes that it promotes people to be open-minded about history of everyday people. She hopes that people can connect with the lives that immigrants faced. She says that immigrants in the museum tell a story of " who we are as Americans." The mission of the museum is “ to promote tolerance through the presentation and interpretation of the variety of immigrant experiences on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.”
