Historic Houses Series - Glasgow Tenement House

Time for another weekly series. This one's on historic residential buildings around the world that have been transformed into museums, such as 97 Orchard's nearly identical twin in Glasgow, Scotland: a 117 year old tenement building that housed workers -mainly native Scots, it seems, rather than immigrants - during the Industrial Revolution. One of the apartments preserved by the museum was owned for over 50 years by a shorthand typist named Agnes Toward, whose pack-rat habits (she held onto bills, recipes, pamphlets, her grandparents' Victorian furniture, and even homemade jam) offer a snapshot of ordinary life in the early 20th century. The lesson here: leave clutter lying around in your apartment, and it may go on display for all to see in a museum one day.




Built of red and white sandstone, Glasgow tenement houses were typically subdivided into small one or two room "flats," as well as slightly larger ones for the more well-off. For more photos of the Tenement House interior, check out the museum's website.

-posted by Liana Grey

A Tale of Two Garment Districts

Long before New York's Garment District became synonymous with the square-mile section of Midtown West between 34th and 42nd streets, clothing was produced by hundreds of immigrants in the Lower East Side. 97 Orchard’s own Harris Levine ran a garment shop out of his apartment after arriving with his wife from Poland in the 1890s, paying two unmarried Jewish women $8 -$9 a week to put the finishing touches on items and an old man about $12 a week to iron them. (Learn more on our Piecing It Together Tour.) There were at least 23 such makeshift factories on the stretch of Orchard Street between Broome and Delancey. 180 still operate in the entire Lower East Side today (you can recognize them by the steam coming out of pipes near windows) and though demographics have shifted over the years, the shops continue to rely on immigrant labor.



During the Great Depression, Rosaria Baldizzi, an Italian immigrant living in 97 Orchard, was forced to find work in a factory (photographed above) in the city's "official" midtown Garment District. To see how the neighborhood was depicted in movies, books, and plays at the peak of its fame, check out this 50-minute lecture by historian Warren Shaw, courtesy of the Gotham Center.

-posted by Liana Grey

Historic Preservation Month: Places That Matter

Historic preservation has gone grass-roots: People all over the country are uploading photos of buildings near and dear to their hearts (ranging from a church in Goldsboro, North Carolina to the multipurpose Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma) onto a Flickr pool launched by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Over 700 entries have been compiled so far, but it doesn't look like New York is anywhere in the mix. Where in the city would you place a small white "This Place Matters" sign?



The Orchard House in Concord, MA matters to a museum educator dressed as Louisa May Alcott. The "Little Women" author and her family lived in the building in the mid 1800s.

Racism and Real Estate In Levittown

Racism was so rampant in Levittown that the pristine Cape Cod cottages in the country's most famous chain of suburbs might as well have had signs in their windows proclaiming: "whites only." In 1957, Bea and Lew Wechsler, a Jewish couple living in Pennsylvania's Levittown, exposed the dark underside of cookie-cutter suburbia by buying the house next door for a black family (the Myers), circumventing real estate practices designed to enforce segregation. Havoc ensued: Bill and Daisy Myers received threatening phone calls, crosses were burned on their lawn, and angry neighbors rioted and displayed Confederate flags in their cars. Journalist David Kushner chronicles all this in the book Levittown, which he and the Wechslers themselves will be discussing at the museum tomorrow night.

Tenement Talks on TV (And Our Website!)

Earlier this month, C-Span aired NYU professor Andrew Ross' discussion on job instability in an increasingly globalized (and, thanks to the current downturn, shrinking) economy. His book, Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, addresses why people are forced to change jobs so frequently these days. Watch the video clip here. And since C-Span only covers the occassional talk, check out the podcasts on our website if you'd like to catch up on others.

In other Tenement Talks news, folk artist Chris Lowe has posted the two songs ("Downtown" and "The Muse of Jones Alley") that inspired the theme of tonight's Lower East Side Stories installment on his Myspace page. Lowe will be performing live at the event.

An American Girl

Lots of buzz on Rebecca Rubin, the newest American Girl Doll in the series, this week. Although she doesn't officially launch until May 31, Rebecca has been all over the web (and, starting tomorrow morning, CNN - be on the look out for an interview with Museum President Morris Vogel, filmed in the Confino apartment).

