Discovering Treasures With a Little Bit of Research...

Eva Silverman is a New Jersey native whose grandmother Gladys settled on the Lower East Side in 1920 as a Jewish immigrant from Poland. Eva's  "Mapping Roots" project explores New York City geography and history through her family's stories and photographs. She's currently working on an installation at the Carlton Arms Hotel here in New York City, where she'll be hosting a reception on Saturday, March 10.

In the following post, Eva finds the site in the Lower East Side where her grandmother attended school. For more information about Eva's work and the upcoming reception, visit her blog (where this post originally appeared).

I love research! There is nothing more satisfying than looking for something, following leads, and then finding it! This installation has been FULL of satisfaction on that level. Today, as I pair images of ‘now’ and ‘then’, I was looking for an image of a pushcart peddler on Hester Street. During my search, I found an image of a newspaper article that showed the inside of a school at Hester and Chrystie. This exact location is where my grandma went to ‘continuation school’ — which was what was required of her when she dropped out of high school to work in a sweatshop. Children under 16 who worked in the sweatshops, were required to work fewer hours and attend ”Continuation School’ for a half-day every Saturday.

The Lower East Side School that Eva's Grandmother attended

That corner of Hester and Chrystie streets has changed so much since then with the development in the late 30′s of the Sara D. Roosevelt park. When I returned to that corner the other day, it was hard to see where this ‘school’ could have been and I settled on the fact that maybe it had been small classrooms in some of the larger tenements. But then I found this photo and all that changed. Presumably, this was THE school where my grandma went to continuation school. It is no longer there. The above photo was taken in 1929, just a few years past when my grandma would have gone there. I read somewhere else that this was Public School 7 (P.S. 7) and that in a 1896 article was considered the dirtiest school in the city. There was an article written about it in 1905 — a little before my grandma’s time, but still interesting.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, all of these images are courtesy of the New York Public Library. They have an AMAZING archive of photos that have been digitized.

--Posted by Eva Silverman

From Poisonous Sweets to Heavenly Halvah: Notes on the History of Candy

This is the fourth in a series of 6 articles by Educator Judy Levin, originally written as research for our “Foods of the Lower East Side" walking and tasting tour.

Sugar candies were among the first products marketed directly to children. Widely available by the 1830s, these treats were crafted in a dazzling array of colors and shapes, including pressed-sugar dolls, horses, guns, stars, hats, cigars, gin bottles (a questionable choice for kids), and so on. They were notable for their cheapness—the original penny candies could be a dozen for one cent—and for the sometimes poisonous things they were colored or flavored with (like arsenic in green dye).

A candy vendor on Hester Street on New York City's Lower East Side, c.1890

Of course, reformers were concerned. Babyhood Magazine c.1879 gave worried mamas a long list of experiments to perform on candy to see if it was adulterated with poisonous flavors or colors, or stretched with additives. There was also a concern that candy would lead to “intemperance, gluttony, and debauchery,” and that children who indulged their early appetites for sugar might be more prone to sexual misdeeds or alcoholism later on.

Other concerns stemmed from the making of cheap candy and chocolate in sweatshop conditions, with women or girls dipping sugar mice in chocolate by hand and then licking their fingers, standing from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. because the boss thought sitting made them “lazy.” As with many other products, concern about candy was based on questions of consumers' health, the misery of workers, or both.

Young women at work in a candy factory in the early 20th century

Mass-produced candy wasn’t sold only to immigrant children in America. Like pickles and a few other cheap edible pleasures, candy was a strong contrast to the often bland diets of the poor. It figures prominently in tales of tenement and immigrant life—both in novels (the smallest sisters in All-of-A-Kind Family, the classic children’s novel of the Lower East Side, agonize happily over penny candy purchases) and in memoirs and oral histories. 97 Orchard Stree resident Josephine Baldizzi remembered sugar-coated almonds (confetti), torrone (either nougat or a kind of nut brittle), and 1-cent Hooter bars (her favorite—an American candy bar rather than the traditional Italian candies), and American peppermint drops.

