Shopping for History

The historic shops at 97 Orchard Street were busy places, crammed full of people and goods. To recreate these environments for our "Shop Life" exhibit, we've done a bit of shopping ourselves, collecting historic objects to help us tell stories from dating all the way back to the 1860's.

Kathleen O'Hara, Collections Manager and Registrar, recently revealed some of these objects. Here are some of the highlights:

Iroquois war club, Schnieder's Saloon

We know that, in the late 19th century, 97 Orchard Street resident and shopkeeper John Schneider was a member of the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal organization that modeled many of its practices after Native American customs. The Red Men were known to dress in feathered headdresses, apply paint to their faces and collect artifacts associated with Native American culture.  While Native Americans would have used this type of club as a weapon, for members of the Order of Red Men like John Schneider, this would have been a souvenir and symbol of the fraternity.

Beer barrel, Schieder's Saloon

What would a German saloon be without a beer barrel? Nineteenth century German saloons were family-friendly gathering places on the Lower East Side.  While beer may have been the main attraction for parents of both sexes, whole families gathered in saloons like the one at 97 Orchard Street to enjoy home cooked meals and a lively atmosphere after a long day.

Sash and bundle of sticks, Schnieder's saloon

These objects are part of the regalia associated with the Oddfellows, another fraternal organization that congregated in the back rooms of saloons on the Lower East Side. The sash is made of velvet with intricate beaded designs. The bundle of sticks is a symbol which can be traced to ancient Roman concepts of strength and unity.

Trading Cards

These trading cards from 1934 were manufactured by the Schutter Johnson Candy-Corp. Collectors of all 25 designs could trade the cards in for various prizes such as a baseball mitt, a wristwatch, or roller skates. Cards depicting a detective, a policeman, a jockey, a hunter, a sailor, and an athlete are included in the Tenement Museum’s collections.

 

Microphone, Max Marcus' Auction House

A microphone like the one above would have been used by auction-house owners like 97 Orchard Street’s Max Marcus.  The microphone, when plugged into a radio, would broadcast the auctioneer’s voice throughout the room. In this image of Marcus' crowded auction house from 1933, we can imagine that it might have been hard to hear Max’s voice even with the microphone!

Undergarments, Sidney's Undergarments

In the 1970s, the Meda family started their own business in the basement of 97 Orchard Street selling ladies undergarments, called Sidney Undergarments Co. These colorful underwear were given to the Museum by the Medas themselves.  While these objects will not be on display for Shop Life, they give the curatorial team insight into the styles and prints that were popular at the time.

    

This is just a fraction of the cool items we have as part of our "Shop Life" collection. We'll keep you posted as we get closer to the exhibit's opening on October 1! 

-- Posted by Ana Colon

Rainy-day Rugelach

Here in New York, it looks like we're in for another damp, dreary day. Since it feels more like fall than spring, why not bake something delicious while waiting for the sun to return?

Below is a delicious recipe for rugalach, a traditional Jewish pastry, courtesy of  Jane Ziegelman, author of 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement. Jane served these cookies at a recent Tenement Talks event--needless to say, they were a huge hit!

4 ½ cups all-purpose flour
¾ pounds butter
1 yeast cake or 2 ½ teaspoons instant yeast
3 egg yolks
½ cup milk
½ cup sour cream
1 lemon (juice and rind)
1 teaspoon salt
3-4 cups walnuts, chopped
½ cup yellow raisins, chopped
1/4 cup sugar
cinnamon to taste
apricot jam

Mix flour and butter thoroughly; add yeast which has been dissolved in 2 tablespoons warm milk; add egg yolks to the rest of the milk and add to the flour mixture. Now add the lemon juice and grated, sour cream and salt. This should be thoroughly blended until it forms a ball. Put in refrigerator over night.

Let dough come to room temperature. Combine walnuts, raisins, sugar and cinnamon. Set aside. Divide dough into four even pieces. Roll into a long narrow rectangle, ¼ inch thick. Spread lightly with apricot jam, then sprinkle evenly with nut mixture. Roll up, jelly roll style, brush with milk and sprinkle with sugar. Repeat with remaining ingredients. Bake 30 minutes in moderate oven (350 degrees) or until nicely browned. When cool, slice in diagonal slices.

--adapted from the Jewish Centinel Cook Book, 1936

"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

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

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 second in a two-part essay on how artifacts pertaining to the media have been used in the exhibit.

