"Piecing it Together" and the Impact of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire on Immigrant Life: An Educator's Perspective

I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t remember learning about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire growing up in Tennessee. Maybe it wasn’t taught at my school. Maybe I tuned out during that unit.

I’m even more embarrassed to admit that, despite 4 years in college as a history major, it was not until I became an educator at the Tenement Museum that I had more than a superficial understanding of what had happened at 19 Washington Place on March 25, 1911. Since I first began working with the Museum, virtually every "Piecing It Together" tour I lead has begun with a visitor asking, “Are you going to talk about the fire? The Triangle fire?”

I have been at the museum now for almost two years, yet I still marvel at how many of our visitors know about the fire - parents, kids, teachers – and not just those from New York. They know about the locked doors. They know about the fire as a watershed moment in this country’s movement towards labor regulations and the support of unions.

And now the answer to the question is of course, “Yes. I will be talking about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.”

New York Evening Journal headline from March 28, 1911
Image Courtesy Kheel Center at Cornell University

In keeping with the countless articles, television specials on PBS and HBO, and hundreds of events around the country commemorating the 100th anniversary of the fire, educators at the museum present the tragedy within the historical and political context of the labor movement.  We also draw connections between this history and the precarious position of unions today as evidenced by the recent events in Wisconsin.

What I think the museum does best, however, is to paint a picture of how the fire and its aftermath was experienced by the people living within the community and who were most impacted by the tragedy. We do this by examining the fire from the perspective of the Rogarshevsky family, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant family that arrived in the United States in 1901. The Rogarshevskys moved into 97 Orchard Street by 1910, and by the time of the fire in 1911, at least three family members were working in the garment industry: Abraham, the father, at a small tenement sweatshop in the neighborhood, and Ida and Bessie, the two daughters, at a big factory like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory further up town.




Rogarshevsky Parlor
Photo by Tenement Museum

 

We imagine how the mother, Fannie, must have felt when word of the fire reached the neighborhood. Perhaps initially without the name of the specific factory, Fannie feared the worst for her two daughters.

We look at the front page of the Jewish Daily Forward from Sunday, March 26, 1911, the day after the fire. The headline reads, “The Morgue is Filled With Our Sacrifices” – OUR sacrifices, the sacrifices of an entire community. Together, visitors imagine the eight members of the Rogarshevsky family poring over the paper together, looking for names of friends and neighbors in the preliminary list of victims.

Perhaps Abraham, the most religiously observant of the family, looked up from the paper and announced to his family that it was not a mere coincidence that the fire broke out on a Saturday, the holiest day of the week within the Jewish tradition. Perhaps he viewed the fire as a punishment for those Jews breaking their commandment with God by working on the Sabbath.

Did his children share his view or did they voice opposing opinions over the parlor table? Maybe they reminded him that the majority of factories were dark on Sundays, so that despite the imposition on religious traditions (and despite the unsafe and unhygienic conditions, the low pay and poor treatment, and the exploitation by foremen and bosses), immigrants like themselves had no choice but to work Monday through Saturday, regardless of the Commandments.

For me, this kind of approach breathes life into an event that has become synonymous with immigrant issues, women’s issues, workers’ issues, and resonates primarily on a political level. It illuminates the personal at the heart of the political.

Posted by Clare Burson

Visitor of the Week: Debbie Keller

Over the summer, look out for this new feature - Visitor of the Week! Each week we'll profile a different person who's been to the Tenement Museum. If you're coming to visit and would like to be profiled on the blog, send us as email.

Meet Debbie Keller, a writer and teacher from Sacramento, California who recently visited the Museum with her husband, Jim Muldavin and son, Noah. Like many of our guests, Debbie was in town visiting the city because she loves it here and still has many friends to visit.

Besides being born in Greenwich Village, Debbie has interesting Lower East Side ties. Her grandparents on both sides of the family, as well as her husband’s grandparents, all at one point lived on here in tenements and were involved in the garment industry. They emigrated at the turn of the century, sometime between 1908 and 1913. Her grandfather reupholstered furniture, and later in life he got his own company started. Debbie speculated that he started as a tailor and stayed in the sewing realm for the rest of his life. His family eventually moved to Washington Heights.

Her maternal grandparents (last name Schertz) came from Austria and her paternal grandparents emigrated from Poland (which at the time was part of Russia). What I thought was really cool was Debbie’s story of how the name Keller came to be. When her grandparents came to Ellis Island, their name was changed from  “Kalles” to Keller, which is the name she goes by today. Her husband’s family came from Moldova (northeast of Romania). Their original last name became Muldavin when they passed through Ellis Island. [Editor's note: no names were actually changed at Ellis Island. It's likely the family name change came later, either through transcription errors or by the family's choice. The Rogarshevsky family, whose story the Museum tells on the Piecing it Together tour, changed their name to Rosenthal by the 1930s.]

Debbie and her family had seen the Piecing it Together tour when I talked with them, but this was not Debbie’s first visit. She first came with her uncle shortly after the Museum opened. She was amazed by 97 Orchard itself.

“The condition of the building, actually, and the stairwells was what struck me the most," she commented. "But I was looking for more details about the living conditions, specifically. For example, the lack of sanitation, and there’s no sunlight or ventilation, and how crowded the rooms were. Also, my husband and son had never seen it before, so I’m glad they came with me!” [For more information about sanitation, check out the Moore Tour or read the blog.]

After leaving the Museum the family was planning to eat lunch Katz’s or Second Avenue Deli (at 33rd Street). Debbie was very impressed by the Lower East Side neighborhood.

“It’s changed even since I’ve been here before, I like it. It’s very cool and artsy.”

Debbie left me with something she wanted to share with everyone. “This Museum is fantastic. I just want everybody to come see it! It’s so rich with history and so amazing and so many Americans came through this gateway, it’s just the coolest thing!”

-posted by Devin

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, picked one up on Grand Street  and took it home for a week to harden. (The bread had to be dried out before a mold could be cast.) After a week, the challah bread was mailed from the Lower East Side to Iwasaki Images’ California studio, where they coated it pink putty and made a mold!

