My Mother's Gift

In 1990, I was one year old and on my way to America. My father had begged my mother to let me stay with him in the Philippines, so a compromise was struck—I would move between worlds and cultures for the first few years of my life. Soon, it was my mother’s turn to say goodbye to me at the gate and fly back to America alone, leaving my father to care for me with the help of my army of Titas (aunties).

When she returned home to the U.S., my mom packed away my things and spent that year avoiding birthday parties for her friends’ children. It was too much, she would later tell me -- “But I did what I had to do.”

My mother’s life is defined by this phrase. Her courage was rooted in her responsibility to sustain the future of her family with each paycheck she sent home.

Tenement Museum Intern Marianne De Padua and her Family

In 1986, my mother was a frail and naïve 26-year-old woman who came to America for the first time seeking a better life. She worked long hours as a nurse between two hospitals and lived in a small apartment on the outskirts of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

For years I never understood her absence. She was still a stranger to me even after my father’s visa was approved and we moved to America to live with her and my new baby sister. Through my young eyes, mom worked from dawn until well into the night. When she was home, she was tired and always cooking a week’s worth of food. My mother always seemed angry.

At 22 years old, I am in awe of the strength it must have taken for my mother to leave her country and her family. My resentment towards her has turned into immense gratitude for giving me a life of limitless opportunities. Like most immigrant family stories, ours is one of sacrifice and unwavering faith in the American dream. Because of my mother, we are all living her dream.

Marianne De Padua is an intern with the Public Affairs Department at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. She is currently a senior majoring in Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. Marianne hopes to pursue a career in public relations, working for non-profit organizations or museums in New York City.

Celebrating Immigrant Heritage Week

This Monday marks the start of Immigrant Heritage Week here in New York City--a time to celebrate the rich contributions that immigrants make to our city and our nation. It’s especially meaningful for us at the Tenement Museum, where we discuss both immigrant history and contemporary issues with thousands of visitors from around the world each week.

The United States has been a nation of immigrants from the start. Our culture reflects this in the foods we eat, the music we hear and the holidays we celebrate; our economy is fueled by the labor and innovation of immigrant workers and entrepreneurs.

Chinese Schoolchildren c.1910

Here at the Tenement Museum, we celebrate the strength and variety of our immigrant experiences every day. Often, visitors find that the stories we tell mirror those of their own families. Whether our roots are in South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, or right here in New York, we can all find commonalities with the people who started new lives at 97 Orchard Street.

This week is a perfect time to support immigrant heritage and the Tenement Museum by paying us a visit or joining us as a museum member. We are a community organization in the truest sense, and we hope you’ll contribute to our ongoing conversation.

In an effort to share some of our own personal histories, and in celebration of this important week, we’re excited to present a series of stories from our museum staff members here on our blog. I hope you’ll check back to read each of these uniquely powerful contributions. Today you’ll find the first of five installments.

--Morris J. Vogel, Tenement Museum President

Why Architecture Matters with Paul Goldberger

“Like the best art criticism, the education of Goldberger's eye explains much of what one feels but had not fully understood in looking at them.” -- John Berridge

We all need a place to sleep; it seems like one of the most basic needs—shelter.

Paul Goldberger discusses the places in which we shelter, work and play. He discusses when architecture is necessary and aesthetic, and goes beyond necessity to architechture’s function, sustainability, beauty and effect on our emotions. So we all need, want and like architecture—but do we need criticism?

Right before the Tenement Talk with Paul Goldberger, and as guests streamed in and took their seats Paul looked carefully at the Tenement Museum’s books, toys and cultural objects. He stood in front of the shelves, diving into the details and continued that scrutiny until right before the Talk began. Mr Goldberger is known for this detailed observation as a writer and architecture critic, from his work at the New York Times to his “Skyline” column in The New Yorker. The Talk began. There was laughter and detailed answers to complex questions related to his work as a critic. As he spoke, the detail and description he provided about buildings like those at Astor Place or Columbus Circle displayed a never-ending search for the specific ideas embedded in architecture and which his criticism aims to illuminate.