While we didn't have any input into the doll's creation, the designers did visit the Museum to get a sense of the neighborhood's history, and we're hosting guests from American Girl Place on 5th Ave for a special tour of the Confino Family Living History program. Details, via American Girl:

New York City History Tour
June 7, 29; August 10
9:30 a.m. Cafe, 11:30 a.m. museum
Spend a day with your girl in New York City! During this special event, girls can meet our new historical character and enjoy a delicious meal in the American Girl Cafe. Then, you’ll take a private tour of the New York Tenement Museum, a National Historic Landmark on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Transportation to the museum provided by Coach USA.
General Information
Tickets: $75 per person (gratuity not included)
Reservations required; call toll-free 1-877-247-5223.
For girls ages 8 and up.

Sounds like fun! I hear there are still tickets available. What will our Victoria Confino say when she sees so many little girls toting pretty dolls into her 1916 world?

Downtown is Disappearing

"I wish it was the fifties or the sixties or the teens, so I could talk to someone who don't know what Starbucks means," laments folk artist Chris Lowe about the gentrification of once gritty and eclectic lower Manhattan in one of the songs that inspired the theme of tomorrow night's installment of Lower East Side Stories. The New York-born musician, who's lived on MacDougal Street for the past 20 years, will be performing live at the event, hosted by spoken word artist H.R. Britton. Check out a sample of Lowe's work below.

Opening and Closing - Streit's Matzos

Historic LES stores that have shuttered (or are about to), and the businesses that are replacing them.



The boxes of Streit's Matzo stacked in supermarkets across the country every Passover are produced not in China or along the Jersey Turnpike, but in an 84-year-old factory on Rivington and Suffolk Streets. Founded by European immigrant Aron Streit in 1916 and passed down to his granddaughters and great-grandsons, the iconic company is one of few mom and pop manufacturing firms left on Manhattan. With a grip on about 40% of the U.S. matzo market, it's still going strong. Rumor has it, though, that the factory has been put up for sale for $25 million for the second time in two years; the owners, who were initially reluctant to give up a piece of Lower East Side history, have struggled to find a buyer. (The business isn't closing, just moving elsewhere.) Because it lacks landmark status, the 47,500 square foot building could turn into just about anything if a deal goes through. Condos? A new Whole Foods? Your guess is as good as mine.

If you drop by 148-154 Rivington Street, workers (many of Puerto Rican rather than Eastern European heritage, in a testament to the neighborhood's changing demographics) might hand you some matzo samples.

Business Senselessness

Canal Street’s Jarmulowsky Bank building is a stop on the Museum’s new walking tour, Immigrant Soles. Here's a short history.



In 1873 prominent philanthropist and Russian immigrant Sender Jarmulowsky founded a bank on the Lower East Side. Through his astute business sense and community connections the bank grew, and in 1912 Jarmulowsky erected a structure at Orchard and Canal Streets magnificent enough for his successful company.

Unfortunately, Jarmulowsky died less than a month after the building was completed. Even more unfortunately, his bank failed only two years later, leaving thousands of its depositors penniless. Jarmulowsky himself had little to do with the bank's downfall. His seemingly risky business practices - granting loans to clients based on personality rather than financial standing - proved successful.

It was two of Jarmulowsky's sons who caused trouble, making bad real estate investments and mismanaging the institution they had inherited from their father. As World War I raged in Europe, crowds of Lower East Siders rushed to withdraw money for family across the Atlantic. Having squandered the bank’s funds, the Jarmulovskys couldn’t make good on their clients’ deposits.

Two thousand people demonstrated in front of the bank. Five hundred people stormed the house where son Meyer lived, forcing him and his family to flee over the rooftops. Shortly after the State took over the bank in May 1917, the Jarmulowsky sons were indicted for banking fraud and the bank closed. The building, however, still remains.

Over the Rooftops

Below is a 1914 NY Times article chronicling Meyer Jarmulowsky's escape from a mob of angry depositors. A brief summary: crowds gathered around the banker's home on Fort Washington Avenue, demanding their money. Fearing for his safety, Jarmulowsky scampered from his rooftop onto a neighboring apartment house, descended into the building's basement, and dashed across the street into a waiting cab, narrowly avoiding capture by the protestors.

