Join us tomorrow at 1 pm outside the Visitor's Center (108 Orchard Street) for an American Sign Language interpreted tour of the Lower East Side. We'll walk past places where 19th century immigrants worshipped, worked, played, and went to school. ASL tours are usually the first Sunday of every month. Check out our tours page for more info.
-posted by Liana Grey
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
Mark Your Calendar - Egg Rolls and Egg Creams
Every year, the Museum at Eldridge Street hosts a street festival celebrating Chinese and Jewish culture. (The restored synagogue's home just north of the Manhattan Bridge, formerly a Jewish neighborhood, is now in the heart of Chinatown.) Head over to 12 Eldridge Street this Sunday for free food and entertainment, including live performances by Klezmer bands and a local Chinese orchestra. Details:
-posted by Liana Grey
Chicago's Public Housing Museum
A series on historic residential buildings around the world that have been turned into museums.
Most historic housing projects on the Lower East Side, like Knickerbocker Village near the Manhattan Bridge, home to mobsters for part of the 20th century, and East River Housing, which replaced 13 acres of slums in the 1950s, are still occupied today.
Not so for one of Chicago's early public housing developments. Founded by social reformer Jane Addams during the Great Depression, it provided affordable one and two bedroom apartments for struggling Mexican, Italian, Jewish, and African-American families until the early part of this century, when the buildings were abandoned.
A group of social historians and preservationists are now converting this building into a museum modelled after "the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City, the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, and other social history museums throughout the world." [Public Housing Museum]
Check their website to learn more, as they work to "create a place for social reflection, public dialogue, and education for the future."
Affordable housing projects, here and in Chicago:
Left: The East River Housing Project near the Williamsburg Bridge. Right: The only remaining building of the Jane Addams Houses complex, abandoned in 2002, and now a museum.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Mark Your Calendar - "Gotham and Its Garbage" At the NY Public Library
When cars park illegally in street-cleaning zones, the Department of Sanitation slaps on bright green notification stickers proclaiming, "a cleaner New York is up to you." Back in the 1890s, New York's cleanliness (there wasn't much of it at the time) rested in the hands of City Hall and public health campaigns. Next Monday, anthropologist Robin Nagle will be lecturing on sanitation reforms at the Public Library in midtown. Details from the library calendar:
"Gotham and Its Garbage: A History of Public Waste, Public Health, and the Department of Sanitation," with Robin Nagle
Monday, June 8th
6:30 PM
Mid-Manhattan Library
455 5th Avenue
It took centuries for New York City to find the will to manage its municipal waste and to keep its streets clean. The effort found success for the first time in the 1890s, when political reform, public health campaigns combined with a moral teaching that tried to foster an upstanding citizenry by creating a well-ordered environment. The anthropologist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation will focus on the moment in the city's history when these strands came together and will describe how these changes had a lasting impact on the health and well-being of New Yorkers.
-posted by Liana Grey
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Drayton Hall
A series on historic residential buildings around the world that have been turned into museums.
Miles away from England's workhouses, literally and on the socioeconomic spectrum, this old brick plantation house just outside Charleston, South Carolina preserves layers of early American history. 23 year old John Drayton, the son of British immigrants, built a Georgian-Palladian style mansion on 350 acres of farmland several decades before the American Revolution, and his grandson and great-grandson (both named Charles) lived through the cultural battles over slavery leading up to the Civil War. In the early 1800s, the family owned about 26 slaves. This virtual tour tells their stories, and those of the seven generations of Draytons who managed the property before it was sold to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1974.
-posted by Liana Grey
Miles away from England's workhouses, literally and on the socioeconomic spectrum, this old brick plantation house just outside Charleston, South Carolina preserves layers of early American history. 23 year old John Drayton, the son of British immigrants, built a Georgian-Palladian style mansion on 350 acres of farmland several decades before the American Revolution, and his grandson and great-grandson (both named Charles) lived through the cultural battles over slavery leading up to the Civil War. In the early 1800s, the family owned about 26 slaves. This virtual tour tells their stories, and those of the seven generations of Draytons who managed the property before it was sold to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1974.