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

Meet the Educators: Justin Gilman and Rachel Serkin

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with two of the Tenement Museum's educators, Justin Gilman and Rachel Serkin. They told me about their jobs, inside and outside of 97 Orchard.

How long have you been working at the Tenement Museum?

JG: I've been working here for a month a half.

RS: I've been working here for four years now.

JG: Pretty different.

RS: For your fifth year, you get a chamber pot.

JG: I can't wait!

Can you tell me about your day-to-day schedule?

JG: Basically, I give tours here. I mostly do the Moore family tour, the Irish immigrant family. I'm learning the Piecing It Together tour starting today. I'm learning it because I took Rachel's tour and she was really great.

On a typical day, I get here about fifteen minutes before the tour and hang out with the other awesome educators. There's so many new people to meet every day. The tours last about an hour, and each and every tour is completely different. So every day is a totally different experience with student groups or families that came from Ireland or people who have no idea of Irish culture at all. I work twice a week: Thursdays and Saturdays for about five or six hours a day.

RS: When I started out at the museum, I was an access intern four summers ago in the office [editor's note: "access" involves working to make the museum accessible to people with disabilities]. So part of my training experience was to give tours, and I loved it so much that I asked them, "Can I come back next summer?" I've stuck around ever since.

I've succeeded in doing all the building tours so I've got all the family stories. I just passed the test to do the Immigrant Soles walking tour, and in addition, I do the Shared Journeys program with ESL classes. I'm a teacher by profession so, for me, it's a combination of teaching/storytelling/performance art.

I typically work three days a week. My day starts at ten or eleven o'clock but I usually end up coming an hour early because I like everyone here so much. It's really fun to schmooze in our break room. It's like our warm-up for the day and then, typically, I'm doing anywhere from three to five tours a day.

I had my first school group of the year yesterday... eighth graders. I just finished graduate school and the tenement building is my unorthodox classroom.

Justin, what other experience do you bring to the Tenement Museum? Do you have another outside job?

JG: Yeah, I got a couple of jobs. I'm an actor by trade. I just graduated from Columbia in May with a master's in acting. I don't have a teaching credential so I end up teaching acting because you don't always need a credential for that in university situations. They're just like, "Aw if you can do it, come on in." That's really fun and I love it. I'm also a nanny for a five month old baby boy, a four year old, and a six year old boy and an usher in an interactive bus tour that goes through Times Square called "The Ride."

When did you start doing that?

JG: I started doing that a week ago. I had a teaching job over the summer at Columbia where I taught high school kids acting, directing, and playwriting. Then I thought, I'm out of grad school and I have no job experience in New York City at all except for teaching. So I spent all of  September trying to find work and now finally, as of five days ago, can pay my rent.

RS: Mazel tov!

So being a tour guide is brand new to you.

JG: Yeah. Everything that's happening to me right now is new but I think that all of my acting training comes into it, like breathing so you can be relaxed. I'm more of a storyteller so my tours are very, very story heavy. They're about being as dramatic as possible.

What do you each find most rewarding about being educators here?

RS: I love my job. This is the coolest job that I've ever had. And the building itself is cool, too. As Justin said, we're really storytellers. I'm from Brooklyn, born and raised, so this is my history and my family's history. I love interacting with people from all over the world. Sometimes you touch people. I've had grown men get teary-eyed on my tours. And people share their stories. These families came to this country a hundred years ago and I try to get people to realize you have more in common with them than you might think.

JG: For me, it's the people as well. Teaching people is huge for me. And since I'm doing the Irish tour mostly, seeing people share what their ancestors had to deal with when they came to New York, it's really striking to me how that affects people. It gets me thinking too, because I'm half Irish, about my family, and thinking about what they had to deal with when they came to New York. I'm so lucky and so grateful that they dealt with that so we don't have to.

But the most rewarding thing is this job makes me feel like more of an activist because there's a lot we still have to do, especially in the Lower East Side, revving people up and saying, "we're not done yet." It's what helps me wake up in the morning.

RS: A lot of people sometimes come in with the mindset that their family was the only demographic to come through, and I love talking about Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) or the Five Points or Chinatown. This neighborhood is still a living, breathing thing. This community is still a living organism, still here.

What's most difficult about your job?

RS: Oh boy.

JG: I'm new to this, so I don't have a lot of difficulties right now. It's the simple things like remembering the dates, the names, the information, and being okay with not knowing the answers to everything. I'd like to be a know-it-all and make something up while saying it passionately but I can't do that because the visitors might know more than me. It's the idea of humbly giving a tour. I am not the end-all, be-all of this information. You clearly might know more than me and I'd love to hear your experience. The other thing is that people come in with their story and their family and sometimes it's difficult to open up their minds and say, "that's your experience, but we're talking about the Moore family. It's a different experience, but there may be correlations." It can be difficult, but when it happens, it's really rewarding.

RS: And if you work at a job like this, you learn a lot about human behavior and people. When there's fifteen, sixteen of us and 325 square feet, a lot of stuff can go down on a hot summer day, and sometimes people don't necessarily want to hear what you want to say. But we like to be challenged, and we like when people challenge each other. The majority of the time, the discussions are wonderful, but sometimes people just come in with a certain mindset and they aren't willing to change. They might not see any value in the history of the building, which is unfortunate.

One of the most challenging things for me is that I talk so much. We talk for a living, and it can be emotionally exhausting sometimes. When I was learning these tours, like the Moores tour, I started having dreams that I was giving the tour in my sleep.

Doing every tour here, you must be juggling a lot of information.

RS: It's amazing. I've learned that you can just turn it on for each tour. Sometimes you feel like you're telling the same tour but in the end, you can still bring it back to suit the individual theme or topic of the tour.

Do you ever confuse one tour for another?

RS: Oh yeah. One time I was doing a Getting By tour and I forgot Julius Gumpertz's name. I just drew a blank.

