 The
Tenement Museum – A Museum Celebrating the Immigrant ExperienceIt
is no coincidence that New York City is home to a museum honoring
the immigrant. Ever since the 19th century, immigrants from all over
the world and their families have been inhabiting this colorful
city. It is where they have come to seek the American dream.
Created in 1998, the Tenement Museum stands as a tribute to the
urban, working class immigrant. Located at 97 Orchard Street, or the
Lower East Side, as it is known to New Yorkers it was home to 7,000
people from over 20 nations between 1863 and 1935. Today the museum
lists fourteen hundred of these people by name.
 Built
in 1863, the tenement building has five floors with four apartments
on each floor. Each apartment of about 325 feet in turn consists of
three rooms: a front room, a bedroom, and a kitchen.
By 1905 the building had running water. At approximately the same
time indoor toilets were also installed: two on each floor.
The building was shut down in 1935, evicting all residents and it
was not until 50 years later that historian Ruth Abram decided to
give it new life. In 1988 the first photographs were exhibited.
These photographs soon came to life, as researchers started
gathering information about the people who had inhabited the
building and soon their lives were reconstructed.
Today, visitors can get an actual feeling of what an immigrant’s
life was like a few generations ago. You can almost feel the
presence of some of the tenants, like the Gumpertzes, for example.
In 1874, Julius Gumpertz left his wife and daughters, never to
return. His wife, Nathalie was not deterred by circumstances;
instead she started her own seamstress business in the kitchen of
the small apartment. The visitor can almost feel her vitality in the
neat and yet colorful kitchen where she kept her family together.
The Baldizzi apartment is also full of life. Adolpho and Rosaria
Baldizzi, immigrants from Sicily lived here with their two children
until they were evicted in 1935. Struggling to find work and to feed
their family, they nevertheless had a portrait of President
Roosevelt as to testify to their optimism in the future of their
adopted land. Josephine Baldizzi Esposito, their daughter, gave the
museum’s organizers invaluable first-hand information as to what
life was like in the building. Although she died in 1998, at the end
of the tour, visitors can hear her voice through a loudspeaker in
the kitchen: “Cleanliness was very important to my mother. She would
stand up all night polishing pots…and then she’d turn on the radio
and listen to Italian soap operas, and I remember my mother crying,
because she missed her family in Sicily. She had left them to come
to America. She never saw her mother or father again.”
In 1998 the Lower East Side Tenement Museum became a National
Historic Area by an act of Congress. Its founder, Ruth Abram says:
“I wanted to create a national conversation among Americans. Most of
us are descendants of working-class immigrants, and we hold our
forebears in high regard. But we might not relate to the newest wave
of immigrants or realize how similar their experience is to our own
families’. I thought that if I could bring Americans home to meet
their own ancestors before they were ‘acceptable’ or economically
comfortable, I could build that understanding.”
Official Site of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum
www.tenement.org
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