A Guide to the Tenement Museum
Why were a free Black couple, an Irish washerwoman and her biracial son living together in a cramped apartment in 1860s New York City? Their fascinating story is one of many revealed at the Tenement Museum.
Located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, 97 Orchard Street was once just another run-down 19th-century tenement. Today that building forms the core of the museum, with seven apartments (along with a German beer saloon) restored to reflect the various Jewish, Italian, Irish and other multicultural working-class families who lived here. Guided tours bring their stories to life and shed light on immigration to the United States at a time when the Lower East Side was the epicenter of the City’s melting pot.
A tour group enters 97 Orchard Street
Why Go?
• Many museums brush over the lives of ordinary people. Tours at the Tenement Museum put these lives front and center.
• Tours at 97 and 103 Orchard Street, the museum’s other building, are led by trained educators. They usher small groups through the dimly lit hallways and tiny apartments, highlighting objects that were recovered from the building and quoting from primary sources to open a window into how these New Yorkers carried out their day-to-day existence.
• The museum tells several immigrant and migrant stories, including those of Black, Chinese, Irish, Italian, Jewish and Latino families.
• The tours and a film in the visitors center highlight the fundamental role that immigrants, migrants and refugees play in defining the national identity of the United States. As Annie Polland, president of the museum, says, “Our mission is to elevate the stories of everyday immigrant, migrant and refugee families to promote a more inclusive vision of what it means to be an American.”
Tenement Museum shop
Practicalities
The museum is two blocks from the Delancey St–Essex St subway station (F, J, M or Z trains). Check in and buy tour tickets at the visitors center, at 103 Orchard Street, which is open from 10am to 6pm daily. We highly recommend reserving tickets in advance, as there’s a 15-person maximum on each tour. The only way to visit 97 Orchard Street is on a guided tour (same for accessing the tours at 103 Orchard).
You can watch the 30-minute film Treasures of New York, narrated by Edward Burns, in the center’s Ruth J. Abram Theater and peruse the vast selection of books and gifts about New York City history, immigration and tenement life in the shop.
Personal items on mantel in the re-created apartment of Joseph and Rachel Moore
History
Once farmland, the Lower East Side began to develop in the 1830s, housing Irish and German immigrants in crowded tenements built quickly for maximum profit. By the time 97 Orchard Street was built in 1863, the area was known as Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany. In the decades that followed, the inhabitants of the building mirrored the waves of immigration to the neighborhood as a whole: Italian, Eastern European (many of whom were Jewish), Latino and Chinese residents passed through. The run-down 97 Orchard building closed to tenants in 1935, though its lower-level shops stayed open until the 1980s.
In 1988 Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson noticed the abandoned tenement, and the idea for the museum was born. The first restored apartment opened in 1995, and 103 Orchard Street was added in 2008, opening as a visitor center and gift shop in 2011. The museum offers historical perspectives on the immigrant experience, promotes inclusivity in society and provides connections between past and present—as well as connecting new arrivals with local settlement houses as part of its Shared Journeys program, which offers tours for English-language learners.
Narrow hallway in 97 Orchard Street
Tours
Each of the eight tours at the Tenement Museum introduces a different set of inhabitants in a different time period, and any one of them will help you understand life on the Lower East Side from the 1860s to the 1960s. We took two 75-minute tours: Under One Roof and A Union of Hope: 1869.
The cramped, colorful apartment of the Rogarshevskys
Under One Roof
Focusing on the early 20th century, when the Lower East Side was bursting with immigrants, Under One Roof takes in two restored apartments—cramped but wonderfully atmospheric spaces inhabited by the Jewish Rogarshevskys and their Italian neighbors, the Baldizzis.
In the apartment of the Baldizzis
The tour began in the darkened entry hall, with its soot-encrusted roundels and burlap wallpaper. The educator, Zina, shared compelling details, anecdotes and historical context, touching on issues such as working conditions (Abraham Rogarshevsky is believed to have worked in a garment shop) and the fight to improve them. The stories were amplified by recordings of the family members, like the Baldizzis’ daughter Josephine, as well as the presence of everyday items: flyers for English classes for Yiddish speakers, toy jacks and tickets to Jewish holiday events under glass in one room; packets of Linit starch, a patterned tablecloth and a wooden cabinet made by Adolfo Baldizzi in another. But theirs was also a story about cooperation. The two families became close, with Fannie Rogarshevsky teaching Rosaria Baldizzi to speak some Yiddish and Irving Cohen, Fannie’s grandson, revealing how much he loved Italian food in one of the recordings.