JG: That's something that I'm nervous about now that I'm learning my second tour. I've just been giving this one tour every day, and suddenly there's a lot of new information.

How do you prepare for all the question that you're asked?

RS: I'm used to some of them. "Is this the fireplace? Where's the toilet?" We get a lot of some of the same questions but I love it when visitors ask questions. I don't feel that I've done my job right when they're quiet. This is your tour. I like to talk, but I don't like to lecture. I want you to share. Open it up, ask anything you want.

JG: And we have tour content for every tour, and it's so much information that you couldn't possibly get out in an hour. So sometimes it's good for me to go back and reread the tour content because there's so much info that answers questions I have for myself. We have to study a lot because we're students at the same time as we're educators.

RS: We're always observing each other. They put us on observations because it's the same content, but every educator has a different way of spinning the same story. It refreshes your tour content.

JG: I observed somebody else today on the Moore family tour, and she does a tour that is 180 degrees from what I do, but in the end, there's the same result, and it's beautiful to see that.

How do you react when you don't know something? Do you admit that you just don't know it and need to study?

JG: I have to because I feel like otherwise I'm not doing my job. I always say "please go to the Visitor's Center where we have so many books and online access for further research." If I honestly just don't the information, it's always better for me to say that than lie to you.

RS: Absolutely. There's some things I just don't know and I'll say "Sorry, but I'm going to be sure to get that information."

Do people typically react well when that happens?

RS: Yeah. Overall, people are very understanding. We don't know everything and that's okay.

JG: I think that's how I feel a leader should work. It's like I know something up to a point and then I may need your help. Because I think when we lie and give the wrong information, then we're sending them the wrong message about our position. And I'd rather just say, "if you know more than me, you might want to talk about this because I want to hear." It's not like I'm the dictator and they're my minions. We're all in this together and I just happen to know more about this particular family.

RS: I've had visitors step in and save me because they knew an answer I didn't. Thank you!

JG: When there's somebody who has come straight from Ireland because they've heard about this museum and they want to take this tour, I'll always look to them and ask if they want to elaborate on anything. I don't want to feel like I know more than them because if his or her family dealt directly with these issues, then technically I don't.

Are there any particularly odd or unique questions that you recall getting?

RS: I've had visitors obsess with the families about birth control and things like that. I have people all the time asking, about the Baldizzis, "So they're Italian Catholics and they really only had two kids? Can you explain that?"

JG: I got asked the question, "Why are you talking about the Irish people so much? When are you going to talk about the Jews?" and I had to say "I'm sorry ma'am, I think you're on the wrong tour?" I can't give all of the tours at once. It's impossible.

I also get a little political with my tour, and we talk about the "No Irish Need Apply" policy, when many people didn't want the Irish to hold jobs. I relate that to modern times, trying to understand who might be in the position of the Irish today. I mention the Arizona immigration law, and sometimes I'll encounter people from Arizona. One woman stood up and gave a speech about why the law was fantastic, but I loved it. I love that stuff because I'd never heard someone vocalize that side of the issue before. People can get super passionate and they've experienced things that I'll never know.

Have you been in situations where you've applied the experience you've gained here?

RS: I come from the belief that history and literature really compliment each other. You look at our bookshop and you've got some of the greatest works of literature. I'd want to teach my kids Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, excerpts from Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, the work of Abraham Cahan, the editor of The Forward, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Some of the greatest works of literature come out of this time, so I love when I get school kids and tell them it's not just for your history class. Literature is a product of a time period and a historical event. That's exciting for me.

I was doing my student teaching last year, and I was a little nervous because the kids who come to this museum are kind of my guinea pigs. We had a workshop last week about classroom management and the school kids who are coming back. Essentially, we are playing the roles of teachers. We don't see these kids after two hours but we want them to have a positive educational experience. I'm applying for a teaching job right now so I love that I can still apply these skills I've learned and use them somewhere. And I feel so gratified when I get through to a group of kids.

Justin, has it helped you as a performer?

JG: Yeah, for sure. It's taught me more clearly how to read a room. Just like with an audience on stage, when you're giving a tour, sometimes you'll see that there's a gloomy atmosphere going on, and the tour that I give is already specifically gloomy so I can make the decision to put more jokes in, to have a better time. We don't need to be miserable while dealing with sad subject matter.

I use that at my usher job in Times Square job as well, thinking about what these people need and how I can help them. How can I play with a person for an hour and be okay with things changing so that they can have a good experience? I don't have to force gloom and doom on them if I can tell they already feel that way.

And It's the same way on stage. If the audience isn't feeling it, okay, let's do it funny.

RS: You've got to improvise. For me, with school kids, eighth through twelfth graders are the toughest sell because they're at that age where it's hardest to engage and motivate them. They come and pretend they don't care about history but they really do. And I have so much fun really trying to challenge them. I've also become a much better listener as a result of working here, hearing so many other people. It's not all about us talking. Even the questions I ask are a skill. We have some great facilitators that really know how to challenge visitors and ask these open-ended questions. It's a difficult skill and a great skill to have.

JG: It's taught me to be more open and inviting. I want you to be able to open up to me. It's the same on stage, where even if I'm playing a villain, I have to play an inviting villain because I want you to come on the journey with me. I don't want to keep you at bay. The greatest villain performances are when you want to be that guy's friend even though he's a maniac.

Do you think that willingness to learn is contagious with the visitors to the museum?

JG: Absolutely.

RS: We're accessible. We're the face of the museum. We're approachable. I love talking about how I'm the girl from Brooklyn. My mom's from Brooklyn, my dad's from the Bronx, and people can relate to those kind of stories. We're all the children of immigrants.

- Posted by Joe Klarl

Visitors of the Week: Paulette Kaufman and Nancy Leonard

From left: Paulette and Nancy

Each week, we profile one of the many interesting visitors who stop by the Tenement Museum. Do you want to be our next Visitor of the Week? If you're planning to visit and would like to be interviewed, send us an email.