Image of Jewish Daily Forward headline from May 18, 1903
Courtesy of Yeshiva Institute for Jewish Research

The Forverts can also be used to reveal other aspects of immigrant Jewish life. The newspaper’s name itself provides a telling starting point. Many Yiddish readers would have noticed that “forverts” is not a Yiddish word, but a Yiddish adaptation of the German word for “forward.” This choice reflects the significant influence of German socialists (mostly Gentiles) who lived on the Lower East Side in large numbers at the time eastern European Jews began arriving during the 1870s and 1880s. In labor lyceums, saloons (perhaps even the one located at the bottom of 97 Orchard between the years 1863 and 1886), and in other places, German and Russian Jewish radicals interacted with one another. Germans exercised a formative influence on Jewish socialists, such as Abraham Cahan, who went on to become the Forverts’ editor. They offered Cahan and his colleagues (who knew little of Karl Marx and his ideas before settling on the Lower East Side) ideological tutelage, financial aid, and practical assistance in getting the Jewish labor movement off the ground. Thus, when Jewish socialists chose Germany’s Vorwarts, the leading socialist newspaper in all of Europe, as their namesake, they paid tribute to their German mentors. The Rogarshevsky family surely knew little, if anything, of this German-Jewish alliance. They arrived on the scene in a later period, when Germans had all but left the Lower East Side for other parts of New York. Nonetheless, the Forverts represents its concrete legacy.

Rogarshevsky Family
Courtesy of Tenement Museum Photo Archives

The Forverts encapsulates another important cultural development that might seem unremarkable today, but was of profound importance a century ago: the creation of Yiddish newspaper readers. At the time of the Forverts’ birth in 1897, virtually no immigrant had read a Yiddish newspaper in the old country. Censorship in the Russian Empire, where the Rogarshevskys (along with most immigrant Jews) originated, prevented the publication of Yiddish newspapers until the early 1900s. Even with the easing of censorship following the 1905 revolution, a full-fledged Yiddish newspaper market took some time to develop. The Rogarshevskys probably had never seen a Yiddish newspaper or, at least, were not regular newspapers readers in Russia. When they arrived in New York, however, the Rogarshevskys discovered a thriving Yiddish newspaper market, in which a wide variety of Yiddish newspapers were sold in newsstands and read virtually everywhere: in cafes, in places of work, on park benches, at home, and so on. And if somebody did not have sufficient literacy—as was common among older women, for instance—that person nonetheless had opportunities to hear newspapers read aloud. In the Rogarshevsky household, the father or one of the children probably read the newspaper to other members of the family on a regular basis.


Newspapers had the effect of broadening the mental horizons of immigrants. The Forverts, for instance, not only provided news (often quite sensationalistic) from near and far, but also published fiction and poetry, educational articles on history and science, and gave practical advice that helped readers navigate difficult moral and ethical problems pertaining to daily life. Learning how to read the Forverts and other Yiddish newspapers often proved difficult. Immigrants encountered much unfamiliar vocabulary regarding unfamiliar subjects. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of immigrants learned how to read newspapers—often with the help of friends and relatives who had arrived earlier—and, in the process, became Americanized, albeit through the Yiddish language. An American innovation, the Forverts offers a glimpse into this complicated Americanization process.


In short, the Forverts provides a crucial piece of the Rogarshevskys’ life, connecting it to the larger immigrant Jewish experience as it unfolded beyond the four walls of 97 Orchard.

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]

Podcast: Butcher Shops and Other Businesses

Learn more about the businesses that operated our of 97 Orchard Street in the second half of our long conversation with Curatorial Director Dave. (Here's the first half.) He talks a lot about butcher shops and the Lustgarten family.

Powered by Podbean.com

Podcast: Collections Management and Conservation

An interview with Derya Golpinar, our collections manager and registrar. Derya talks about how she started working at the Tenement Museum, about the Museum's collections, and how we go about conserving a 147-year-old tenement building.

Powered by Podbean.com

Photo of the Day

Photo by DoreenKlein

Photo of the Day

Baldizzi family dresser, July 20, 2010. By ejswoo.

Photo Database: Back to School

So after a long, hot summer, September is finally here, and it's time for many children to head back to school. If you were growing up in the Lower East Side 80 or 100 years ago, how was it different dusting off the old notebook and pencil and strapping on your school shoes? Our Photo Database held a few interesting answers.

