The lives of others: Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Levine, Rogarshevsky, Gumpertz, Baldizzi… While the families bearing these names set out from very different starting points during the immigrant influx of the 19th and early 20th centuries, they all shared one common address in what would become their adopted new world: 97 Orchard Street in New York City’s Lower East Side. The building, a five-story tenement consisting of twenty apartments and four storefronts, would be home to an estimated 7,000 tenants of myriad origins and cultures between 1863 and 1935.

Since opening to the public in 1994, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum has conducted guided tours of the building’s apartments, meticulously restored to mirror the living conditions of the era. Through vivid narratives depicting both daily routines and life-altering events, each apartment evokes the hardships and staunch resourcefulness of the family that lived — and sometimes set up shop — in its three cramped, tiny rooms. Visitors touring the home of the Sephardic-Jewish Confino family have the rare chance to interact with the teenage Victoria Confino — as portrayed by a costumed interpreter — who imparts her first-hand knowledge on adapting to life in 1916 America.

Far from casting a quaint, nostalgic eye on the neighborhood’s past, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum cites as it mission “to promote tolerance and historical perspective,” through an impressive array of programs aimed at researching and interpreting the history of the Lower East Side — as a bridge to establish a dialogue on contemporary social and cultural issues surrounding the immigrant experience in America. In addition to its series of guided tours — including "touch tours" for visitors with visual impairments — the organization’s award-winning education programs bring its message of tolerance to over 30,000 school children each year.

The Tenement Museum’s website is a treasure trove of information and resources linked to the organization’s programs, as well as to the communities that currently make their home on the Lower East Side — a neighborhood which retains much of its old-world character despite recent stabs at gentrification. Virtual tours of 97 Orchard Street, complete with audio narrations, make a visit to the tenement possible for anyone with online access. The Tenement Museum’s website address is www.tenement.org

Advance tickets for public tours can be purchased online or by phone at 866-811-4111. Same-day tickets are available at the Visitors Center and Tenement Shop at 108 Orchard Street, New York City, where all tours assemble before crossing the street to visit the tenement building.

For those seeking to continue their stroll back in time, a short taxi or subway ride will take them to Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, where they can board a ferry to the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. Open to the public since 1990, the former immigrant depot in New York Harbor stands as a moving tribute to the more than 12 million immigrants that huddled and hoped within its massive halls between 1892 and 1954 — including many of the families that would find their way to the tenements of the Lower East Side.

For directions to the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, including ferry information, visit the museum’s website at www.ellisisland.com.