Candy-making also became a business in which immigrants could compete. One of the candies that comes to America with immigrants and goes on to be a Lower East Side success story is halvah (also spelled halva, halwa, helwa. . . .). Its root is the Arabic word for “sweet,” and versions of halvah go back about 3,000 years. Its long history results in arguments about its ingredients, flavorings (vanilla, chocolate, orange, carrot), consistency, and historical origins. Some people also like to eat it; others say it’s “just right for spackling the walls.”

Halvah for sale by the pound

There are two general styles of halvah. The one that comes from India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan is semolina-based, though it includes oil, flour, and sugar (or honey). The other widely-known version is based on ground seeds or nuts and is Romanian, Russian, Greek, Israeli, Turkish, and Lower East Side Jewish.

Halvah was originally sold by “Turkish, Syrian, and Armenian street vendors”, according to author John Mariani, but the variety best known on the Lower East Side was brought here by a 22-year-old immigrant from Minsk, then the Ukraine, named Nathan Radutzky. He started making it in 1907, and it was sold on pushcarts and in delis. His company moved to Brooklyn and was renamed Joyva by his sons after World War II. These days they also make chocolate-covered jelly rings, marshmallow twists, and a hard sesame candy with a well-known logo: a drawing of a Turkish guy.

Joyva's chocolate-covered halvah

Radutzky’s recipe, based on ground sesame seeds, comes in vanilla, chocolate, marbled (mixed vanilla and chocolate), chocolate-covered (rolled in mixed nuts or not), and with and without pistachios. The “chocolate-covered” part is surely an American addition. Otherwise, Richard Radutzky, grandson of Joyva’s founder, says the stuff is made as it always was, partly by hand, in 60-gallon copper mixing bowls. Workers combine tahini with a “taffy made of corn syrup, sugar, and egg whites, elongating and aerating the blend until the halvah holds together in sinewy strands.”


Halvah’s popularity is attested to by references to it in literature and popular culture. In a play called The Centuries: Portrait of a Tenement House (Emanuel Jo Bansshe, 1927) an immigrant in need of a job is given the suggestion (among others) that he go sell halvah. In The Garret, Carl Van Vechten reports that some patrons of the Yiddish theaters are driven crazy by other patrons eating during the plays, often fruit or candy—and especially halvah. While it wasn't as iconic as lox and bagels, no one ever felt the need to explain what halvah is at that time.

--Posted by Educator Judy Levin

An Update on "Shop Life" Construction at 97 Orchard Street

We've been talking about our upcoming exhibit "Shop Life" for months now, so it was exciting for all of us when construction finally began earlier this month. As you may have heard, "Shop Life" will span more than 100 years, exploring the histories of the many businesses once housed at 97 Orchard. The exhibit will include a re-created 19th century German beer saloon, and will also tell the stories of Israel Lustgarten’s 1890's kosher butcher store, Max Marcus’ 1930's auction house and Sidney Meda’s 1970's undergarment store.

Here are a few snapshots of the construction in progress on the ground floor and in the basement at 97 Orchard Street.

Our intrepid construction team is hard at work on the ground floor. In a few months, this will be the front room of the re-created Schneider's saloon.

In a former bathroom, we've peeled away the walls to find decades-old graffiti. These are construction measurements pencilled onto the walls by past builders.

Here's a cross-section view of the ground floor and basement. A staircase will eventually connect the two floors.

Here's one of the building's original ground floor fireplaces, now uncovered from behind a plaster wall. We'll re-construct the stove that Caroline Schneider would have used here to prepare meals for saloon patrons (this is where you'll see our meticulously crafted faux feast). As was the case with others in the building, this fireplace is crammed full of old "stuff"--discarded bottles, children's toys, and other refuse. At this stage we can only get a glimpse of the aging trash/treasures behind the boards covering the fireplace opening.

Check back for updates as this project progresses. You never know what we'll find next!

-- Posted by Kira Garcia

Images by Riis and Gericault Reveal Visual Clues to the Past

The Tenement Museum derives much of its information from sources that might seem less than glamorous--census data, public records and aging household objects, for example--but visual art also plays a critical role in our research. Here, Development Associate Hilary Whitham explores some images that are relevant to the Museum's work.

