Relatives Say Photos Depict Ellis Island’s First Immigrant
(New York Times, December 28, 2009)
For more than a century, she was lost to history. Three years ago, she was rediscovered. As it turned out, the first immigrant to set foot on Ellis Island when it opened on Jan. 1, 1892, an Irish girl named Annie Moore, did not go west and die in Texas, as had long been believed, but spent her days as a poor immigrant on the Lower East Side, dying in 1924. Now, relatives have found two photographs of the woman they believe is the real Annie Moore.
Repeal of Nebraska Tuition Bill Draws Support
(ABC News, December 28, 2009)
Nebraska lawmakers are set to again consider repealing a law that offers tuition breaks to some illegal immigrants, and the looming debate is already drawing support. A majority of lawmakers participating in an Associated Press pre-session survey say they support rescinding the offer made after lawmakers fought to override Gov. Dave Heineman's veto to pass the law in 2006.
Book review of From Every End of This Earth by Steven Roberts
(Washington Post, December 27, 2009)
Steven V. Roberts begins his new book, From Every End of This Earth, by describing Bao and Tuyen Pham's escape from Vietnam following the fall of Saigon. The Phams are one of 13 families Roberts profiles in this homage to the "sacrifice generation" and the children for which they make that sacrifice. His goal, he says, is not to "capture the entirety" of the immigrant experience, but to write a book that explores the parts and "resembles the mosaics I used to see in the ruins of ancient Greece," where he was based for a time as a reporter for the New York Times.
Decision to let ferry widow stay a 'Christmas blessing,' McMahon says
(Staten Island Advance, December 23, 2009)
Hailing it as a “Christmas blessing,” Rep. Michael McMahon today applauded the government’s decision to grant permanent residency to a Jamaican immigrant whose husband died in the 2003 Staten Island Ferry crash. The government yesterday overturned the deportation of former Elm Park resident Osserritta Robinson. Mrs. Robinson and Louis Robinson had been married for eight months when he was killed in the crash of the ferryboat Andrew J. Barberi.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Rear Yard Now Open!
This week the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is proud to announce the opening of “The Rear Yard at 97 Orchard Street,” a permanent exhibit that immerses visitors in a mid-19th century tenement yard. The exhibit – the first re-creating an urban American privy yard – explores important aspects of daily life in 19th-century urban America and sanitation reform efforts in the tenements.
As part of the Tenement Museum’s tour The Moores: An Irish Family in America, the “Rear Yard of 97 Orchard Street” is recreated to depict 1869, six years after the building welcomed its first residents. The space includes a wooden privy shed (outhouse) with four individual stalls; a cast-iron water hydrant; original paving stones; a wood plank fence; and reproduction period laundry hanging from lines overhead.
From 1863 until 1905, when indoor plumping was installed at 97 Orchard Street, the yard was an extension of the tenement household, a space for residents to use the toilet, pump water for cooking and bathing, and wash laundry. The yard also served a social function as a space for women to socialize with one another and for children to play.
The recreation of the yard was completed with the help of period photographs, many taken by the Tenement House Department in around the turn of the 20th century. In addition, the Museum used research from urban archeologist Joan Geismar, whose team excavated 97 Orchard Street’s rear yard between 1991 and 1993.
Expecting to find the “ubiquitous, round, deep, dry-laid, stone-privy pit documented through archaeology in other 19th century urban rear yards,” the team was surprised to instead find the remnants of a water-cleansed brick privy vault believed to date from the building’s construction. The building’s financer and first owner, Lucas Glockner, was “a man ahead of his time when it came to backyard toilet facilities,” according to Geismar. (There were no laws governing outhouse construction in New York until the 1867 Tenement House Act.)
This physical investigation suggests that for 97 Orchard Street’s early residents, conditions were probably much more pleasant than the stereotype of tenement life might suggest. But, by 1900, 97 Orchard Street’s privies were shared by 105 tenants, living in eighteen apartments. Around 17 people shared each toilet. All of the building’s residents also shared a single water hydrant.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, tenement rear yards became the subject of an intense public debate about the relationship between sanitary technology, immigrant hygiene, and the public health. For middle-class reformers, the rear yard was ground zero for the linked threats of epidemic disease, social disorder, and moral degradation.
Visitors to the Tenement Museum’s The Moores: An Irish Family in America tour will explore both the yard’s role in the city-wide housing reform efforts and its practical importance in the private lives of working-class New Yorkers.
Public tours are offered daily, 10:45 am – 4:45 pm. Tickets are available at the Visitor Center, 108 Orchard Street; online at www.tenement.org; or by phone at 866-606-7232.
We hope you will come for a visit and learn about this important space in person. And some day soon we will add it to our virtual tour!