Meet Paulette Kaufmann and Nancy Leonard, friends who decided to take the Piecing It Together tour, visiting the homes of Jewish immigrants, the Levines and Rogarshevskys. Kaufmann, a New York native, had visited many years ago with her husband and described it as "such an enriching experience" that she was glad to return when Leonard decided to take a tour.

I was lucky enough to speak to them about the harshness of early immigrant life and why New York tourists ought to head over to the Tenement Museum.

When you first walked into the apartments you saw today, what was your immediate reaction?
PK: Small spaces. I was beginning to wonder how they survived.

And what did you learn about the immigrants who lived there?
PK: For me, it was a repeat so actually, I can remember more of the experience because I've come back a second time. I do a lot of historical research and I was doing some research on an immigrant who lived in the northern part of Manhattan. So I was remembering back to my experience here. I was looking at the severance records and I was looking at the other information that I had about him and I kept referencing back to the time I had been here so it's always nice to be able to come back and take a look again, now with that experience.

If you could ask an immigrant at that time any one question, what would it be?
NL: I think the obvious one from a historical perspective is "how did you survive?" because it just seems like a very difficult life, a lot of physical labor, and you sort of understand why people didn't live as long as we tend to live now. But I think more about the community, what it was like to grow up there, whether they went to school or not would be fascinating to know, and what they learned from it all.

Would you encourage others to visit the Tenement Museum?
PK: Oh, absolutely. As a tourist, you may think it's all about Rockefeller Center, but the city has great, great stories to tell on every corner and in every burrough. I've traveled all around the world, and I'm always interested when I'm going into "old" cities or older areas of cities. I want to know how people lived their lives or the change that was going on, so on and so forth. So I encourage anybody visiting New York to come down here and see a slice of the city that they probably didn't know about.

- Interview by Joe Klarl

The Jewish Daily Forward on the Lower East Side: An Educator's Perspective

The Rogarshevsky apartment on our popular "Piecing It Together" tour takes our visitors into the Jewish Lower East Side of 1911. The family of eight, crowded into 325 square feet, likely spent most of their daytime hours at work or on the street. It's very likely that on occasion they might have found themselves on East Broadway by Essex Street. This is why a new object from that very location, a Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, has recently been added to the Rogarshevsky apartment; it illuminates the larger atmosphere of the Lower East Side at that time. Today this intersection looks very different than in 1911, but still possesses a hint of the energy that once pulsed there.


Image of the Jewish Daily Forward
Photo courtesy of BoweryBoogie.com



Just a few short blocks from 97 Orchard Street stands a majestic condominium building that faces Seward Park and the Seward Park Library. This triangular intersection is mostly quiet, except for the occasional taxicab or idling bus. Little does the average passerby realize that this intersection, so quiet and inconspicuous today, used to be bursting with fervent and empowering energy. With opinionated individuals, young and old, speaking their minds from a soapbox in Rutgers Square—where you might have even found a local intellectual celebrity like Emma Goldman or Eugene Debs debating the best course of action for Lower East Siders and the nation. And that majestic condo? The quiet and elegant bas-relief of Engels, Marx, Liebknecht and Lassalle engraved on the facade belies its former resident. This condo was originally home to the Jewish Daily Forward, the most influential voice in the early 20th century Yiddish-speaking East European Jewish community.

Founded by dissidents in April of 1897, the Forward became the source for information serving the working-class Yiddish-speaking population. The fifty socialists who served as the backbone for the paper were well aware, to lean on a later colloquialism, that the personal was political. Marginalized for their class status, their religion, their ethnicity, their immigrant status and most of all, for their language, the Yiddish-speaking population in the Lower East Side was most likely thought of as a backwards nuisance by uptown folks, if they were thought of at all. Out of this dismissal and disregard came a fierce drive for the community to pull itself up from within. Unlike most Victorian communities, the radical environment surrounding the Forward embraced all members of the community–women and men, young and old. In a world where conventional power eluded them, the community surrounding the Forward became a force to be reckoned with by organizing, through and around the newspaper as well as through unions and associations. These protests, walk-outs, and political actions would eventually profoundly influence New York City and the United States. Its contributors—both the professional writers and the readers who sent their letters and questions–debated the contours of American freedom and idealism and developed a strong social consciousness that advocated for many of the social protections and conventions that we take for granted today.

It's thrilling for a Tenement Museum Educator such as me to see a reproduced copy of the Forward lying on Bessie and Ida's cot in the Rogarshevsky dwelling. To me, it is a loud testament to the clatter of social action and a worthy struggle that is impossible to ignore. New York City has a proud history of civic engagement and empowerment for its citizens, but it is not there to be passively received. The Forward, folded politely on broadsheet paper, is a call to arms to the modern citizen; a reminder that no matter how oppressed you feel or how seemingly insurmountable the injustice that surrounds you, a strong and unified community can demand attention and change. It happened then. It can happen today.

--Posted by Emily Gallagher

Visitors of the Week: The Ornstein Family

Over the summer, look out for this new feature - Visitor of the Week! Each week we'll profile a different person who's been to the Tenement Museum. If you're coming to visit and would like to be profiled on the blog, send us as email.

Meet the Ornstein Family, recent visitors to the Tenement Museum. Pictured here are Leslie, Greg and Toriah. They live in Gainesville, Florida, where Leslie is a teacher and Greg is a data analyst. Said Leslie, “We love the City, so we’re visiting.”

Greg also has Lower East Side family ties. His father, Benjamin, lived on Orchard Street for a time and eventually lived all over the Lower East Side. Benjamin was born in 1936, and in 1957 he moved to California, where Greg was born. The Ornsteins wanted to see the neighborhood where Benjamin grew up in the 1930s and 1940s. They actually had specific addresses where he resided on the Lower East Side, including 739 East 5th Street, 89 Avenue B between 5th and 6th streets, and 26 Avenue B between 1st and 2nd streets. After their tour they planned on visiting these places and seeing what they look like now compared to when Benjamin lived there.

