Reading the Walls at 97 Orchard: Q & A With Historian David Favaloro

After listening to all the stories we share on our tours, visitors often ask, "How do you know what you know?" It's a great question! The answer is: lots and lots of work. Years of research have gone into each of our tours, and we continue to revise our programs as we learn more. The Tenement Museum's Director of Curatorial Affairs, David Favaloro, plays a central role in our research. Here, he talks about his professional background and favorite parts of the Museum.

Director of Curatorial Affairs and HTI Fellow, David Favaloro

What's your role at the Tenement Museum? What does your job entail?
I am the Museum’s Director of Curatorial Affairs; I supervise the Curatorial Department. Much of what I do involves research, interpretation, and exhibit development centered on our tenements at 97 and 103 Orchard Streets, in collaboration with the Education Department. I also work with the museum’s Collections Manager, Kathleen O’Hara, to ensure the ongoing preservation of the tenement at 97 Orchard Street as well as the Museum’s object collections and archives.

On a fundamental level, I see the Curatorial Department as the collecting arm of the Museum. We take the lead in acquiring the kinds of things that serve as the raw material for The Tenement Museum. However, we collect a bit differently than other museums, in that we're gathering stories linked to the tenements at 97 Orchard and 103 Orchard Street and their former residents, shopkeepers, and owners, as well as the objects associated with those stories.

What did you do before you came to the Museum?

I led historic walking tours of New York City neighborhoods for Big Onion Walking Tours, including the Lower East Side. I earned a Master's Degree in Public History from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst about a year before that. Much of my studies there were focused on American urban history.

How did that prepare you for your work here?

Graduate school gave me both the knowledge and tools to successfully grapple with the complexity of researching and interpreting the past at 97 Orchard Street.  I was also conducting historic walking tours of the Lower East Side and had conducted research on the history of New York as a graduate research assistant.

What is your favorite part of 97 Orchard Street?

I love all of the graffiti that we’ve found throughout 97 Orchard Street, the places ìn the building where former residents have “left their mark.” I think my favorite might be the “Nuts to You” written on the pressed metal in the third floor hallway.

History with a Bad Attitude: the Hallway at 97 Orchard Street

What is your favorite tour moment?

Even after hearing it thousands of times over the years, I still love visitors’ reactions to Josephine Baldizzi’s oral history that we share on the Hard Times tour. I also love the first floor hallway of 97 Orchard - the way that this space challenges visitors’ pre-conceived notions of what tenement life was like continues to be incredibly profound for me.

What are you most looking forward to over the next year, here at the Museum?

I’m looking forward to our next exhibit, Shop Life, opening later this year in 97 Orchard’s commercial basement. This new exhibit will, for the first time, tell the stories of some of the building’s shops, including John and Caroline Schneider’s German lager beer saloon, the Lustgarten family’s kosher butcher shop, Max Marcus’s Auction House, and Sidney Undergarments.

I’m also excited to begin work on creating a Preservation Action Plan for 97 Orchard Street, a project which is being funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This will implement a holistic approach to addressing the complex and inter-related conservation and preservation needs of 97 Orchard Street and its contents over the next 15 years.

-- Posted by Institutional Giving Manager Dana Friedman and Tenement Talks Manager Alana Rosen

Teaching the History of Immigrants and Discrimination

Immigrants are remarkably varied, but most have one thing in common: they face discrimination as new Americans. This experience resonates with elementary school children, who understand the challenge of being the “new kid.” Similarly, teenagers easily relate to being judged and judging others.

Recently, New York City teachers gathered at the Museum to explore the topic of discrimination. Together, we considered the pervasive language of “othering” and its curricular connections. We began by reflecting on ethnic stereotypes, both good and bad and went on to examine political cartoons and music from the past and the present.

 
John Bull and Uncle Sam--popular 19th c. symbols of England and the U.S.--
debate about the Irish. The Irishman is depicted with a pronounced
lower jaw and mouth, a flat, short nose, and the sloping forehead--stereotypes of a "racial inferior".
 

By exploring the lives of three immigrant families that lived in 97 Orchard Street, we gained insight into the history of racial prejudice. Questions guided our visits to their recreated homes. What was it like to be one of the only Irish families in the 1860s “Little Germany” of the Lower East Side? How did Natalie Gumpertz get by when her husband disappeared and gender discrimination prevailed in the 1870s? What options did Adlofo and Rosario Baldizzi have as Italian immigrants in the face of the discriminatory quotas passed in 1924? These questions, along with music and political cartoons, shaped our experience and our understanding of the role that popular culture plays in advancing and negating stereotypes.

