Tenement Museum

I just got back from a trip to New York City and while we were there I visited a really great house museum called the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The building was erected in the 1860s and was home to an estimated 7,000 people between then and the 1930s. At any one time this single address housed around 20 families.

I went on the "Getting by Tour" which took us to the apartments of the German-Jewish Gumpertz family who lived at the address in the 1870s and the Sicilian-Catholic Baldizzi family who were there in the 1930s. Each of the apartments were around 300 square feet and had a small bedroom, a kitchen area and a small living room. Of course due to the size of the apartments all of the these rooms doubled as living, dining and work spaces. There were outhouses in the back yard for the 20 families until the early 1900s when they received indoor pluming. After that each floor had two bathrooms to share between the 4 apartments on each floor. In the early 20th century they ran electricity to the tenement building.

Much of the information known about the Gumpertz family was taken from historical documentation. They showed us pictures of the family members as well as census records and citizenship papers and used these documents to tell the story. As for the second apartment (pictured here), the museum was able to contact a member of the Baldizzi family that lived in the tenement as a young girl. They have around 15 hours of oral history interviews with her and she played a major part in helping reconstruct the apartment as she remembered it for the museum. They played a few minutes of the oral history recording for us where she describes her mother and some of her daily activities.

At the end of the tour they took us into what they call the "Ruin Room" which is an apartment left exactly as the museum found it in 1988. The guide wrapped up the tour by talking about current immigration in the city. I asked if there had been any archaeology done at the museum. The guide said that archaeologists had excavated the backyard and had found the privy and they are currently excavating the cellar area. As you can imagine they found a tremendous amount of domestic material but beyond that the guide couldn't give me too many details.

For me this museum was so interesting because it wasn't about one time period or one group of people. It was about the urban immigration experience as a whole. It managed to tie so many different types of people together but also kept it personal and relevant to the present. If you're in NYC I recommend a visit. Don't forget to ask about the archaeology!

For more information on the museum check out their website: http://www.tenement.org/index.htm