Click to enlarge



Family Drama

Sender Jarmulowsky's descendants (at least those that made it into the NY Times' extensive archive on the family) were as prone to scandal as their ancestor was widly successful. Not only were sons Albert and Meyer indicted for fraud after forcing their father's bank to close, but a third son was sent to Bellevue's psych ward. And then there was a grandson who was jailed for stealing $1,625 from a jewelery store manager, and (perhaps the strangest of all) a granddaughter, Bertha Clark, whose elopement to a linen salesman in 1911 dragged her family into a messy lawsuit. When the couple was kept apart for 17 days by Clark's furious parents, the groom demanded $100,000 in retributions.

Questions for Curatorial - How Immigrants Handled Finances

When it comes to depositing money and taking out loans, many recent immigrants in New York avoid big banks in favor of local credit unions like the Affordable Loans for Immigrants Campaign and the Lower East Side People's Federal Credit Union, which support small businesses and allow undocumented workers to open accounts. (Many don't require social security numbers, using other methods to validate customers' identities.) Curatorial Director Dave discusses how immigrants dealt with finances back when 97 Orchard was still occupied.

Was it common for 19th Century Irish immigrants in New York to deposit their money in banks?

In 1873, former 97 Orchard Street resident and Irish immigrant Joseph Moore opened an account with the Emigrant Savings Bank. Given their relatively impoverished condition upon arrival, Irish immigrants appear to have had a surprising propensity to deposit their savings in banks.

The historian of Irish America Joseph J. Lee has written that, “The extraordinary savings surge on which so many immigrants embarked almost immediately upon arrival in New York City – depositing savings, however humble the amounts, on a regular basis for years—and which was presumably replicated wherever comparable institutions where available, may have reflected something of a search for security among people who had seen the price of insecurity paid through eviction and death. In fact, they quite possibly over saved, stinting themselves in order to help bring other family members out through remittances and to build up some protections against what they saw as a callous and unpredictable world.”

Source: J.J. Lee, “Introduction: Interpreting Irish America” in J.J. Lee and Marion Casey, eds., Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (New York University Press, 2006).


Built in 1908, the Emigrant Savings Bank on Chambers Street served New York's Irish population. Click here for more photos.

From the Archives - Linoleum Project

It was, if you will, the architectural equivalent of buying knock-off designer products: In order to save money on flooring, one of 97 Orchard's landlords lined some of the bedrooms and kitchens with felt-backed linoleum, a relatively cheap mixture of linseed oil and cork dust that replicated the patterns of carpet, tiles, and parquet squares. The material was first invented in 1860, but didn't boom in popularity until the Armstrong Cork Company, a major linoleum manufacturing firm, launched a massive marketing campaign in the 1920s.

During stabalization on 97 Orchard's 4th and 5th floors, we removed over 200 pieces of linoleum with 45 different patterns. After scouring research libraries around the city for original pattern books, such as the one pictured on the right, resident linoleum expert Melissa identified 21 of the patterns. The dates of those pieces Melissa was able to identify ranged from 1913 to 1939, though the earliest patterns were recycled throughout the next few decades. We suspect, in fact, that the first layer of linoleum was installed in 1924; in a mystery we're still trying to solve, multiple copies of newspaper pages from February 14, 16, and 17 of that year were used to line the wood floor underneath.





Pattern book images on the left match two of the pieces we removed from 97 Orchard. Tile-mimicking linoleum, as shown above, was found most frequently in the building, particularly kitchens. Floral, rug-like patterns were used in bedrooms.

Tiny's Art Exhibit

Tiny's Giant Sandwich shop on Rivington Street is a relatively recent addition to the Lower East Side (it opened in 1999), but it's celebrating the neighborhood's history next month with an art installation by local environmental designer Michael Brown. The mural, which captures a tenement building from a worm's eye view, was inspired by the camera obscura photography of Cuban artist Abelardo Morell, and will be splashed on the restaurant's walls and ceiling.

LostLES is on display June 5 through September, 2009

Questions for Curatorial - Short But Sweet

There was quite a bit of buzz last year about rezoning plans that would impose height restrictions on new construction in an 111-block radius of the Lower East Side. This was hardly the first effort to limit vertical growth in the neighborhood. Curatorial Director Dave explains.