The Ornsteins were seeing “Piecing it Together” when I chatted with them, and about a year ago they had seen “Getting By.” They weren’t sure what to expect from the new tour, but they remembered parts of “Getting By” that were resonant to them.

Greg commented on the upgrades of the living conditions. “What I liked was the sense of the technological progression. It began as just a squalid little corner, then the air shafts were installed, and then electric light and flowing water. And as we went through the building, we got a sense of how the tenements became a more humane place to live.” [Read more about living conditions in the tenements.]

Leslie said, “I thought it was fascinating that our understanding of 'tenement' was that it was where poor people lived. And we learned that ‘tenement’ doesn’t necessarily mean poverty. [The negative connotation] is something that it has gained over the years. It’s become associated with negativity and poverty.”

-posted by Devin

Meet Lauren Rosenberg: Summer Intern

Meet Lauren Rosenberg, an education department intern at the Tenement Museum for the summer of 2010. On her last day at the Museum, she took some time to talk with me about her experience as an education department intern.

What have been your major responsibilities?
As an education department intern for the past two months (three days a week), my major responsibility has been assisting in the creation of lesson plans that accompany online interactives.

What were the highlights of your internship?
Aside from working with the wonderful people at the museum, I thoroughly enjoyed the tours and working with teachers and museum professionals.


Which tour was your favorite?
I liked “Piecing It Together” the best because my family immigrated here at roughly the same time period and worked in the garment industry. I actually gave the tour about four times and enjoyed doing so.

Were you nervous at all about giving tours?
I’m a school librarian during the year, so I’m not at all worried about talking to lots of people. [In terms of remembering all the tour information], after doing the run through with Pedro, I was okay and I remembered everything. Plus I saw the tour three times before I gave it, which helped tremendously.

When you first started, what did you expect to gain? Were your expectations fulfilled?
I planned on doing lesson plans that would help teachers and educators and working with great people. And those expectations were definitely fulfilled!

What accomplishment are you most proud of?
My favorite lesson plan is the We are Multicolored plan, which is not up on the website yet but will be eventually. [Editor's Note: We are Multicolored is an online game that allows users to make their own custom flag by mixing together the components of three different national flags.]

What are your plans for the fall and beyond?
I’m an early education school librarian, so that’s where I’ll be. Hopefully I can use the lesson plans I assisted with this summer in the library media center where I work.

Do you have any advice for people who are currently looking for internships?
Internships are a great way to learn about a profession, so try to apply to what you’re interested in and get a wide variety of experiences. Try different things because sometimes you don’t know what you like until you’re involved.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about your experience here?
The people who work here are amazing, and I’ve had such a wonderful summer. It was truly enjoyable coming to work everyday.

-posted by Devin

The Face of Child Labor

As September rolls around, many of our kids head back to school. It's a sometimes exciting, sometimes sad time - who wants to leave behind the beach, freedom, and Popsicles for the classroom? But a scholar friend of ours recently unearthed a pamphlet that shows the alternative to school for many Lower East Side children at the turn of the century: work. And not house work or farm chores - more like "sew buttons on 100 coats before bed."

The chart below, showing “Children Found at Work in Certain New York City Tenements October, 1906-April, 1907,” was published in 1908 in a pamphlet by the New York Child Labor Committee, National Child Labor Committee, and the Consumers' League.

As you can see, the chart shows that 558 of the children surveyed were working, while only 491 were attending school.

Even more interesting than this chart to me were the pamphlet's photographs, which immediately caught my attention.

The Museum’s Piecing it Together tour focuses on immigrants at work and how labor affected their lives. Both families we “visit” on the tour, the Levines and Rogarshevskys, were connected to the garment industry; the Levines ran a garment shop out of their home, the very thing the Consumer’s League was attempting to stamp out with pamphlets like this one.

As I stand in the Levine apartment on my tours, I find that some parts of the shop are easy to imagine. The crowded conditions, the low light, and the heat of the apartments in summer. I’ve felt these conditions myself working in 97 Orchard Street this year, our hottest summer on record!

But as many times as I’ve given the tour, I still have trouble imagining that children were the workers and often faced the terrible conditions in the garment industry alongside adults.

In their pamphlet, the Child Labor Committee makes it painfully clear that these child workers are not leading the kind of carefree lives we imagine children should. Most captions remind the reader how young the children are or what they should be doing instead of work. For example, the caption on the image below reads, “Work instead of play after school for these little flower-makers.”

Child labor was one of the facts of Lower East Side life, often a necessity to make ends meet in poor families. Illuminating this for visitors and helping younger guests contrast it to their lives today is a powerful way to demonstrate how much has changed for the children in our neighborhood.

Sometimes it's not enough simply to say that some of the people Harris Levine employed might have been as young as ten. Actually seeing the young children hard at work in these photographs, and being reminded of what more fortunate children would be doing instead, illuminates so much more. 

Even though things have changed here, the sweatshop has moved elsewhere, and a new generation of children are experiencing similar conditions in other locations around the world. At the Tenement Museum we also strive to draw these contemporary connections, reminding folks that what you see below is still happening. The Child Labor Committee strove to stamp out child labor with promotional materials like this pamphlet. What tactics do you see reformers using to stop child labor today?

- Posted by Educator Ellysheva Zeira, with thanks to Sarah Litvin


Special thanks to Marjorie Feld, a professor at Babson College and historian of the Progressive era, who is currently working with the Museum on a grant and sent us this pamphlet.

Read more about child labor in New York State, 1910-1922, in another report.

IMAGE CREDITS: Photos taken by Consumers' League, National Child Labor Committee, and New York Child Labor Committee, 1908. Pamphlet in collection of Harvard University Library. This material is owned, held, or licensed by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Contact Library for further copyright, reprint, or distribution information.

Visitors of the Week: Carolyn and Noah from London

We're always looking to learn about the many, diverse visitors who stop by the Tenement Museum each week. Planning a visit? Send us an email and be our next Visitor of the Week!