- Posted by Kate
The yard is finally complete! Above: recreated privy shed, or outhouse.
As part of the Tenement Museum’s tour The Moores: An Irish Family in America, the “Rear Yard of 97 Orchard Street” is recreated to depict 1869, six years after the building welcomed its first residents. The space includes a wooden privy shed (outhouse) with four individual stalls; a cast-iron water hydrant; original paving stones; a wood plank fence; and reproduction period laundry hanging from lines overhead.
Workers install paving stones, artifacts that were excavated from 97 Orchard's rear yard in 1991.
From 1863 until 1905, when indoor plumping was installed at 97 Orchard Street, the yard was an extension of the tenement household, a space for residents to use the toilet, pump water for cooking and bathing, and wash laundry. The yard also served a social function as a space for women to socialize with one another and for children to play.
The recreation of the yard was completed with the help of period photographs, many taken by the Tenement House Department in around the turn of the 20th century. In addition, the Museum used research from urban archeologist Joan Geismar, whose team excavated 97 Orchard Street’s rear yard between 1991 and 1993.
Expecting to find the “ubiquitous, round, deep, dry-laid, stone-privy pit documented through archaeology in other 19th century urban rear yards,” the team was surprised to instead find the remnants of a water-cleansed brick privy vault believed to date from the building’s construction. The building’s financer and first owner, Lucas Glockner, was “a man ahead of his time when it came to backyard toilet facilities,” according to Geismar. (There were no laws governing outhouse construction in New York until the 1867 Tenement House Act.)
This physical investigation suggests that for 97 Orchard Street’s early residents, conditions were probably much more pleasant than the stereotype of tenement life might suggest. But, by 1900, 97 Orchard Street’s privies were shared by 105 tenants, living in eighteen apartments. Around 17 people shared each toilet. All of the building’s residents also shared a single water hydrant.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, tenement rear yards became the subject of an intense public debate about the relationship between sanitary technology, immigrant hygiene, and the public health. For middle-class reformers, the rear yard was ground zero for the linked threats of epidemic disease, social disorder, and moral degradation.
Visitors to the Tenement Museum’s The Moores: An Irish Family in America tour will explore both the yard’s role in the city-wide housing reform efforts and its practical importance in the private lives of working-class New Yorkers.
Public tours are offered daily, 10:45 am – 4:45 pm. Tickets are available at the Visitor Center, 108 Orchard Street; online at www.tenement.org; or by phone at 866-606-7232.
We hope you will come for a visit and learn about this important space in person. And some day soon we will add it to our virtual tour!
- Posted by Kate
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Questions for Curatorial - Yiddish on the LES
Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.
Were the dialects of Yiddish spoken on the Lower East Side during the turn of the last century mutually intelligible? For example, if they have lived at 97 Orchard Street at the same time, could the Polish Levine and Lithuanian Rogarshevsky families have understood one another?
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants to the Lower East Side hailed from a number of different regions, among them Hungary, Galicia, Rumania, and Russia. Although the "eastern Yiddish" dialect spoken by people from each of these regions evinced a shared linguistic heritage, their “Lithuanian,” “Polish,” and “Ukrainian” sub-dialects differed substantially from one another in vocabulary and grammar, as well as in the pronunciation of certain vowels.
A language “always in a rapid process of growth and dissolution,” the Yiddish spoken by Eastern European Jewish immigrants was further transformed by the encounter with America. The historian Irving Howe writes, “A whole sublanguage or patois grew up in the immigrant districts, neither quite English nor quite Yiddish, in which the vocabulary of the former was twisted to the syntax of the latter.”
It is possible, therefore, that while Yiddish-speaking immigrants from modern Poland (like the Levines) may have experienced some immediate difficulty in communicating with Yiddish-speaking immigrants from modern Lithuania, a shared linguistic heritage and an increasing overlap between Yiddish and American English appears to have narrowed this linguistic divide.
Were the dialects of Yiddish spoken on the Lower East Side during the turn of the last century mutually intelligible? For example, if they have lived at 97 Orchard Street at the same time, could the Polish Levine and Lithuanian Rogarshevsky families have understood one another?
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants to the Lower East Side hailed from a number of different regions, among them Hungary, Galicia, Rumania, and Russia. Although the "eastern Yiddish" dialect spoken by people from each of these regions evinced a shared linguistic heritage, their “Lithuanian,” “Polish,” and “Ukrainian” sub-dialects differed substantially from one another in vocabulary and grammar, as well as in the pronunciation of certain vowels.
A language “always in a rapid process of growth and dissolution,” the Yiddish spoken by Eastern European Jewish immigrants was further transformed by the encounter with America. The historian Irving Howe writes, “A whole sublanguage or patois grew up in the immigrant districts, neither quite English nor quite Yiddish, in which the vocabulary of the former was twisted to the syntax of the latter.”