In this  1871 cartoon, Catholic bishops drawn to look like threatening alligators play on the religious superstition Americans felt towards the Catholic Church. A father tries to protect his family. On the left stands St. Peter's cathedral, the center of the Roman Catholic Church,
now re-labeled "Tammany Hall."
 

This workshop helped me remember the power of a simple drawing and the magic that happens when a group of dedicated teachers gather around a table. An old cartoon still communicates prejudice over 100 years after its publication. It resonates. One glance makes you curious to learn more, to understand its place within history and our culture. I wish I could visit each of their classrooms and hear the conversation it inspires in today's students.

--Posted by Director of Education Miriam Bader

A Winter Version of Our "Foods" Tour Comes in From the Cold!

“I never much liked fried okra. But the moment I learned that my mother had had a stroke, I thought, ‘I never got her recipe for fried okra.’ It made me so sad.”

A group of visitors were gathered around a table above our new Visitors Center at 103 Orchard Street, sharing stories about their favorite childhood memories. It’s how we start every Foods of the Lower East Side program, and I never cease to marvel at the stories I hear. But this story about fried okra seemed to sum up so much of what this program is all about.

We began offering the Foods of the Lower East Side walking tour this summer, but as winter approached, we realized that it’s no fun trying to snack in sub-freezing weather. So we designed an indoor version of this program: all the same foods served in the comfort of our brand-new classroom with sweeping views of Delancey Street.

What could be better than dumplings on a cold winter day?

Something about moving the tour indoors changes the program. With more time to relax, nibble, and chat, visitors share more of themselves than they do on the walking tour. And with less time spent walking between stops, we have more time to discuss the history of immigrant cuisine and how it shapes so much of what we eat today.

But food, as the “fried okra” story reminded me, is as much about loss as discovery. So often, the foods we remember most are lost to us. Our grandmother has passed away, and somehow her recipe for fried chicken or brisket just doesn’t taste the same when we make it. Or we’ve moved to the big city, and the apples here just aren’t as crisp and fresh as the ones our father used to make apple cobbler.

These feelings of loss are compounded if you’re an immigrant. U.S.-born citizens can usually re-create their favorite foods with some success. But an immigrant can’t just walk down to the corner market and find the same ingredients their mothers used back in China or Mexico. And immigrants often work long hours, making it hard to find the time to cook for themselves anyhow. Leaving your mother is bad enough;leaving your motherland can be doubly heartbreaking. And if you’re an immigrant, the foods you eat are a constant reminder of both leave-takings.

Fresh bialys from Kossar's on their way to the Museum

Bialys, salami sandwiches, pork dumplings, gumbo, shepherd’s pie – no matter what we eat, there’s a story to be told. I’m so glad that we offer a program where everyone gets to hear and share those stories. It’s just one of the many ways we break down the cultural barriers that too often separate us from our fellow Americans, no matter where they were born or what immigration status they must bear.

--Posted by Education Coordinator Adam Steinberg

If Bridget took the Omnibus and Harris Rode the Subway: Public Transportation on the Lower East Side

I first became involved in learning the story of New York City’s public transportation because I’m one of the five million commuters who ride the city’s subway every single day. Second, I’m an educator at the New York Transit Museum, the largest museum in the United States devoted to the story of urban transportation. At the Transit Museum I lead students through the turnstiles of transit history, from the birth of the subway in 1904 to the evolution of subways and buses both past and present. Without them, it’s fair to say that the United States would not be the great melting pot that it is today.

Navigating a snowy street c.1860

When looking at the story of public transportation and immigration there’s no better place to see this story unfold than 97 Orchard Street in the Lower East Side.When families like the Moores and the Gumpertz’s stepped onto the shores of Manhattan, they were forced to quickly adapt to the hustle and bustle of the Lower East Side with its “great conglomeration” of German and Irish immigrants. They also learned to attend to the daily business of home and family by darting through narrow dirt streets packed with horses, stage coaches, omnibuses, and elevated trains. Second only to walking, horses were the city’s main source of transportation. Yet when navigating the streets of the city in those early days, one would have to weave through constant gridlock, with no lanes, police officers or traffic signals to guide the vehicles. Omnibuses--large horse drawn carriages that ran along a fixed route--were overcrowded, bumpy, and slow. Even the advent of streetcars didn’t solve the problem: they were often impossible in inclement weather.                       