Were there ever height regulations placed on buildings in New York City, especially tenements on the Lower East Side?

Height regulations were first placed on buildings in New York City by the 1916 Zoning Resolution. As the first comprehensive effort at regulating the height, area, and use of structures built in an urban environment, the resolution proved influential to other U.S. cities that enacted zoning legislation after 1916.

While the 1916 Zoning Regulation was in a sense formulated as a reaction to the ways in which a new building form, the “skyscraper,” blocked sunlight to the surrounding streets (resulting in the setback, pyramid-style designs typical of New York City high-rises) it applied to the entire city. Neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side were divided into height districts where limitations were formulated in relation to the width of the street. The Lower East Side was deemed a 1½ times district, meaning that no building was to be erected to a height in excess of 1½ times the width of the street. However, for each foot that the building or a portion of it was set back from the street line, three feet could be added to the height limit of the structure.

Although many of the tenements on the Lower East Side were erected prior to 1916, the height of those constructed after were subject to the limitations imposed by the 1916 Zoning Resolution.

Building height hasn't changed much in parts of the Lower East Side since the turn of the last century...



...although more of these have certainly sprung up over the last few years

TM on TV

Last month, the museum got its fifteen minutes of fame on television. (Almost literally. Just add up the lengths of the clips we're featured in.) Actress Lauren Ambrose told NBC's First Look that she fell in love with 97 Orchard while preparing for her role in Awake & Sing, a Lincoln Center production about a Jewish family struggling through the Great Depression, and now counts TM as one of the top three things she can't live without.

A recent PBS Sunday Arts profile gave a great behind-the-scenes look at our history and mission. And Columbia University's Uptown Radio covered "Coping While Broke," an April installment of our Lower East Side Stories series. Listen to museum educator Max Weissberg discuss the Yiddish term "luftmensch" and its relevance to economic downturns.

A tour of 97 Orchard helped Lauren Ambrose research immigrant life during the Great Depression for the play Awake and Sing

National Historic Preservation Month

Every spring, the National Trust for Historic Preservation compiles a list of the country's 11 most endangered landmarks in hopes that more resources will be pooled towards their rescue. This year's roundup includes the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Illinois, and tiny, remote Lana'i City, Hawaii. The entire Lower East Side was featured in 2008. But thanks to the slowing real estate market and the efforts of preservationists like Tenement Museum founder Ruth Abram (who won a prestigious award last month for her work), the neighborhood’s risk of losing its historical integrity to new construction has declined. Check out some footage of current at-risk sites on YouTube.



A large corporate landowner in Lana'i City wants to demolish historic buildings to make way for commercial developments.



Lack of maintenance and plans for replacement have put the East Coast's oldest vertical lift bridge at risk.

21st Anniversary Gala Photos

At last month's annual gala at Capitale, the Tenement Museum honored three of New York's most influential architects: Gary Handel, Brad Perkins, and Enrique Norten. All of their work has had a remarkable impact on the built environment, and both Mr. Handel and Mr. Perkins have been strong supporters of the Museum's restoration efforts. Perkins Eastman, the architecture and design firm, is currently finalizing plans for the Museum's new visitor center at 103 Orchard Street, slated to open early next year.

Thanks to everyone who came to enjoy a wonderful evening and supported the Tenement Museum's P.S. 97 campaign, the proceeds of which help underwrite NY public school visits.

Honoree Gary Handel (center)

Board Chairman Bruce Menin (left) with City Councilman Alan Gerson

Guests having fun in the Capitale ballroom

Questions for Curatorial - Staying... and Leaving

Over the last few years, stricter immigration laws, the recession, and improved living conditions in countries like India, China, and Mexico have led to an exodus of both skilled workers and undocumented immigrants. Curatorial Director Dave describes migration patterns at the turn of the last century and what conditions were like for those that chose to remain in New York.

In what percentages did immigrants return to their homelands? Are there differences if looked at by time period and ethnicities?

Many immigrants came to America with the ultimate intention of returning to their home countries after earning enough money to buy land or houses. Between 1900 and 1920, 36 percent of immigrants arriving in the United States returned home. In turn-of-the-century New York, the degree to which Russian Jews became permanent settlers was remarkable. Escaping virulent anti-Semitism and political oppression, many emigrated with no intention of returning.

