The Tenement Museum tour was eye-opening to say the least. I have read and learned about the conditions many immigrants lived in, but never did I have a chance to experience it first hand. Growing up and living in an apartment all of my life, I am no stranger to a crowded living room or a line to use the bathroom; there were many times during the past eighteen years when I would ask my parents about moving into a house or trying to convince them to move into a bigger space and leave the apartment for me. The few hours between me getting home from school and my father arriving home from works were my personal time with the couch in the living room where I could watch Sports Center uninterrupted. Visiting the Tenement Museum, however, made those complaints and desires seem very irrelevant. Seeing how I could have been sharing a sofa with two other people, all three of us leaning our legs on kitchen chairs to maximize the amount of space available, made me appreciate very much my own bed that I don’t have to share with anyone. Additionally, I found that I could compare my own summer job to how it would be like to work in one of these tenements during the summer. When the class visited the museum, it was around a chilly forty degrees outside and it still managed to be somewhat stuffy inside the museum apartment. During the summer, when temperatures peak a hundred degrees, I am usually working in a restaurant kitchen, where even though many open windows and fans provide cool breezes, one will work up a decent sweat after scurrying around for ten to fifteen minutes. I could not imagine, however, working and living my entire day in such conditions, outdoor heat accompanied by the indoor heat of burning furnaces and stoves, and the constant stench of sweat mixed with carcinogenic coal fumes fueling me through the day. Thinking about how many families had to live and work in such conditions constantly amazes me.

Besides all of the setbacks of living in a tenement household, there were defiantly several perks that came from living in communities where this form of housing was abundant. Ingenuity was a necessity for making it from day to day under such conditions, and people strongly believed in a hard days work as a means to make ends meet, two things that are losing face in today’s society. Additionally, a lot of families in a given tenement shared similar cultural, religious or ethnic backgrounds, giving the living space an air of community and unity. For example, the tenement museum, when inhabited, was home to Jewish residents, many who worked for Jewish employers or who themselves employed Jewish workers. Here, the Yiddish language was preserved and Sabbath was celebrated every Saturday when work allowed so. Families were also very close knit and were humbled by their circumstances. Out of all this, many stories of families, whether several years down the line or several generations down the line, one day reaching the “American Dream” and moving out of the dense city areas show that even though living conditions were harsh, they were overcome by their residents’ strong will and determination and were a form of catalyst for families to work towards finding a more comfortable place to live.