An unrestored apartment on the Union of Hope tour
A Union of Hope: 1869
Daryl led A Union of Hope: 1869, and his knowledge and eloquence made this tour extremely moving—the amount of information that the museum and educators have at their disposal is mind-boggling. This is the only tour about a family who didn’t actually live here: Joseph and Rachel Moore, Black New Yorkers who lived in the Eighth Ward (now Soho) by 1864. It visits two unrestored spaces at 97 Orchard and ends at a meticulously recreated apartment on the fifth floor.
Personal items in the re-created apartment of Joseph and Rachel Moore
Re-created apartment of Joseph and Rachel Moore
This tour was especially interactive, with lots of to-and-fro between Daryl and the small group, which made for an intimate and meaningful exchange on everything from New York’s African Free School to the 1863 New York draft riots and the 14th Amendment. We learned about the late Gina Manuel, who wrote a letter to the museum in 1989, asking it to cover the Black experience. Manuel then donated items once owned by her great-grandmother, a member of New York’s free Black community in the 1850s: a small Shakespeare book, a coin purse and perfume bottles (some of which are displayed in a glass case).
The tour also delved into the Moores’ life with their roommates Rose Brown, an Irish washerwoman, and her biracial son—according to the educator, some 60 percent of households in the building were interracial at the time. As Daryl said, “There was a rhythm to the household, and it was controlled by women.”
A tour group outside the visitors center
Other Tours
Referencing Ireland’s Great Famine of the late 1840s, which accelerated Irish immigration to the United States, After the Famine: 1869 visits the home of Joseph and Bridget Moore and examines the blending of music, politics and the Catholic faith into an Irish American identity. Tenement Women: 1902 tackles the formidable challenges faced by Jewish immigrant mothers through Jennie Levine’s apartment and inspects how events like the kosher meat boycott of 1902 inspired future generations. For an immersive experience that’s especially good for families, in Meet the Residents: Meet Victoria, a costumed actor plays the role of Victoria Confino, a teenager who immigrated to the United States in 1913. You can ask her questions about her NYC apartment and her home in Greece.
It’s worth pairing a tour with one of the museum’s enlightening walks around the area, like Reclaiming Black Spaces, which explores the experience of Black New Yorkers in Lower Manhattan, or joining a food tour that combines an apartment visit with a walking itinerary and tastings at local vendors. Tour and Tasting: Family Owned marries the Family Owned tour with a tasting at Cafe Katja, a nearby Austrian restaurant. Foods of the Lower East Side is a more extensive culinary journey, making nine stops, including for pickles, pretzels and ice cream.
There are more regularly scheduled options, and new tours are introduced from time to time. Check the museum’s website for a complete list.
Fast Facts
• The museum has recorded nearly 17,000 stories from teachers and students in the United States and overseas as part of its interactive Your Story, Our Story digital collection.
• Originally, 97 Orchard was split into 22 apartments, each with three rooms. At first there was no running water or a sewer connection to an indoor toilet. The interior bedrooms did not have any natural light or access to air until the 1880s.
• Decorations were added to the hallway and lobby in 1905, when gas lighting was installed, making the soot-stained walls more noticeable. Indoor toilets, two per floor, were added the same year.
• Records are sparse (there were no written leases before the 1920s), but in 1900 a three-room apartment on the first floor of a tenement rented for around $12 per month, while the same apartment on the fourth floor rented for roughly $10 per month. According to one of the educators, this equates to nearly 30 percent of a family’s total wages at the time (including children and boarders).
Lower East Side, outside the museum
Take a Break
The Lower East Side of today is jam-packed with restaurants, bars and coffee shops, both contemporary and classic. To extend your tour’s old-world vibe, make for Russ & Daughters, seller of smoked fish, caviar and bagels. The location that opened in 1920 is a takeout shop; if you’d rather sit down, go to the café at 127 Orchard St., just a few doors down from the museum.
Other nearby alternatives:
• Pickle Guys for classic kosher dill pickles
• Katz’s Delicatessen for mile-high pastrami sandwiches
• Sunday to Sunday for coffee, pastries and brunch
• Excuse My French for Continental small plates
• Empanada Mama for take-out Colombian-style empanadas
Where to Go Next
If the Tenement Museum whets your appetite for more immigrant history, continue on to the Museum at Eldridge Street, a 10-minute stroll from 97 Orchard. This synagogue, which was built in 1887, holds exhibitions and events that offer a glimpse into the Eastern European Jewish community that sponsored it. Learn more about the Jewish experience at the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side or the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan.
The Museum of Chinese in America and Italian American Museum, both within walking distance of the Tenement Museum, focus on their respective communities. You’ll get the best overview of immigration to NYC and the United States as a whole at Ellis Island’s National Immigration Museum. Over 12 million people arrived through this complex in New York Harbor between 1892 and 1954. You’ll have to take a Statue City Cruises ferry from Battery Park, which stops at the Statue of Liberty first; there is no additional charge for the museum itself.
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