Meet our Visitors of the Week, Carolyn and her son, Noah. Visiting from London, the two come to New York many times a year to spend time with Noah’s Grandmother. After investigating their own family’s history, the two discovered that they, too, have a connection to the Lower East Side.

Carolyn: Noah’s grandmother… has a story down on the Lower East Side. So that’s why we started coming to the Tenement Museum. It’s the first time we’d been.

What’s your grandmother’s connection?

C: Norma, [Noah’s] grandmother, was born to Hyman Kremer and Naomi, who were immigrants from Bialystok, now Poland, once Russia. Norma married Jack Bloomberg, who also is from Bialystok. Once his family came here, Jack was born on the way in Britain by chance…. As far as we gather, we’ve just started investigating.

What tour will you be going on today?
C: Immigrant Soles, the Walking Tour.

Do you have any favorites from the other tours you’ve done here?
C: That’s a tough one!
Noah: I like Piecing It Together with Justin!
C: I liked that one, too. A lot of your family, Noah, was in the garment industry, as well. One of the memories that Norma had last night was… waking up very early in the morning to find her mother stitching sequins onto chiffon in the morning light by the window. It’s been very interesting the last week or two since we’ve been coming here, because you go around these stories in different ways and Norma’s remembered different things.

So what are some other things you like to do when you’re visiting New York?
N: I like to go to Central Park… to the zoo. And right now, I’ve been having a really good time sledding.
C: Do you remember where you went yesterday in Brooklyn?
N: We went to the Brooklyn Transit Museum! It used to be an old train station.
C: The other place that’s near where we’re staying now in the Upper West Side is the Natural History Museum! But this has actually been our best museum experience in all of New York, I would say. We became members after the first tour, and we’ve been on four indoor tours, and now the outside tour. We thought we’d leave it to the end, having done the indoor tours… So we’ll do that and go to Katz’s deli for lunch later!

Have you been yet?
N: No!

You have to get some latkes.
C: Is that one of the things we should get?

They’re so good!
C: We should get some, Noah. They’ll be better than your Dad’s at Chanukah!

- ag

Made in L.A.

Filmmaker Almudena Carracedo has won an Emmy for Made in L.A., a documentary that shadows three women fighting for better working conditions in Los Angeles sweatshops.

 

Tenement Talks hosted Almudena earlier this year for a screening of the film, which mirrors themes in the Museum’s Piecing It Together tour. Not only does this documentary open your eyes to the workplace discrimination taking place in our own country, Made in L.A. also provides a unique window into the lives of three very different women, who ultimately take very different paths.

 

We can’t help but note that the Tenement Museum also has a role in the film; as Almudena writes on the Latina Lista blog:

The United States is a country that’s been, in part, built by waves of immigrants, and yet — and this continues to amaze me — immigrants remain the focus of hatred and resentment here, too. There’s a scene in Made in L.A. where Lupe, one of the main characters and an immigrant from Mexico City, visits the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and Ellis Island, the gateway for millions of immigrants coming to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Lupe sees pictures of the immigrants who came to New York more than 100 years ago and sees how they lived, how hard they worked, and how they fought for their rights. In a moment of epiphany, both saddened and empowered, she concludes “It’s just like today!” That was a revelatory moment for me as well. She is so right, and it brings me great sadness that so many people have yet to connect these most recent waves of immigration to the greater U.S. narrative: it’s just the same struggle, the same hopes and dreams for a better life, both for themselves and for their children.

Both Lupe and Almudena understood the fundamental idea behind the Tenement Museum, and we’re so happy to be part of this fantastic film! Read the rest of Almudena’s post. Note that she’s looking to host more screenings in the future, so contact her if you have an interest.

Donor to the Collection: Mr. Allan J. Madansky

Often visitors ask us about the furnishings in the recreated exhibit apartments. Where did we get them? Did they belong to the actual family who lived in the apartment? In a nutshell, we conduct extensive research on the family and use what we learn to create a “historic furnishings plan.” This document includes an inventory of everything the family would have had in their home, down to the number of spoons. Once the furnishings plan is complete, museum staff search auctions, estate sales and flea markets for the items. Most of the time we purchase the items, but every once in a while, someone will offer to donate an item that we can use in a recreated apartment. This was the case earlier this year when I got a call from Allan Madansky.

Mr. Madansky’s mother, Chana Bias Meir, immigrated to the Lower East Side from Minsk about a hundred years ago. She was originally from Poland, but lived in Minsk for a while until she came to the United States. On the Lower East Side, she lived at 11 Henry Street and used a wooden butchering board to prepare her kosher meats at home. Meat would be placed on the slats and fluids would drip into the white, enameled tray at the end.

Collection of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum

After his mother passed, the board came into the possession of Mr. Madansky, who hung on to it over the years. After visiting the Tenement Museum, he decided to offer the board to the museum for use in the Rogarshevsky Family apartment. The Rogarshevsky Family lived in 97 Orchard Street during the same time that Mr. Madansky’s mother lived on the Lower East Side. We know that Fannie Rogarshevsky, the matriarch of the Rogarshevsky Family, kept a kosher house, and we even have a metal pail she used for koshering meat that was donated to the museum by her family.

After visiting Mr. Madansky at home and picking up the board, I brought it back to the museum for cataloging. Soon it will be on display in the kitchen of the Rogarshevsky Family Apartment, which is on the third floor of 97 Orchard Street and visible as part of our Piecing it Together Tour.

-Posted by Derya

From Russia with Love: A 1st Generation Cobbler and a 3rd Generation Educator

Erik Shoemaker spends most of his day behind the counter of his tiny shop on Grand Street, surrounded by boxes of shoes, jars of polish, hammers, buffers, and every tool needed to fix shoes no matter how tattered and broken. Erik moved to New York City from Russia when he was a teenager, and he quickly learned his family's trade. When he opened Erik Shoe Repair twenty-four years ago, he became a third-generation cobbler.

Erik repairing shoes at his Lower East Side store.

Erik and his family decided to leave Russia with a simple goal: to have a better life. After staying in Israel, they arrived in New York City in the 1980s. For him, the adjustment was fairly easy, because he could practice Judaism.