It is possible, therefore, that while Yiddish-speaking immigrants from modern Poland (like the Levines) may have experienced some immediate difficulty in communicating with Yiddish-speaking immigrants from modern Lithuania, a shared linguistic heritage and an increasing overlap between Yiddish and American English appears to have narrowed this linguistic divide.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Merry Christmas from the Tenement Museum
Merry Christmas to all our readers!
Read a history of the Volunteers of America sidewalk Santas. They've been around for over 100 years with their distinctive chimneys. Apparently the New York chapter even created a "Santa School" in the 1950s.
And here's a bit about how cartoonist Thomas Nast invented the Santa that's familiar to so many Americans - today a personification of Christmas, but not always so.
We're also carrying this book, The Battle for Christmas, at the Museum Shop for the holidays. Author Stephen Nissenbaum "rediscovers Christmas's carnival origins and shows how it was transformed, during the nineteenth century, into a festival of domesticity and consumerism." Apparently New Yorkers played a prominent role (mais oui).
Warm wishes to all!
The Tenement Museum blog will return on December 29.
Read a history of the Volunteers of America sidewalk Santas. They've been around for over 100 years with their distinctive chimneys. Apparently the New York chapter even created a "Santa School" in the 1950s.
And here's a bit about how cartoonist Thomas Nast invented the Santa that's familiar to so many Americans - today a personification of Christmas, but not always so.
We're also carrying this book, The Battle for Christmas, at the Museum Shop for the holidays. Author Stephen Nissenbaum "rediscovers Christmas's carnival origins and shows how it was transformed, during the nineteenth century, into a festival of domesticity and consumerism." Apparently New Yorkers played a prominent role (mais oui).
Warm wishes to all!
The Tenement Museum blog will return on December 29.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Questions for Curatorial - Pets in the tenements
Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.
Did any 97 Orchard Street residents keep pets?
According to Josephine Baldizzi, who lived in the building in the late 1920s and 30s, their family owned a canary while living at 97 Orchard Street. Her father Adolfo was extremely fond of all the animals. After a busy day at work, he would walk into the apartment and immediately get a piece of lettuce to feed the bird in its cage. His wife Rosaria, however, hated all of the animals because they tracked dirt and bugs into the apartment. Josephine remembers her having a particularly hard time with Adolfo’s bird because the fluttering of its wings would send birdseed flying.
In her oral history, Josephine also mentions that the family had a cat, as well as a black and white dog, but it is unclear if this was at 97 Orchard Street or a subsequent residence.
Did any 97 Orchard Street residents keep pets?
According to Josephine Baldizzi, who lived in the building in the late 1920s and 30s, their family owned a canary while living at 97 Orchard Street. Her father Adolfo was extremely fond of all the animals. After a busy day at work, he would walk into the apartment and immediately get a piece of lettuce to feed the bird in its cage. His wife Rosaria, however, hated all of the animals because they tracked dirt and bugs into the apartment. Josephine remembers her having a particularly hard time with Adolfo’s bird because the fluttering of its wings would send birdseed flying.
In her oral history, Josephine also mentions that the family had a cat, as well as a black and white dog, but it is unclear if this was at 97 Orchard Street or a subsequent residence.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Mystery Object Revealed
Yesterday we posted a mysterious pink lumpy object and asked you to guess what it was. Well, drumroll, please...
It's a challah!
Curatorial and education department staff are busy updating elements of the Piecing it Together tour. Right now the Rogarshevsky family apartment depicts the Shiva of Abraham Rogarshevky in 1918, but next year, the museum will change the exhibit so that it depicts a typical Sabbath day in 1916.
The Sabbath table at that time would have include two loaves of challah bread. As food and drink are not permitted inside the museum (yay integrated pest management!), Collections Manager Derya turned to Iwasaki Images of America, which makes reproduction foods for restaurants, supermarkets, and - museums!
To make a bread, we had to send a sample to the company. Annie, our VP of Education,Grand Street California
We were lucky enough that the excellent Ron documented the process and sent us some photos. Behold - how a reproduction challah is born:
First, you make a mold out of a real challah bread.
Then you pour in the plastic molding agent and let it harden. The breads fresh out of their little mold "oven" are surprisingly life like.
They get a layer of shiny gloss and then a layer of light yellow that looks rather like an egg wash.
Next, they are spray painted.
And voila - we have bread!
You can see the new bread on the Piecing it Together tour sometime in the near future. (The bread will not be available to sign autographs.)
Thanks to Iwasaki Images for all the photos.
- Posted by Kate & Derya
Mystery Object - Keep Guessing!
We'll reveal what our mystery object is around noon today... in the meantime, keep your guests coming! Hint: it's definitely food-related.
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