Lady: "For Pity's sake, how often do these cars run? I've been waiting here a week."
Satirical Conductor: "Have you ma'am? That's strange; I was by here three days ago and never noticed you!"
Streetcar humor, c.1874; Image Courtesy New York Public Library

The year before the Levines moved their family of five across the Williamsburg Bridge, they may have experienced one of the greatest novelties of the new century: a ride on New York’s first underground transit system, the subway. For four years, more than 70,000 laborers--many of them immigrants--had been digging and blasting their way through Manhattan to build the city’s first stations and tunnels. Perhaps Harris read Yiddish and English newspapers that depicted the triumphs and tribulations of constructing these tunnels. This city-wide drama featured the extraordinary feats of “sandhogs” (underground construction workers) who dug tunnels underneath the riverbed and constructed the 59th Street Power Station, which fueled the system with thousands of pounds of coal.
 

The early days of the New York City subway

Surely, the subway’s debut was a frequent topic of conversation at the pushcart market. It’s worth wondering if families like the Levines and Rogarshevskys would have ventured into the subway on opening day--October 27th 1904-- braving the dark tunnels on speedy subway cars, not realizing that these machines would change the way they lived, worked, and how they saw themselves as Americans and New Yorkers .

--Posted by Educator Rachel Serkin

Great Reads: "Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels"

In a fit of book straightening fury last week I happened across Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels by Hella Winston in the Tenement Museum’s Jewish interest section. Though intrigued by the content and title whenever the book caught my eye, it was not until a slow afternoon that I finally had the opportunity to open the book’s cover. I’m glad that I did.

The Tenement Museum  engenders critical thinking about issues faced by current immigrant communities by exploring their historical antecedents. In large part, this is done by immersing visitors in the stories of specific families. Sociologist Hella Winston takes a similar approach, delving into the complicated lives of individuals struggling with their Hasidic faith, family, and community in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood through a series of vignettes. As a trained anthropologist, I was particularly curious about this subject.

Unchosen is a quick, accessible read, but it’s by no means pedestrian. The people and Hasidic culture that she describes are compelling and the historical detail is illuminating. Twelve hours and two subway rides after I purchased the book, I had read it cover to cover.

Living in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood, I come into occasional contact with the Hasidim of nearby Williamsburg and Crown Heights. These encounters are mainly experienced through a car or bus window and leave me wondering about who these people are and what their lives are like. Maintaining exceptionally strict community and cultural identity in the face of numerous social, technological, and cultural intrusions seems impossible or untenable. Yet, despite the odds (at least from external appearances) Brooklyn’s Hasidim appear to have discovered the formula.

While readingWinston’s book, I had the feeling that I have been asking the wrong questions, or at least framing them incorrectly. Guided by Winston’s insights, I realized that the more important question is not how Hasidic communities preserve traditions, but why--and if--they are ultimately successful. 

Not surprisingly, reading Unchosen piqued my interest in this visible and often misunderstood community. Thankfully we have three other equally intriguing books on the Hasidim: Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls by Stephanie Wellen Levine, Holy Days: The World of a Hasidic Family by Lis Harris, and Boychiks in the Hood: Travels in the Hasidic Underground by Robert Eisenberg.

--Posted By Shop Associate Leah Mollin-Kling

Salty, Sour and Controversial: A Quick History of the Pickle

This is the second in a series of 6 articles by Educator Judy Levin, originally written as research for our “Foods of the Lower East Side" tasting tour. During the coldest months of January and February, we're offering a modified indoor version of the tour.

A true story: two old Jewish guys get into a fight about whether a kosher pickle is preserved in vinegar or in brine, a salt solution. The argument escalates until they are questioning each other’s Judaism, insulting each other’s ancestors (who must have come from a strange little hick town to be so ill-informed), and reaching no conclusion except that the other guy is SO wrong.

People have strong feelings about pickles.

Classic Dill Pickles

Pickling is one of the oldest ways of preserving foods. It goes back 4,000 or 5,000 years in the Middle and Far East. Recipes for pickled fruits and vegetables (also meats, but that’s another story) came to America with the Dutch and English, who had eaten them in the old country and on the ships coming over. Pickles were a part of American cuisine, not just before the Jewish deli, but even before there was a United States!

"The Dill Pickle Rag", c.1906

To the question of method: either vinegar or brine will work. Vinegar is faster, but brining fruits and vegetables allows for fermentation, which creates different flavors. The Pickle Guy, one of the last of the Lower East Side pickle makers, traces his recipe back to Poland. He packs uncooked cucumbers in brine solution. Sarah Levy, writing the first Jewish cookbook in America, used vinegar. Other pickle recipes compromise by suggesting either salting the vegetables before preserving them in vinegar, or preserving them in brine and then flavoring them with vinegar. Of course there are also less traditional approaches: in Mississippi, they put sour pickles in Kool-aid.