"You go freely to pray and wear a yarmulke without worrying," he says, comparing the US to his homeland. "It was the time of communism in Russia," and most religious practices were banned.

His faith is what brought him to the Lower East Side. When he first arrived in New York City, he learned to repair shoes with his brother-in-law on Fourteenth Street. He decided to open his shop further downtown because it was a predominately Jewish neighborhood at the time. He was able to speak Hebrew while he was learning English.

Erik has seen the Lower East Side change frequently and suddenly over the years. His Jewish community started moving to Queens and Long Island. Then there was a larger wave of Chinese immigrants. Lately, his customers have been mainly Americans and Europeans from the East Village, who he calls "the village people" with a slight smile. Despite all the changes, Erik still likes working in the neighborhood. "It's quiet," he says.

And Erik is certainly well known around here. In 2007, New York Magazine named him the best shoe repair shop in the Lower East Side. His award is proudly displayed on his door. He says he won because he's "fast, and I do a good job." How fast? The article says that Erik once did a reheeling job while a taxi idled on the sidewalk.

****

Back at the museum, Kathryn Lloyd, an educator who has led all of the Tenement Museum's building and neighborhood tours, also has a history deeply rooted in Eastern Europe and the Lower East Side, though hers begins with her great grandparents. Listen as she discusses how her family directly influenced her career as an educator and the way in which she approaches the hardships of immigration, past and present.

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Want to know more about Russian and other Eastern European immigrants on the Lower East Side? Get the details on The Moores: An Irish Family in America, in which the title family is compared to the Russian-Jewish Katz family, or the tour Kathryn says is closest to her own family's history - Piecing It Together - here.

- Article by Kiley Edgley and Joe Klarl

Here's something interesting for those of you who are interested in labor history. We talk a lot about the garment industry and unions on the Piecing it Together tour.

This is pulled from the NY Times City Room blog, where historian Joshua Freeman (author of Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II) is answering questions.

Q: In your opinion, what were the primary causes and repercussions of the early 20th-century conflicts between the various leftist unions in the New York City’s garment center?

For example, in his landmark book “World of Our Fathers,” Irving Howe wrote: “If anything, the Jewish Communists were more ferocious than their gentile comrades, for when Joseph Boruchowitz, the Communist leader of the cloak union started debating a Forvetsnik (a Forward supporter), what erupted was not just a difference of opinion but a seething hatred between men who only yesterday had known one another intimately.” (Page 333) — Posted by Miles T. Wood

A. The battles among leftists in the New York garment unions were part of a worldwide fight between communists and socialists, which broke out in the wake of the Russian Revolution. New York leftists had disagreements about union strategy and national politics, but the heart of their conflict lay in loyalties to contending international movements. As Irving Howe suggested, the social and political proximity of the factionalists added to the bitterness between them. In few places in America besides the world of radical New York labor were socialists called “the right wing.” During the mid-1920s, leftist factionalism crippled several unions, including the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. The inability of communists and socialists to work together, except during brief periods, diminished their influence on the larger labor movement, (though it nonetheless was considerable, especially in New York).


Anyone have a different perspective?

- Posted by Kate

Commemorative Events for the 100th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

On March 25, 1911, as employees of the Triangle Waist Company finished their workday in the Asch Building (now known as the Brown Building; located on Washington Place and Greene Street), a fire broke out when a cigarette was thrown into a pile of lawn, an extremely flammable fabric used to make shirtwaists. As a result of poor safety conditions and a lack of emergency protocol in the Triangle factory, 146 men and women died tragically.  The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was a climatic moment in labor history because it spurred the United States government to pass legislative reforms that would protect workers' rights.

Wednesday, March 25, 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Fire. There are countless forms of commemoration occurring throughout New York City and even across the country. The following are events, resources, and websites that can help one learn about and become involved with the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

Official Commemoration on March 25, 2011
Workers United will sponsor the official commemoration of the Triangle fire at the Brown Building in New York City
11 am: Music
12 pm: Speakers
4:45 pm EST: Join churches, schools and fire houses across the country to ring a bell at the exact time the first alarm was sounded

Programs at the Tenement Museum
March 22, 2011 at 6:30 pm
Fire Escape: A Commemorative Performance
America-in-Play memorializes the 100th anniversary of the fire with a performance that honors the victims of this tragedy.
Located at 108 Orchard Street

March 23, 2011 at 6:30 pm
Triangle: The Fire That Changed America with David Von Drehle
The author of the definitive social history discusses American labor conditions before and after the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of our city.
Located at 108 Orchard Street
Visit Tenement Talks 

“Piecing it Together” Tour
See the homes and garment shop of Jewish families who lived in the tenement during the “great wave” of immigration to America.
Tours Given Daily

Comprehensive List of Events at the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition
Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition is supporting organizations and the collaboration between communities across the country by spearheading the creation of commemorative events.
Visit the Remember the Triangle Fire's Online Calendar of Events

Online Resources
Triangle Fire Open Archive
The Triangle Fire Open Archive is an online archive being created by community contributions to tell the story of the Triangle Fire and its relevance today.
Visit the Open Archive 

Remembering The Triangle Factory Fire 100 Years Later Online Exhibit
Cornell University's IRL School Kheel Center honors the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Fire through a detailed online web exhibit.
Visit the Triangle Fire Online Exhibit

American Experience: The Triangle Fire Documentary
PBS created a documentary on the deadliest workplace accident in New York City.
Watch the Triangle Fire Documentary

Next week the Tenement Museum blog will be solely focused on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Please stay tuned.

Triangle Factory Fire

Museum Shop Manager Katherine Broadway guest-blogs about some of her favorite Shop books.

On March 25, 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, located in the Brown Building at the corner of Washington and Greene Streets (still standing at the edge of NYU’s campus), caught fire when an employee tossed a cigarette into a bin of scrap fabric. Within 15 minutes, 146 garment workers were killed, most of them women. This was the worst workplace disaster in New York until September 11, 2001.

