Visiting the Tenement Museum was an interesting experience because we’ve always had an image in our minds of how early 20^th century immigrants lived.  We had previous knowledge from books we’ve read, like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, and from our American History classes.  This trip was enlightening because we were able to compare our predisposed notions to the reality of the actual apartments.

The Tenement Museum is an unorthodox museum in most ways.  First of all, it’s not set up like an actual museum.  Rather, it has a gift shop through which you enter, which is where we met with our tour guide, and she took us through into the preserved tenement apartment building it’s attached to.  Inside, we toured through the actual apartments, which are furnished with genuine artifacts from the 1900s to the 1910s.  Going from one apartment to the next brought us to a different time period, so we were able to compare how drastically living conditions changed from then to now.

Generally, our ideas of what living conditions in tenements were like were accurate.  However, there were certain aspects of the lifestyle that caught us by surprise.  For example, we did not picture anyone actually setting up workshops for garment production in their own homes.  These apartments are barely large enough to live in, much less hold workers, materials, and fabrics.  Such working conditions were most common when factories had not yet sprung up.  Up to three people would be sleeping on one couch, a crib would be sitting in the kitchen corner, and there would be no room for kitchen tables to eat at.

Eastern European Jews frequented these apartments in the early 20^th century, so it occurred to Ellie that if she had been born 80 years earlier, those living conditions would have been her own.  That put the whole experience into perspective for Ellie, and made it more personal.  She really enjoyed the interactive nature of the tour, and the fact that she knew the personal histories of the actual families that lived in the apartments.  It made envisioning the past much easier.

Adrianna is of Polish descent. She could relate to the inhabitants of the tenement because she is also Eastern European, although her ancestors were not persecuted and forced to leave their home country because of her religion, Roman Catholicism. Instead, she can relate to the inhabitants because other factors such as economic prosperity encouraged other Eastern Europeans to move to New York City. Eastern European Jews and Italians were not the only people who lived in tenements that were similar to the Tenement Museum—other nationalities lived in the neighborhood too. Like Ellie, if she had been born in Poland and moved with her family in the 1900s then she too would have lived in a small cramped tenement, and most likely with more than three other people like she does now. She imagines she would have to work to help her parents bring food to the table and resign from school.