About half of the city’s 200 or so Jewish pickle shops were on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century. In a 1929 Saturday Evening Post article the writer says, “There is one store on Hester Street . . . which probably contains enough pickles to have exhausted the entire cucumber crop of the Eastern seaboard”. But why the cucumber? Historically, pickles have also made from cabbage (sauerkraut), green tomatoes, turnips, mushrooms, walnuts, nasturtiums, and just about anything else we eat. For much of the world, for much of history, pickled vegetables were all the vegetables you were likely to eat during winter.

The eventual dominance of the cucumber pickle may be based less on ethnic Jewish cuisine than on the influence of the Heinz Company. By the late 1800s, Heinz had bought its own Long Island cucumber farms, displayed its products at the 1893 World’s Fair, and advertised widely: Where the Flatiron Building now stands, a six-foot, light-up Heinz cucumber pickle once stood.

The Heinz Company c.1910; Image courtesy American Antiquarian

Given the importance of pickles in most cultures and for thousands of years, it seems odd that between about the 1820s and 1920s, many American reformers, dieticians, and food faddists rejected the pickle, vehemently. When in the 1920s dietician Bertha Wood wrote that Jewish pickles interfered with “assimilation,” her concern was both for the assimilation of food into the body and the assimilation of foreigners into American culture. Like alcohol, strong flavors or stimulants of any kind (spices, coffee, vinegar) seemed likely to overstimulate the senses, the stomach—and the social order.

Mexican Pickled Vegetables; Photo by Amber Gress

Pickled Chinese Long Beans; Image courtesy SeriousEats

American pickles are more diverse than ever before, with most immigrant groups bringing their own versions. They’re celebrated each year at a Lower East Side International Pickle Day, which features Middle Eastern pomegranate pickled turnips, Chinese pickled lemons, Japanese plums, and Indian mangoes, as well as sauerkraut and cucumbers. In fact, if you wanted to use one type of food to survey all of American culture, the pickle might be it. Pickles preserve food—but also memories of childhood or home.

--Posted by Tenement Museum Educator Judy Levin

For more reading on this subject:

On the history of pickling, Lucy Norris in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (Oxford University Press, 2004).

The Sensible Cook, Peter Rose’s modern translation of a popular 17th century Dutch cookbook (Syracuse U. Press, 1989.)

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Harold McGhee, (New York: Scribner, 2004).

“Pickles in Many Tongues at Lower East Side Festival,”  Jennifer 8 Lee, The New York Times, 9/12/2008

"How to Quick Pickle", Serious Eats, 5/21/10

Beyond Nostalgia: "Tour and Discussion" Programs Spark Public Dialogues

"Waves of anti-immigrant hostility have made many in this country forget who and what we are."
 --"The Nation's Cruelest Immigration Law”, The New York Times, Aug 28, 2011

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
--George Santayana

Immigration continues to be a highly contentious topic in this election year. Here at the Tenement Museum, our "Hard Times Tour and Discussion" program offers a place of reflection and collaborative learning about both historic and contemporary immigration issues.

During this program, participants from all over the world come together, hear the stories of immigrant families of the past, exchange their own personal stories, offer fresh perspectives, renew ideas and help make informed decisions. Opinions on these topics inevitably vary, and we’re careful to create a dialogue, not a debate in which one side tries to persuade the other. Our hope is that visitors experience this as democracy in action.

Whichever tour they choose, we want visitors to experience more than just nostalgia ("oh, those were the good old days...), or a sense of gratitude ("wow, I'm glad that I have a bathroom in my apartment"). In sharing the stories of immigrants' interior lives, we sometimes ask participants to seek common ground by recalling or discovering "the deep complexities of our relationship to the realities of immigration,” in the words of scholar Yolanda Chávez Leyva.

Great conversations start at 97 Orchard Street

Each of our post-tour dialogues contain the potential to inspire social responsibility. We hope that participants return to their communities after these conversations to plant the "seeds" of curiosity and engagement. By sharing their thoughts and experiences, participants can inspire others, in turn, to vote, volunteer, or simply to give more thought to the lives and experiences of immigrants.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas recently encouraged us to "… keep talking...Addressing our country's direction depends on a civilized and informed dialogue." The Tenement Museum’s post-tour discussions are the perfect place to engage in this dialogue by sharing your own unique thoughts and experiences. We hope you’ll join us soon!

"...overall we are each human, and THAT is what we must not forget." --A "Hard Times Tour and Discussion" participant

--Posted by Education Associate Lokki Chan

"Hard Times Tour and Discussion" is offered daily at 2:00 PM; we offered this, as well as other tour and discussion programs, to private groups as well. For more information, please contact Lokki Chan, Education Associate, 212-431-0233 ext. 221, or lchan@tenement.org