The Tenement Museum’s Piecing It Together Tour introduces visitors to two families tied to the garment industry on the Lower East Side. The Triangle fire affected garment workers on the Lower East Side by galvanizing support among the general public for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). The tragedy eventually led to regulations for worker and fire safety that are still in place today.

The Museum Shop has many books on the Triangle fire. My favorites are Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle and Triangle: A Novel by Katharine Weber. Von Drehle’s Triangle gives not only a detailed account of the fire and its aftermath but also provides a history of the many waves of immigration to New York, which adds perspective and depth to the tragic story. Weber’s novel connects a contemporary woman researching the fire with an aging survivor of the tragedy, linking the past with the present in a way that shows how women’s labor remains a troubled issue, and ways in which it has changed.

We are proud to invite you to listen to David Von Drehle discuss the history of the Triangle Fire on the 98th anniversary of the fire. He will be speaking in the Museum Shop at 6:30 p.m. TONIGHT. Please join us!

Further Reading:

The Triangle Fire, by Leon Stein
The Triangle Fire, The Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York, by Richard Greenwald
Dreamland, by Kevin Baker

The Jewish Daily Forward and the Daily Lives of the Rogarshevsky Family: Guest Post by Tony Michels -- Part I

Thanks to an NEH grant, scholar Tony Michels is advising the Tenement Museum on how we can use objects to tell stories in the Rogarshevsky family apartment. He'll be at Tenement Talks on February 17 at 6:30 pm. Here is the first in a two-part essay on how artifacts pertaining to the media have been used in the exhibit.

“Piecing It Together” vividly reconstructs the domestic life of the Rogarshevsky family, but how might we connect the Rogarshevsky domicile to the larger public arena? I raise this question because immigrant Jews spent much of their free time outside of their apartments: in parks and squares, on street corners, in cafes, and in other public and semi-public places. Unfortunately, few of those places still exist or, if they do they reveal few traces of past events. Rutgers Square, now named Strauss Square, used to be a gathering spot for young Jewish radicals, who congregated there nearly every day to discuss and argue issues of the day, but the square today gives no indication of this past. Linking the public and private realms thus presents a challenge, though not an insurmountable one.


A simple artifact—the Yiddish daily Forverts—can be used to connect the Rogarshevsky apartment to the world outside. We do not know for sure whether the Rogarshevskys read the Forverts. They could choose from no less than five Yiddish dailies during their years living at 97 Orchard. Nonetheless, we can reasonably surmise that at least one person in the Rogarshevsky family read the Forverts. This is because the Forverts was the most popular Yiddish newspaper in the United States, indeed the world. With a circulation topping 200,000 in 1917, the Forverts sold more than twice the number of copies than did its closest Yiddish competitor. Furthermore, the Forverts was not just a newspaper in an ordinary sense, but a force within immigrant public life. Its writers and editors played leading roles in Jewish communal affairs, the Jewish labor movement, New York City politics, and the American socialist movement as a whole. If an immigrant wanted to keep abreast of current events, he or she most likely turned to the Forverts (though not necessarily to the exclusion of other newspapers). Even immigrants who considered themselves traditional, religious Jews read the Forverts because they saw no contradiction between its socialist viewpoint and their Judaism. Religious articles of the kind seen in the Rogarshevsky apartment and the Forverts often shared space in a single household.

The Bintel Brief, a Yiddish advice column, began in 1906. Bintel means "bundle" and brief  means letter.
Courtesy of The Bintel Brief

Many of the events covered by the Forverts had to do with labor movement. An avowedly socialist newspaper, the Forverts’ masthead declared: “Workers of the world unite! The liberation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves!” The Forverts published countless articles on strikes, consumer boycotts, demonstrations, parades, and debates: all frequent occurrences on the streets of the Lower East Side. The newspaper did not merely report on events; it served as a tribune of the Jewish working class. Take the Forverts’ response to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire as an example. On the day following that terrible incident, the Forverts’ front-page headline wailed: “The morgue is filled with our dead/victims! 175 workers lose their lives in a burning shirtwaist factory. The entire Jewish Quarter mourns.” The Forverts refused to adopt a dispassionate tone or removed stance. The victims were “ours.” And masses of Jewish workers, who knew firsthand the hardships and abuses of the garment industry, looked to the Forverts to articulate their grievances and lead the way…forward.


The March 26, 1911 copy of the Forverts thus opens up the Rogarshevsky apartment, bringing to bear one of the major events of the immigrant era. The presence of the newspaper invites us to imagine how the Rogarshevsky family might have reacted and discuss the public outcry that followed, culminating in the reform legislation passed by the New York State Assembly as a result.

[Part II will be posted later this afternoon]

Questions for Curatorial - Garment Shops on the LES

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

Where did Harris Levine get the pattern and fabric he needed to sew the dresses produced in his garment shop at 97 Orchard Street at the turn of the century? Who supplied all of the necessary materials?

During the late 19th century, manufacturers in New York’s burgeoning garment industry were responsible for designing, cutting, and marketing garments. One manufacturer on the Lower East Side was Jacob Vogelmann. During the 1890s, he operated a shop at 264 Broome, between Allen and Orchard Street, where there is a tailor shop today. In 1904, Vogelmann served as a witness to Harris Levine’s naturalization petition. He might have designed the garments, cut the cloth, and subcontracted the pieces out to be assembled by subcontractors like Harris Levine of 97 Orchard Street.

Both manufacturers and subcontractors working in the Lower East Side’s the turn-of-the twentieth century garment industry were likely to be immigrants and tenement dwellers. Subcontractors like Harris Levine lived in tenement apartments and competed for the contracts that Vogelmann and other manufacturers offered. Without money to rent a separate space for their businesses, they transformed their kitchens and living rooms into small garment shops. Many hired their neighbors and/or family members to help with the sewing. The contracts usually went to the shops that could sew quickly, cheaply, and without making mistakes.

(The Levine family story is told on the Piecing it Together tour; read more here.)