Writing about the subjects of photographer and activist Jacob Riis (1849-1914), Ansel Adams once said, “Their comrades in poverty and suppression live here today, in this city – in all the cities of the world." Riis’s pivotal 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives paired documentary photographs with text in an attempt to reveal the living conditions of working class immigrants residing in the tenements of the Lower East Side.  For more than a century, Riis’s images have been a rich source of information for historians, sociologists and anthropologists.

Of course, the Tenement Museum believes that images, objects, and literature can tell us a great deal about the past —so it’s not surprising that our educators regularly employ photographs from Riis’s book in tours of our landmark tenement building at 97 Orchard Street. (For more information about material culture theories and studies, please see Jules Prown’s essay, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method” in Winterthur Portfolio.)

Bandits' Roost, Jacob A. Riis, 1888

Although they weren’t originally intended to be aesthetically pleasing, Riis’s photographs have also been studied by art historians. As eminent art historian Linda Nochlin has observed, a comparison of one of Riis’s documentary photographs with a print by the French artist Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) reveals how both commercial and fine art were used in the service of public education in the 19th century.  Géricault, like Riis, was astounded at the poverty and degradation of industrializing cities in Britain in the 19th century. Both men drew on shared visual culture to educate the middle and upper classes about the plight of the poor.

 Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man, Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Géricault, 1821

Géricault's Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man from 1821 is a print from the artist’s series of lithographs "Various Subjects Drawn from Life and On Stone", created during his time in London. (For more information on the series and Géricault, see Suzanne Lodge’s essay, “Gericault in England” in The Burlington Magazine.)

Géricault’s images in the series can be characterized as recreations of everyday life, simply because of the process of their creation. Lithographs are printed artworks made by using a press to transfer an image from a stone or metal plate to paper. Similarly, Riis’s photograph entitled Street Arabs in Night Quarters is a recreation of nocturnal activities of tenement residents. Scholars have shown that Riis staged some of the scenes during the day because of the limitations of flash technology at that time. (Bonnie Yochelson discusses 19th century flash technology in the book Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-century New York.)

Street Arabs in Night Quarters, Jacob A. Riis, c. 1880's

In both images, the old man and the young children are positioned outside of buildings and away from other figures, indicating how the city's everyday life goes on without regard to their plight. The slumped or horizontal postures of the children and the old man are associated with abjection and dejection. For Nochlin, the image of the kneeling or leaning figure has antecedents in religious imagery beginning in the Renaissance, such as Filippo Lippi’s Madonna of Humility (1420s). While the figure of the Virgin Mary or Madonna low to the ground suggests humility and piety, the image of the slumped man and boys suggests degradation and poverty. Both images draw on an iconography meant to elicit an emotional reaction, specifically pity.

Madonna of Humility, Filippo Lippi, c.1420

Another recurring theme in both Riis’ photographs and Géricault's lithographs is the brick of the cobblestoned streets and new multi-family buildings. In this instance, brick serves as a visual signifier for the urban environment and specifically the tenements which housed the urban poor and recent immigrants. While these sights would have been part of everyday life for the residents of 97 Orchard Street, these images were intended for a more affluent audience that lived further uptown, far away from the tenements.

Drawing on popular knowledge as well as artistic traditions, Riis and Géricault utilized print media to disseminate images meant to educate the 19th century public. More than a century later, their work continues to yield new insights for historians of art and others. Here at the Tenement Museum, we still refer to the rich catalogue of images created by fine and commercial artists to tell the stories of the immigrants who made their lives on the Lower East Side.

--Development Associate Hilary Whitham

More reading on this subject:

Adams, Ansel. Preface in Jacob Riis: Photographer and Citizen. New York: Aperture Foundation, Inc., 1993.

Alland, Alexander ed. Jacob A. Riis: Photographer & Citizen. New York: Aperture Foundation Inc., 1993.

Lodge, Suzanne. “Géricault in England” in The Burlington Magazine Vol. 107, No. 753 (Dec., 1965), pp. 616-627

Nochlin, Linda. “Géricault, Goya and Misery” lecture given at the School of Visual Arts. 8 December 2011.

