Hope everyone enjoyed the Tenement Museum tour last evening. Please take a moment to post a sentence or two as to what you found most surprising or unexpected about the stories recounted by our guides and what you yourselves observed.
Also, as promised, this is the link to the museum’s site. They offer terrific programs and happily, I think that podcasts of these programs are always or at least often posted on the site.
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I really enjoyed the tour of the tenement museum. I loved all of the personal touches that were included in the tour, like seeing the pictures of the families who lived in the homes, seeing what kind of coffee they drank, what pictures they had hanging on the wall. These details really brought the histories of the families to life.
Thanks, Natalie. Me too. I was so impressed that they’d done so much research about the families — and gotten all those great picture! cr
I really didn’t know what to expect going into the Tenement Museum, but I found that I had a great time on the tour. The recreated apartments allowed for a unique experience that one doesn’t get just reading a textbook or visiting a normal exhibit in a museum. My favorite part of the tour was towards the end when we were led into apartments that were left bare. You truly understand how old the tenements are when you see paint peeling off the walls, gaping holes in the dusty glass, and how deeply the floors dip underneath your weight. When left bare, I think the apartments look even smaller!
Our trip to The Tenement Museum was delightful. I didn’t expect the tour guide to talk to us about the individual families who resided there, but that part of the tour was my favorite. The most important part (to me) is to remember that the residents were people with dreams who bravely sacrificed what they knew for a better life.
I visited the Tenement Museum for the first time when I was in fourth grade, and I remember being confused as to why one of the rooms was left bare and untouched while the others were restored and decorated. Now I realize that this was done purposefully: these bare rooms show us how few traces there were of the previous owners when the tenement building was bought, and this makes us appreciate how much effort–both in physical restoration and in detective work–was needed to recreate the stories of the families who lived there.
The thing that surprised me about the Tenement Museum is how they focused in great detail over the lives of two families instead of giving a general overview of all the different types of people who lived there. I expected the latter as I had never been to the Tenement Museum before and thought it would be like any other museum.
Another thing that struck me was the amount of hard work that went into gathering pieces of evidence – census data and decendant family members – in order to get clear family stories.
I feel the tenement museum was a good experience for me since I have never gone there before.
What surprised me most about the building we toured was the low standard of living, especially compared to that of the present day. I suppose what was most striking was the size of the families – parents sometimes with four children – in relation to the size of the actual apartments. I may be speaking as a biased 21st century individual, but I literally cannot imagine four kids at the same time in one of the apartments we saw. Maybe they spent a good deal of time roaming the neighborhood? Regardless, I felt like a giant in someone else’s actual home.
The idea of tenements has become so belabored into our minds that it becomes well-known and accepted, but we don’t think much deeper or emotionally about them.
At the museum, we were introduced to the real families that inhabited the space, how they survived, what the tenement meant for them, and how it shaped their lives. This gave the tenement life. It was all the more impressive to stand in a spot that has so much history both specifically in one person’s life, and more generally as a whole facet of New York immigration history.
What shocked me the most was when we listened to the interview with the daughter of one of the more recent families who inhabited the building and she had mostly fond memories of her upbringing there. Her mother’s extensive cleaning habits demonstrated a need to exercise control over the little space that she had to call her own, an interesting look at the psychological impact of of living in small, crowded areas.
I also found the museum’s research methods innovative. I never would have thought to count the layers of paint in order to discover the number of families who inhabited each apartment.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve been on a tour of a Tenement. In fact it’s not even the first time that I went on a tour of this particular Tenement. But for some reason this time It was different. I guess cause this was the first time I was really old enough to really realize the conditions in which they lived in. It might have been that this was the first time that I was really old enough to really genuinely be interested.
My main reaction is that of respect. I respect the families that had no other choices but to live here. They made hellish conditions seem warm and cozy. That’s something that I can’t quite stop admiring. I’m so glad that we came here!