The Peopling of New York 2011

Prior to entering the Tenement Museum, I devourer a McDonald’s “Big Mac” and a medium-sized fries, in hoping to satisfy my appetite and to give me a burst of energy to stay awake during the tour, which I assumed to be like any other tour, dull and cliche.  On arriving on the corner of the intersection of Orchard Street and Delancey Street, I saw the building I assumed was the Tenement Museum and seeing it under construction did not aid to my expectations; I was disappointed and for that reason did I decided to buy something eat.  Despite the trip’s initial impressions, not once did I doze off nor diverged during the tour’s presentation.  Surprisingly, I believed I was living vicariously through another immigrant, who had just arrived during the early 1900’s.  The actress playing as Victoria Castoria, who I assume was a fictional character served only for the purpose of emulating the life of an immigrant during the 1900’s, was completely believable.  Unwittingly, I volunteered to play as the father of a German family of ten and found the experience of conversing with the fake Victoria ridiculously satisfying, engaging and didactic.  I truly believed I was a father of ten by the time she asked me what job I previously had in Germany.   What I learned from the introductory lesson affirmed what I was taught when I was studying American History in High School but walking through those dark, narrow hallways and listening to Victoria as she describes her hardships as the only female in the family as I sit in the cramp, archaic room reinforced my understanding and perspective of life as an immigrant during the 1900’s.  Overall, the tour was enlightening, interactive, and surprisingly not soporific; it was not what I expected.

-Jason Zheng

I didn’t know what to expect when Professor Berger announced we were going to the Tenement Museum the week before last. The only thing I knew about the museum before we stepped foot in the building was that a friend’s ex-girlfriend had fainted upon going a couple years prior. True, I never found out why she fainted, but it seemed I was destined to have an interesting experience.

Browsing through the Visitor’s Center the day of, it was still hard to really get a preview of what was to come; how do hats with animal faces pertain to the cramped and squalid conditions of the early 1900’s? I couldn’t find a connection to my idea of a tenement in practically any of the items for sale in the shop. Regardless, I bought three (unrelated) postcards for a dollar, then followed behind the group and into the actual building.

It was very interesting to sit in a building that once housed hundreds of people, all from different countries, lifestyles, and religious backgrounds. (According to a placard on the street level, that particular block had approximately 2,350 people living in about 2.5 acres of land at the beginning of the 20th century.) As our guide went more in depth about the historical aspects of the building and the time period surrounding its peak, I felt almost squeamish. The thought of sharing a cramped three-room apartment with nine other people is something I would likely never be able to suffer through.

I was very excited to find out we would be role-playing to find out more about the actual experience of living in a early 1900’s tenement. As the mother of a German and Jewish household, I was more or less entrusted with the direction of my many children. We ascended the stairs, siphoned into a hallway no more than two feet in width, and waited as our guide knocked on Victoria Confino’s door.

The actress who played Victoria seemed incredibly skittish at our arrival, only allowing us in after a talk with our guide. My husband and I led our children into the cramped living space of the Confino family, where we talked about many general things, like “wanting to shower after being on a boat for three weeks,” “where to send the children to school,” “where the nearest places of worship were,” etc. It seemed far more effective to actually experience the conditions of a tenement than to just learn about it in a classroom, as I had previously done. I think the talk we had with Victoria was a lot more enlightening than other teaching techniques I’d encountered, and I only wish we could have visited more apartments.

Upon leaving, I thought a lot about the kind of things our generation takes for granted. I don’t mean to sound preachy, but I don’t think any one in this class has had to live in that kind of dwelling for an extended period of time. The “agitator” was considered a marvel to the people of that era, while I complain that I have to pay $1.25 to have my clothes washed automatically. I would like to return to the museum again in the future in hopes of learning more about the lives of the people that lived there, as our group didn’t ask anything about Victoria’s hopes and dreams. It was a great experience, and I would definitely recommend it to my friends.

Before the trip, I always thought the Tenement Museum was a museum like any other; I would walk around a building and learn from studying pictures and memorabilia from that generation. However, I was pleasantly surprised when the experience turned out to be so interactive. The introductory lesson in what a tenement actually is, what it looks like, and what it feels like, was interesting and informative. From reading How the Other Half Lives, I thought I had a good idea of what a tenement was like but actually being in one made this image even clearer.

Role-playing with the actress in the tenement was a fun and enlightening part of the tour (I was the father of the German family). If we had just walked through the tenement and looked at the apartments, we would have gotten to see what it looks like. However, by sitting in the apartment for so long and listening to the child immigrant’s story, I feel like I now have a more comprehensive view of what tenement life was like. Overall, going on this trip was interesting, fun, and enlightening. Although I will probably not return to the museum because there is not much more to see, the neighborhood in which the museum was located in is definitely worth a return to get a better idea of the old NYC architecture.

-Nicholas Macaluso

The visit to the tenement museum was enlightening. First, the actress was excellent. And then, there was the real image, a snapshot of how life for immigrants was then, projected through the tenement itself. I did not expect that the museum, as Thalia said in her post, has no exhibition at all but was actually a restored room with a role-playing interaction and an informative session beforehand. It was fun to be put in the shoes of an immigrant family, but sad at the same time, after realizing the incredible difficulties immigrants might have faced back then. Being an immigrant myself, I am relieved that things for me are much better than it used to be. The experience obtained in this visit was much more vivid that it have could been, were the museum made up of exhibitions instead. In fact, before the visit, I imagined myself bored at walking through some place with pictures of immigrants and some of their objects. To my surprise, it was a completely different exposition. Victoria’s life shocked me as much as the apartment itself, with its narrow and dirty-looking hallway and the claustrophobic impression of the room with 10 people in it.  I even felt for a moment that I was indeed talking to some real Victoria rather than to an actress, and imagined with realistic depictions her arduous life in that cramped room. I also felt uneasy about having to move to an outside place to take a shower, or not being able to shower everyday because of lack of money.  The only real problem with the museum, or I had rather say its shortcoming, is the limited interaction (shortness) and few things to see. Otherwise, it was ingenious what they offered.

The Tenement Museum was small, and unlike any museum I have been to before, lacked exhibits or even pretensions of exhibits.  But the information the Tenement Museum wants to present, they adequately do, through authentic-seeming depictions of immigrant life in a genuinely authentic setting.  Being allowed to walk through the tiny hallways and squeeze into the minuscule apartments that tenements really did live in, (although we were not supposed to touch) gave us a much better sense of immigrant life than a roped-off, to-scale model of a tenement apartment.

The simulation that we went through, however, was equally informative if less real-seeming.  The actress playing Victoria Castoria genuinely drew pathos from us, at least from me.  I was at once guilty for having burst in on her private dwelling, devastated that she could not go to school any longer, and grateful that I had met such a nice friend in the neighborhood, forgetting that she was probably in her mid-twenties and did not live in the Tenement Museum.  On my side, I felt a little ridiculous posing as an insecure German, Ashkenazy Jew immigrant, responding “ja!” to her questions in an effort to play-act.  But even though my own immigrant-scenario did not seem believable to me, I was still in a total panic, realizing how unprepared my family WOULD be if we moved to another country, especially when we didn’t know anyone in America and had formerly been farmers who would have to suddenly work in a city.

Most of my worries were the results of improvisations when we interacted with the fake Victoria Castoria, but they suddenly took on tangible weight.  The Tenement Museum’s greatest strength is the authentic scenario it creates, without the help of the artifacts and signposts present in other museums.