Nevertheless, many more went back than is ordinarily assumed. Between 1880 and 1900, 15 to 20 percent returned to their homes. After 1900, however, return migration dropped off as political upheaval and religious oppression intensified. In contrast to Russian Jews, the return rate among Italians reached 50 percent in some years—of every 10 Italians who left for the U.S. between 1880 and World War I, 5 returned home.

Sometimes called “birds of passage,” many of the first Italian immigrants were young men who came to America with the intention of earning enough money to return to Italy, buy land, and raise a family.

According to Nancy Foner, author of From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration, “Italians called the United States ‘the workshop’; many arrived in March, April, and May and returned in October, November, and December, when layoffs were most numerous… For many Italian men, navigating freely between their villages and America became a way of life.” Nevertheless, many returnees or ritornati chose to re-migrate to the United States.

What is the source for the claim that the Lower East Side was the most densely populated place on earth at the turn of the last century?



Crowds on Hester Street

The source for the claim that the Lower East Side was the most densely populated place on earth at the turn of the last century comes from a housing survey conducted by the newly created Tenement House Department of New York City in 1903, charged with insuring the implementation of the Tenement House Act of 1901. The detailed survey found the Lower East Side’s 10th ward the most densely populated in the city and, indeed, the world.

In 1903, the ward had a total population of 69, 944 or approximately 665 people per acre. The most densely populated block in the ward, bounded by Orchard, Allen, Delancey, and Broome Streets, encompassed 2.04 acres and had a population density of 2,233 people per acre.

The extraordinary population density in the Tenth Ward and neighboring Lower East Side wards was caused by several factors. The major cause was the increasing population as incredible numbers of immigrants - largely Eastern European Jews and Italians - arrived in New York.

Immigrants initially settled on the Lower East Side because this was an area with affordable housing where immigrants were welcome by building owners. Members of particular ethnic or religious groups tended to cluster where their compatriots had already settled, leading to larger communities. Here people spoke their language and shared their customs. The religious and social institutions, and the commercial establishments that eased the transition to life in America, were already in existence.

Turn of the Century Comics

Few things capture immigrant life on the Lower East Side better than art, which we'll explore in this week's series.

Because they were published for a broad working class audience, turn of the century comic strips captured the pulse of immigrant life in a way that paintings, photos, and other forms of high-brow art couldn't.

One of the earliest strips was drawn by German immigrant Rudolph Dirks and appeared in the New York Journal in 1897. Dirks and his family settled in Chicago after landing in the US, but his cartoons - which were written in a hybrid of German and English and followed the misadventures of two mischievous brothers nicknamed the Katzenjammer Kids - would have struck a chord with New York's German population.

Even closer to home (literally) for residents of the Lower East Side was a comic strip set in the Fourth Ward's tenements, rear yards, and alleyways. The title character of Richard Outcault's extremely popular Yellow Kid cartoon, which wound up spawning the term "yellow journalism," embodied a somewhat stereotypical notion of the immigrant slums with his hand-me-down nightshirt, shaved head, and hard-knocks attitude. It's possible the Yellow Kid had fans in 97 Orchard; we've found scraps of newspapers throughout the building which might have once contained this or similar cartoons, as well as a comic strip from a 1931 issue of the Daily American in Apartment # 10.

The Yellow Kid comic strip was an offshoot of Hogan's Alley, an earlier Outcault cartoon set in the slums of the Lower East Side. The now-famous boy in the yellow nightdress was one of Hogan Alley's main characters.



A Yellow Kid strip published in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal in 1896. Lice infestations were frequent in working-class neighborhoods, which would explain the little boy's shaved head.

From Shimmel's Bakery to Shuttered Synagogues

Few things capture immigrant life on the Lower East Side better than art, which we'll explore in this week's series.

These gorgeous black and white snapshots of Lower East Side synagogues and bakeries by Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo were taken only 20 years ago, but have the feel of rare historic prints. The only hints of modern life are parked cars, graffiti, black plastic garbage bags, and the jeans and sweaters on customers at the still-thriving Shimmel Knish Bakery on Houston Street. Gertel's Bakery, another one of Deroo's subjects, was known for its tasty, authentic rugelach and challah. Unfortunately, like many mom-and-pop Jewish stores in the Lower East Side, it recently shuttered. The bakery's owners now run a wholesale business out of Williamsburg.