Architecture matters for a variety of reasons: because of need, function, beauty and even emotion. The discerning and critical eye of writers like Goldberg bring those reasons to the forefront and draw our attention inward to the ways architecture makes us feel and upward to the buildings themselves.

Criticism comes in many forms, including humor. In the clip below from The Colbert Report, Paul Goldberger and Stephen Colbert trade criticisms, and jokes about Why Architecture Matters.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Paul Goldberger
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Posted by Patricia Pforte

Guess the Artifact: And the Object is...

On Friday, we asked readers to try their hand at identifying this mystery item.

It’s called a “stove top lifter” and dates back to 1870. The device, which rests on the Gumpertz family stove, is used to lift up the circular shaped covers on the stove top.

Several readers guessed this right away! We'll try to stump you next time...

Can You Guess the Artifact?

Our next mystery object is made of metal. It's small, slender and designed with coils around the top, and it can be found in the kitchen. Can anyone guess what it was used for?

Check back on Monday for the answer!

Guess the Artifact: And the object is...

The answer to Monday's Guess the Artifact quiz is....

This is known as a “blackjack” and dates back to 1860. It is a small, easily-concealable club made of a leather-wrapped lead weight, attached to the end of a leather-wrapped coil spring. Joseph Moore would have used a blackjack like this one to protect himself while walking home from a long night of working at the pub.

Make sure to look for the blackjack while touring the Moore’s family apartment!



Congratulations to those of you who guessed correctly!

Questions for Curatorial - Keening

Is keening a mourning ritual practiced only by Irish Catholics?

Traditionally performed at Irish wakes and funerals during the 19^th century and centuries before, keening consisted of high pitched, discordant songs sung in Irish, which eulogized the dead. While the practice appears to have been more common in Ireland, it was also performed in Scotland. Keening was usually performed by mna caoine [“na keen” or keening woman], old women either related to the deceased or specially hired to keen.

Keening seems to have predated the introduction of Catholicism to Ireland. Indeed, keening and drinking at the wake were rituals that the Catholic Church tried to forbid, since Catholic officials felt that they cast Irish Catholic immigrants in a negative light (and because the rituals themselves were holdovers from pagan practices).

What is more, keening was one of the Irish rituals that native-born Americans pointed to as an example of Irish racial.  George Templeton Strong^[1], the prominent nativist New Yorker and member of the Union Club, kept a meticulous diary during the 19^th century.  In an entry dated July 7, 1857, he describes coming upon a construction accident on

Fourth Avenue

in which the earth has caved in on a number of Irish laborers.  In typical nativist fashion, rather then commiserating with the plight of the deceased laborers and commenting upon the working conditions that might have led to such an accident, Strong focuses instead on the reaction of the Irish women on hand, and its reflection on the “Irish” character.  He wrote:

Seeing a crowd on the corner, I stopped and made my way to a front place. The earth had caved in a few minutes before and crushed the breath out of a pair of ill-starred Celtic laborers. They had just been dragged, or dug, out, and lay white and stark on the ground where they had been working, ten or twelve feet below the level of the street. Around them were a few men who had got them out, I suppose, and fifteen or twenty Irish women, wives, kinfolk or friends, who had got down there in some inexplicable way. The men were listless and inert enough, but not so the women. I suppose they were “keening”; all together were raising a wild, unearthly cry, half shriek and half song, wailing as a score of daylight Banshees, clapping their hands and gesticulating passionately. Now and then one of them would throw herself down on one of the corpses, or wipe some trace of defilement from the face of the dead man with her apron, slowly and carefully, and then resume her lament. It was an uncanny sound to hear. . . .Our Celtic fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese.

^[1] George Templeton Strong also famously commented after the draft riots, that “I would like to see war made on Irish scum as in 1688,” a specific reference to William of Orange’s campaign against the Catholic James II in Ireland, which culminated in the defeat of James’s Irish and French troops at the Battle of the Boyne.