Prown, Jules David. Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method. Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 1-19

Riis, Jacob.  How The Other Half Lives. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1971.

Yochelson, Bonnie. “Jacob A. Riis, Photographer ‘After a Fashion’” in Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-century New York. New York: The New Press, 2007.

Finding Unexpected Common Ground with 97 Orchard: Unearthing My Family’s New York Tenement Roots

After relocating to New York last year, I was thrilled to be hired by the Tenement Museum as an educator. I grew up in a New Jersey suburb of New York in a family with Italian, Irish, Hungarian and German roots, but my family moved to the Deep South when I was in high school. I lived in Atlanta for many years, teaching English as a second language and working as an immigrant advocate, so the Tenement Museum seemed like a natural next step.

Tenement Museum Educator Laureen Fredella

I always knew that some of my immigrant ancestors started out here in New York, but it was only after I started to work at the Tenement Museum that I began to wonder in earnest where my grandparents and great grandparents lived, what their lives were like, and how they ended up in Bayonne, New Jersey. I knew that my father’s mother was born in New York City, and the image in my head was always of a beautiful brownstone on a quiet tree lined street in Brooklyn. But after starting to work at the Tenement Museum, I wasn’t so sure anymore. I decided to embark on a research project to get answers to my questions. And wow, did I get answers!

I started out by opening the photo albums and shoe boxes stuffed with documents that my mother passed on to me. I had many discussions with my aunt, now 90, who has an excellent memory. And I reluctantly signed up for Ancestry.com (I say “reluctantly” because it’s expensive and I’m kind of cheap, at least with things like that).

Fortunately, the surnames in my family—Fredella, Bevilacqua and Killoran--are not overly common, so it wasn’t too hard to find the records that matched my ancestors. Through census records, I was able to locate was an address for my grandmother’s family—the Bevilacquas--in New York in 1900. I was right; it was in Brooklyn. But it wasn’t a brownstone--it was a tenement in Vinegar Hill, right outside the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A bit of research into the neighborhood at the time revealed that it was a hardscrabble place, with brothels, tattoo parlors, and flop houses. It was where Al Capone was born and supposedly contracted the syphilis that would kill him later in life. I also discovered that my uncle had a bakery not far away, and after the Capones moved from Vinegar Hill, Al Capone’s father opened a barber shop less than a block from the bakery. So it’s possible that my ancestors and the Capones patronized each other’s businesses.


I decided to dig a little deeper to find out about my grandmother’s parents, Nicola and Rosa Bevilacqua. I found out that they were married in Manhattan, which seemed unusual, since they were living in Brooklyn. It turns out that before they married, they lived on Mott Street in Little Italy on the Lower East Side, just a few blocks from the Tenement Museum--and the building they lived in is still standing.

 The author's Great Grandfather, Nicola Bevilacqua,
 lived in this Mott Street Tenement in 1895

My great grandfather lived in the same neighborhood in 1888, right in the Mulberry Street bend, a notorious stretch that was the target of reformers like Jacob Riis. The rough living conditions explain why they left for Brooklyn, just as the the conditions in Brooklyn explain why they went to New Jersey.

Next, I turned my attention to my Irish ancestors, the Killorans. According to city directory records, they lived in different locations in Kleindeutschland (or little Germany, as the Lower East Side was once known). My great great great grandfather, Michael Killoran, who was listed in the 1870 census as a laborer living in Kleindeutschland at the age of 70, was admitted to the Alms House on Blackwell’s Island (today Roosevelt Island) in 1878 for destitution. His poverty would undoubtedly have been a result of the Panic of 1873, which prompted a devastating depression. The panic also impacted residents of 97 Orchard, most notably Natalie Gumpertz and her family, who we learn about on the Hard Times tour. The Alms House was a horrible place, and I found no records of Michael Killoran beyond his admittance to the poor house, so I assume he died there alone, destitute, and in misery.