Recent photographs of the former Sons of Israel Kalwarie Synagogue on Pike Street (now a Buddhist temple) and Gertel's Bakery. Deroo's prints aren't floating freely on the web, so we couldn't post them here. Check them out on her website!

Rebecca Lepkoff Photographs

Few things capture turn-of-the-century life on the Lower East Side better than art, which we'll explore in this week's series.

Born in the Lower East Side in 1916, photographer Rebecca Lepkoff kept her camera trained on the neighborhood for over six decades, charting its gradual shift from melting pot to hipster hot spot. Early in her career, Lepkoff joined the progressive (and eventually black-listed ) Photo League, a group of New York shutterbugs that captured, like the Ashcan artists decades before them, the gritty realities of urban street life. Her classic black and white snapshots of the el train, tenement buildings, and mothers with baby carriages are featured in the book Life On the Lower East Side, and were on display for a while at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in SoHo, where visitors could ask to see rare original prints. The gallery's collection still includes works by a number of famous 20th century New York artists, including Jacob Riis.






A Lepkoff photo from the 1940s. Baby carriages were as common a sight on New York's streets back then as they are now.

Early Edison Films

Few things capture turn-of-the-century life on the Lower East Side better than art, which we'll explore in this week's series.


Thomas Edison shot some of the world's first movies in his West Orange, NJ studio (pictured above). When he decided to branch out to other locations in the mid 1890s, it's no surprise he often chose the big, bustling city only 20 miles away - and that some of his short, soundless films feature Ellis Island and the Lower East Side. The Library of Congress has a great selection of these early experiments in motion picture technology. So, of course, does YouTube.




The market in the following film was located on the Lower East Side, probably somewhere near Hester Street, where thousands of pushcart owners were licensed to sell fish.

Art in the Lower East Side: Ashcan Paintings

What was life really like on the Lower East Side over 100 years ago? The artifacts in our collection are great tools for piecing things together, but few things give a better overview than turn-of-the-century paintings, photographs, and films, which we'll explore in this week's series.

The Ashcan school of painting was controversial back in 1908 for the same reason it's so valuable to historians today: it exposed the seedy side of life on the Lower East Side, shocking wealthy New Yorkers who preffered to keep the city's squalor out of sight and out of mind. The turn of the century saw an explosion in progressive muckraking, with journalists like Jacob Riis using newspaper articles and photographs to win reforms for the working-class. What was most revolutionary about the eight founders of the Ashcan school (named for the gritty subjects of their paintings) was the tools they used to conduct their journalistic endeavors: paintbrushes and canvases rather than paper, pen, and camera. Following the motto "art for life's sake," the artists peeked into the saloons, rear yards, and alleyways east of the Bowery, producing works like the following:

Cliff Dwellers, by George Bellows

Six O'Clock, Winter by John Sloan

Dempsey and Firpo, by George Bellows

Other Museums - Wing Luke Asian Museum

This week, we're taking a look at immigration museums off the beaten path.



The Wing Luke Asian Museum sits in the heart of Seattle's Chinatown, but its exhibits cover all corners of the world's largest continent. Check out this photo essay on the Pacific Northwest's Sikh community, which hails originally from the Punjab region of India. Despite intense discrimination and a series of prohibitory laws, Sikhs have been settling in Oregon and Washington since the late 19th century, first as railroad and lumber mill workers and later as white collar professionals.

Other Museums - New Americans Museum

This week, we're taking a look at immigration museums off the beaten path.



Though located in historic Point Loma, the San Diego neighborhood where Portuguese explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo first landed in 1542, the New Americans Museum celebrates the country's newest arrivals rather than preserving the past. According to its website, one in five U.S. citizens was born abroad or is a first generation American. That's roughly 60 million people, each with a story that will probably go unrecorded unless it winds up in the museum's extensive audio and video archive, soon to be available online. The museum especially seeks to engage the country's youngest immigrants. Check out some of the winning entries of an essay contest inviting local students to share their family histories, and a slideshow of a children's citizenship ceremony hosted by the museum earlier this year.


A recent photo exhibit at the museum by Ricardo Ocreto Alvarado (1914-1976) captured life as a Filipino-American in 1950's San Francisco