-posted by Liana Grey
Workhouse Museum
A series on historic residential buildings around the world that have been turned into museums.
For much of the 19th century, Britain's most impoverished citizens were herded into cell-like rooms in poorhouses, where they were forced to work for food. Inmates at the Union Workhouse in Ripon, Yorkshire - now a museum and a member, along with the Tenement Museum, of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience -were locked in at night, and their jailors made sure they had little reason to leave: an in-house teacher (13 children lived in the house), chaplain, doctor, and vegetable garden provided all the basic necessities. In the mid 20th century, when England underwent a period of social reform, the Ripon house turned from prison to spa (sort of), with unlocked doors, lit fireplaces, and welcoming decorations, all designed to disguise its unpleasant past, according to the extensive history of the building on the museum's website.
Left: The museum, which preserves a block of cells and hosts a photo exhibit on working-class life in 19th century Britain, is currently undergoing a major restoration, scheduled for completion later in the summer. Center: an 1890 ordinance plan of the building. More historical documents here. Right: the historic "market town" of Ripon, pop. 15,922, has an economically diverse population.
-posted by Liana Grey
For much of the 19th century, Britain's most impoverished citizens were herded into cell-like rooms in poorhouses, where they were forced to work for food. Inmates at the Union Workhouse in Ripon, Yorkshire - now a museum and a member, along with the Tenement Museum, of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience -were locked in at night, and their jailors made sure they had little reason to leave: an in-house teacher (13 children lived in the house), chaplain, doctor, and vegetable garden provided all the basic necessities. In the mid 20th century, when England underwent a period of social reform, the Ripon house turned from prison to spa (sort of), with unlocked doors, lit fireplaces, and welcoming decorations, all designed to disguise its unpleasant past, according to the extensive history of the building on the museum's website.
Left: The museum, which preserves a block of cells and hosts a photo exhibit on working-class life in 19th century Britain, is currently undergoing a major restoration, scheduled for completion later in the summer. Center: an 1890 ordinance plan of the building. More historical documents here. Right: the historic "market town" of Ripon, pop. 15,922, has an economically diverse population.
-posted by Liana Grey
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Merchant's House
A series on historic residential buildings around the world that have been turned into museums.
The museum in the early 1930s (left) and now
From the mid 1800s to through the earl 1930s, the Merchant's House on East 4th St. was home (as the name implies) to a wealthy merchant named Seabury Tredwell. The Tredwell family's original furniture and other interior decorations are preserved in full, offering a glimpse of what life was like for the wealthy during an exciting time in New York's history, when the city first joined Paris and London among the ranks of "world class" metropolises. When the Great Depression struck, eldest daughter Gertrude Tredwell, living by herself, made sure to take meticulous care of the building as the formerly classy East Village neighborhood turned decrepit. In 1936, only three years after Getrude finally moved out, the house was transformed into a museum (quick, right? Most houses-turned-museum seem to have been formally preserved only in the 1980s), and acheived landmark status in 1965. Check out this virtual tour.
-posted by Liana Grey
From the mid 1800s to through the earl 1930s, the Merchant's House on East 4th St. was home (as the name implies) to a wealthy merchant named Seabury Tredwell. The Tredwell family's original furniture and other interior decorations are preserved in full, offering a glimpse of what life was like for the wealthy during an exciting time in New York's history, when the city first joined Paris and London among the ranks of "world class" metropolises. When the Great Depression struck, eldest daughter Gertrude Tredwell, living by herself, made sure to take meticulous care of the building as the formerly classy East Village neighborhood turned decrepit. In 1936, only three years after Getrude finally moved out, the house was transformed into a museum (quick, right? Most houses-turned-museum seem to have been formally preserved only in the 1980s), and acheived landmark status in 1965. Check out this virtual tour.
-posted by Liana Grey
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