Sleeping quarters at Blackwell's Island c.1899;
Image Courtesy the New York Public Library

I still have questions, but my discoveries have enriched my experience as an educator and connected me with the building in a way I never could have anticipated. Likewise, my knowledge of how people lived at 97 Orchard has enriched my genealogy, inspiring me to go beyond merely filling in a family tree with names and dates to discover not only where and how my immigrant ancestors lived, but also the sacrifices they made for my family’s betterment.

And it turns out that the investment in Ancestry.com was a good one.

-- Posted by Educator Laureen Fredella

Community Eating via Buca di Beppo

Tenement Museum Educator Sarah Lohman is a Historic Gastronomist who chronicles her explorations of culinary history on her blog "Four Pounds Flour", where this article originally appeared.

One of my colleagues at the Tenement Museum is collecting oral histories from Chinatown. This excerpt about eating caught my attention:

Interviewer: I remembered when I came to this country, one day I was dining out in a restaurant in Manhattan Chinatown. I saw lots of people ate with a fork on a plate. I wasn’t very used to it. In Taiwan, we only used plates to collect bones we didn’t want.

Interviewee A: Ah…..that’s right.

I: In Taiwan, we ate from small bowls with chopsticks, not from plates with forks. (A & I laughed)

A: Yes, that’s a big difference.

Interviewee B: In Chinese culture, we share dishes with everyone sitting at the table. The Westerners prefer to have their own dishes.

Chinese Food, Served Family-Style

A: They prefer that everyone orders their own dishes and eats it separately.

B: It is individualistic. Sharing a dish with someone else is not something that would come to their mind first…… this is a cultural..uh..uh..

I: Cultural difference.

A & B: That’s right.


This conversation immediately reminded me of my experience with the opposite circumstance: seeing communal eating for the first time. Sometime in the mid to late ’90s, a Midwestern chain restaurant called Buca di Beppo opened in the mall near my home town. Offering “Italian Immigrant Cuisine,” the restaurant served family-style meals: large dishes were brought to the table for everyone to share. I remember my friends patiently explaining to me that I could not order my own, personal dish of cavatelli, that the table had to work as a whole to decide on several dishes everyone might enjoy. As silly as it feels to me now, I know that night was the first time I had eaten out at a restaurant where the table ordered together and shared the food, as opposed to every individual ordering their own plate. The concept was completely new to me.

From Buca di Beppo's Facebook Page

Being young, I picked up on the method after the first time, and thereafter could laugh along with my friends when we told exasperated stories of how our parents and grandparents just didn’t get it. I remember family members getting truly irritated: “But I want stuffed shells!” “Grandma, you’re going to get stuffed shells, but it’s too much for one person. You share it with everyone.” Many of my relations vowed never to return to that terrible restaurant, where they couldn’t order their own food.

Culinary historian Hasia Diner remarks on American eating habits in her book Hungering for America, a look at immigrant foodways in the United States. Diner attributes the habit of eating individually to the bounty on food available in the US as compared to the relatively poor fare of the Italians. She quotes the oral history of an Italian immigrant from the 1920s who said ” (back home) The meal was one dish, from which the entire family ate; here there is a variety of food and each person has his own plate and eating utensils.”

I believe that Buca di Beppo was the first chain restaurant to introduce communal eating to a main-stream audience. It’s a way of dining that I still see as relatively uncommon in midwestern restaurants. Since my teenage experience there, I’ve eaten Chinese, Indian, Greek and Ethiopian food; styles that culturally require you to share dishes with the whole table. Buca is not the perfect restaurant, but I do believe it gave me my training wheels to understand how other cultures eat communally.

-- Posted by Educator Sarah Lohman

"Who Moved My Cheese?" Queso Fresco Goes from Niche to Mass Market

This is the third 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.

Some people on our “Foods of the Lower East Side” tours are familiar with queso blanco and queso fresco. Others are a bit confused: we’re talking about things that translate to “white cheese” and “fresh cheese,” and they are both fresh white cheeses. One distinction between the two is that most of the cheeses referred to as queso blanco do not melt when heated but rather soften and hold their shape, making them ideal for fried cheese or bits of hot cheese in things, while queso fresco is more likely to be eaten with fruit or crumbled, cold.

