From the Archives Series

You wouldn't know it from a tour of 97 Orchard, but over the last 20 years we've maintained a collection of hundreds of artifacts discovered in the building. They range from clothing to keys to coins to chicken bones (as you may recall from our March food series), and help us piece together turn-of-the-century tenement life in the Lower East Side. Since we don't put the items on display for public viewing - they're used for research and loaned to other museums - we thought we'd feature some of the most interesting objects on the blog this week.

To get a sense of the variety of artifacts in the collection, check out this collage of random items: