From guest blogger, Andrea Widburg, of Andi’s Answers
Have you ever been to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York? It is, in my opinion, the best museum New York has to offer. All the other New York museums — the Met, Frick, Museum of Natural History, MOMA, etc. — are sort of generic. By that, I mean that, while they’re great museums, you can find their like in every major world city. The Tenement Museum, however, is something entirely different, since it’s a time capsule of a unique moment in American immigrant history.
The museum occupies an old tenement in the Lower East Side that was built in 1867 and that was continuously inhabited through the early 1930s. It was then sealed up, where it remained as an unlikely time capsule to be explored decades later.
New York’s Lower East Side, of course, is the first neighborhood through which the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe streamed at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. During the museum’s heyday, when it was a functioning tenement building, the Lower East Side was more densely packed than Calcutta.
The museum is a staggering testament to the human ability to adapt and survive. Each apartment in the building is roughly the shape and size of a full size school bus (although slightly shorter and wider). The apartments were divided into three parts: a front room, a kitchen, and a back bedroom. As originally built, only the front rooms had windows. In the 1890s, however, the building was remodeled to add a cut-out between the kitchen and the front room, to allow some natural light into the kitchen. The back bedroom had no natural light at all.
What’s almost inconceivable is that these teeny, dark apartments usually housed an average family of six or eight people. Indeed, if the family was really strapped, the six or eight family members would live and sleep in the two front rooms, with a paying lodger getting the privacy of the back bedroom. During the day, while the kids were at school (or, often, working) the same apartments would be used as sweat shops where up to twelve people would cram into the two front rooms to make clothes.
There were four units to a floor. When the building was first build, there was no plumbing, although a single toilet was eventually added on each floor. In other words, during a busy work day, one could have a potential daily toilet load of forty-eight people per floor.
When we visited the museum, it was your average hot New York summer day, with the temperature around 92 degrees and the humidity correspondingly high. The building’s interior was sweltering, and the kids, comfortably attired in shorts and t-shirts, instantly set up a round of complaining about how hot they were. They fell silent, though, when they learned that the building’s original tenants would have been wearing the neck to ankle clothes of times’ past, and that they would not even have had the benefit of the rickety fan the museum had installed to provide some cross-ventilation for weary visitors.
I’ve been to so many museums in America and Europe, including a broad variety of wonderful, non-traditional museums. None has ever struck me the way this one did. Although the rooms are oppressive and depressing, they are also a stirring testament to the hearty spirit of those who came to this country. These immigrants managed, not only to live under such conditions, but to do well enough economically that their children did not have to repeat the experience. I know this because census data shows that, almost without exception, the children who grew up in these slums managed to move to the suburbs and to take their parents with them. Whether these immigrants were Russian, Polish or Italian, Jewish, Protestant or Catholic, they catapulted themselves out of these appalling circumstances and went on to live the American dream. It was, therefore, a very inspiring day’s visit for our whole family.
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