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.

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.

Having visited the Tenement Museum in lower Manhattan, we were exposed to the life that many immigrant families, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, experienced when they first arrived in New York through Ellis Island. All these immigrant families shared a common idea: to take advantage in the “Land of Opportunities”. The immigrant families envisioned America to provide them with all the tools necessary to live a happy life. But was this assumption rational or just wistful thinking on part of the immigrants? A brief visual tour of one of the tenements on 97 Orchard Street gave us the answer. Noisy street vendors and non-stop pedestrians on the black and white pictures along with our guide’s story telling describe the neighborhood livelier than texts do.

The actual tenement museum was a few houses down the road from the visitor center. This clever arrangement took us back in time to the past Orchard Street where many ancestors of current New Yorkers lived in. The entrance to the building was very narrow, thus we had a hard time getting through. The first thing we noticed was the compact space and dim lighting. Another astute observation we made was that everything was made of wood — this was quite hazardous in the event of a fire. Moving up the creaking staircases, we encountered the first room where the apartment suite was not entirely restored. In this suite, the interior was left purposely untouched to give visitors the atmosphere of that time period. Jacob Riis, a muckraker, described the living conditions of immigrant families in tenements in hopes to bring about social reform. In his book, Where the Other Half Lives, he described that a single room contained 6-7 members of one family.

In particular, we noticed sweatshops in each of the apartments. The immigrants worked long, laborious hours trying to make as much clothing as possible because they were paid per piece and not per hour. Imagine the atmosphere of the room while they worked and the sweat pouring over their brows as they sewed the cloth together. They probably did not waste a single second of their working hours doing anything else besides concentrating on the clothes. It was shocking how wealthier people even detested the clothing because they considered the immigrants dregs of society and did not want these immigrants handling their clothes.

The entire family worked for countless hours everyday, slept in cramped spaces every night, lived with caution because of a vulnerability to fire, and dreamed of a better life for their children. Yet, their traditions lived on their culture thrived in their hearts throughout the hardships and tribulations. These people must be acknowledged for what they have been through and what they experienced. The heart of the immigrant lives on, even today.

During the mid-1800 to the early 20^th century, waves of immigrants flooded into the urban areas of New York City. One of the most popular of these areas was Manhattan’s lower east side, where the Tenement Museum now stands.  Last week, we were able to visit this historic neighborhood site to witness the wretched living conditions that European immigrants had to survive through.

Modern-day observers associate tenements with slums or ghettos. While not as bad as living on the streets, we saw that the earliest tenements were far from the standards of apartments today. As visitors, we saw the cramped hallways while maneuvering around the museum, the constant creaking of the staircase, the lighting and ventilation system, and the fear of an imminent fire. The New York State Assembly Tenement House Committee report in 1894 found New York to be the most densely populated city in the world, at an average of 143 people per acre.  Considering what we saw at the museum, this was not too hard to believe.  The first tenement we saw was made up of 2 very small bedrooms, which was a textile “factory” by day and a home by night.  Compared to the standards we have become used to today, imagining such a small and worn apartment housing so many people seemed almost impossible.  Fortunately, laws and reforms were under way by the time the Civil War was over. One of the first legislative actions taken was The Tenement House Act of 1867.  This act defined and set construction regulations on tenements. Of these requirements, it was especially important that there be at least one toilet (or privy) per 20 people.  One of the things that stood out to us was the lack of running water in the tenements.  Even with the Tenement House Act of 1867, having to share a single toilet with 20 other people seems as hygienic as using a public bathroom today (which is, in fact, not very hygienic).  Moreover, legislation was not enforced and conditions would have remained the same had it not been for the muckrakers.  Muckraker Jacob Riis would photograph what he saw in the tenements and have these emotional photos accompany his novel “How the Other Half Lives” which distinctly depicted the living conditions of the urban immigrant population to the rest of the world, especially the rest of America.

Finally, under implementation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the lower east side would begin its final transformation. Many of the low-income housing tenements would be cleared for the building of public housing. We found that it was because of Roosevelt’s New Deal that the tenement at 97 Orchard Street was boarded up in 1935 causing it to remain the same, as if in a time capsule, for the modern world to see.  Although, as our guide Jess told us, the furniture and decorations are not the originals, all of the things we saw in the museum are based on actual tenements through old records and recollections.  Unlike other museums, which allow you to see everything through a glass wall and prevent you from touching the artifacts (though we still do it anyway), the Tenement Museum is a doorway to the 19^th and 20^th centuries where we can walk around and get a taste of actual living conditions of past immigrants.  The museum, which could be described as New York City’s very own Pompeii, gave us the opportunity to visit the past and experience history firsthand.