Homemade Queso Fresco with Chiles

As my colleague Renzo Ortega has said, very firmly, it is not a good idea to put all Spanish-speaking peoples into “the same box” just because they speak Spanish—or to over-generalize about their foods. So it’s important to remember that queso blanco and queso fresco are loose categories that refer to different varieties of cheese in different regions.

Of course, fresh white cheeses aren’t proprietary to Spanish-speaking nations. They’re traditionally made in regions that form a belt around Earth’s equator—historically, where it’s too hot to age cheese. In this category are the aforementioned quesos; also Indian panir, Syrian halloumi (a white goat and sheep milk cheese that can be grilled), Italian mozzarella and ricotta, quark, fromage blanc, a variety of fresh goat and sheep cheeses, kefir cheese, and many others.

Grilled Corn with Queso Blanco

Spanish-speaking people who came to the U.S. and the Lower East Side were accustomed to having cheap, fresh, white cheeses, but could not easily bring these cheeses with them. Fresh cheeses, especially those traditionally made of raw milk, are not cheap (or necessarily legal) to import: An imported raw milk cheese must be aged for at least 60 days. Having noted that the white cheeses of Batista in the Essex Street Market are all American-made, I googled “imported Dominican cheese” and found numerous articles about smuggling and mass outbreaks of tuberculosis and listeriosis.

So immigrants used what was available--Monterey jack is a common stand-in. But the availability of more authentic cheeses is changing. Currently, the push for more authentic quesos comes both from consumers—not all of them immigrants or children of immigrants—who want access to these cheeses and from companies that would like to sell more of them.

Tom Shore, a Pine Hill, North Carolina, Anglo dairy farmer, learned from Hispanic neighbors to make queso blanco when he could no longer support his farm selling his milk. In the early 2000s, some of his neighbors were buying raw milk (illegal in North Carolina) and making their own cheeses, rather than pay $8/lb for the imported (pasteurized) stuff. Outbreaks of listeriosis resulted in miscarriages. When this story was originally reported in 2004, there were more than 350,000 Latinos, mostly Mexican, in North Carolina, but no reliable access to their fresh cheeses. By the time a business site called “Hispanic Trending” picked up this story, they called it “Queso Cash-Cow”. It ain’t subtle, but is indeed relevant to the story of how the foods of immigrants do or do not become available in the U.S.


Maria Castro, Founder of Castro Cheese, in the mid-1960's

Other companies making or distributing American-made quesos began with Latino immigrants. The Castro Cheese Company of Houston, which sells “La Vaquita” products, was begun in 1971 by Mexican immigrant Maria Castro. She said their customers “find the flavors, the tastes, the smells, the memories that take us back to our roots. Back to our mother’s kitchens. That’s why they love ‘La Vaquita’". At the end of 2010, Castro sold the business to a national consortium. It was a family company, but you can’t make enough cheese in mama’s kitchen to supply Wal-Mart.

One of the biggest of the “Hispanic” cheese producers in the U.S., Tropical Cheese Industries of New Jersey, was also started by an immigrant, Rafael Mendez from Cuba, in the early 1960s. He began by making feta cheese with some Greek immigrants and then expanded into Caribbean, Mexican, and Central American varieties as demand increased.

My inclination (as a middle-class foodie) is to be sarcastic about the mass-market brands that replace regionally specific originals. Kroger’s Supermarket sells store-brand “Nice’n Cheesy Queso Blanco with Jalapenos,” for instance. Yet these are likely to be the cheeses that are readily available and affordable to people who are not middle-class foodies.

Kroger's Queso Blanco

As we look at how immigrants adopt “American” cheeses, it’s also interesting to note that many recipes for “American” foods now call for previously unavailable Latin American cheeses. For example, a recent press release for El Mexicano brand Queso Fresco Casero suggested it “as an alternative for feta, mozzarella, or Monterey Jack” and for use in “all kinds of soups, salads, and casseroles.” On a more daring note, Tropical Cheese Industries offers recipes for “Tropical Cheese Asian Noodle Salad” and “Chocolate and Queso Blanco Fondue”.

Fusion, here we come….

--Posted by Tenement Museum Educator Judy Levin