Here's a group of students being led in the ”Pledge of Allegiance” by one of their classmates at a New York City public school. While one female student is pictured holding the American flag, her classmates are saluting her. The teachers of the class are pictured sitting by a chalkboard in the background:

Class pictures were often taken as they are today. Here's P.S. 188 on E. Houston Street, though this depicts an eighth-grade class graduating in January 1912, not starting the school year:

Here's the grammar school class photo (c. 1905) including Sam Jaffe, who was born in 97 Orchard Street in 1891 and eventually became an actor. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1951.

Looks like children in the past had at least a few, superficial similarities to today. Keep reading through the month to learn more about school and education in immigrant neighborhoods like the Lower East Side.

Best of luck to all of you heading back to school! I am heading back to school myself - thank you for reading this summer! [Editor: Thanks to intern Devin for working on the blog this summer! We're hiring a new volunteer blogging intern this fall, so email check our website for details if you're interested in applying.]

-posted by Devin

Announcing the SNAPSHOT! Photo Contest Winner!

It was a photo finish! Congratulations to Amy Neiman, whose photograph is the Grand Prize winner of the SNAPSHOT! Photo Contest! Amy's photograph artfully depicts the kitchen in the recreated Gumpertz Family Apartment exhibit c.1878 on the second floor of 97 Orchard Street.



Thank you so much to all who voted! Amy will receive $25 to the Tenement Museum gift shop and her winning photo will be added to the museum’s permanent collection.

Well done, Amy, and a big congratulations to all of the finalists and entrants, whose photos you can view by visiting the Tenement Museum’s Flickr group.

-posted by Amita

Announcing the SNAPSHOT! Photo Contest finalists!

Thank you to all of the amazing photographers who joined us for SNAPSHOT! A Tenement Museum Photo Event to celebrate the launch of our new photo database. In case you missed it, on July 20, 2010, photo junkies and Tenement Museum fans were invited into 97 Orchard with their cameras to take photographs of the building's interior (something we normally don’t allow). We received a number of incredible submissions to the SNAPSHOT! Photo Contest, and you can see all of them by visiting the Tenement Museum’s Flickr group.

It was a difficult process, but we managed to select 11 finalists that we think capture the architecture of 97 Orchard and the tenement apartments inside. We hope you will help us pick a grand prize winner by checking out all of the finalists below (click on the thumbnails to view larger images) and voting, on the right, for your favorite!

Voting will end on Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 4:30 pm and the winner will be announced here on Friday, August 6, 2010.

Congratulations to all of the contestants and finalists!

Finalist 1:
Unrestored apartment wall on the fourth floor of 97 Orchard Street. Photo by Dominic Poon.


Finalist 2:
Front room of the recreated Moore Family Apartment exhibit c. 1869 on the fourth floor of 97 Orchard Street. Photo by Kathleen L. Kent.


Finalist 3:
Sewing machine in the front room of the recreated Levine Family Apartment exhibit c. 1897. Photo by Sue Shea.


Finalist 4:
Kitchen of the recreated Levine Family Apartment exhibit c. 1897. on the third floor of 97 Orchard Street. Photo by Shawn Hoke.


Finalist 5:
Kitchen of the recreated Rogarshevsky Family Apartment exhibit c.1915 on the third floor of 97 Orchard Street. Photo by Andrea Gaffney.


Finalist 6:
Antique doll in the recreated Gumpertz Family Apartment exhibit c.1878 on the second floor of 97 Orchard Street. Photo by Dominic Poon.


Finalist 7:
Kitchen in the recreated Gumpertz Family Apartment exhibit c.1878 on the second floor of 97 Orchard Street. Photo by Amy Neiman.


Finalist 8:
Kitchen of the recreated Moore Family Apartment exhibit c. 1869 on the fourth floor of 97 Orchard Street. Photo by Kathleen L. Kent.


Finalist 9:
Front room of the recreated Moore Family Apartment exhibit c. 1869 on the fourth floor of 97 Orchard Street. Photo by Daniel Molina.


Finalist 10:
Kitchen of an unrestored apartment on the second floor of 97 Orchard Street. Photo by Andrea Gaffney.


Finalist 11:
Graffiti on the third floor hallway inside 97 Orchard Street Photo by Shawn Hoke.


-posted by Amita

Signing a New Lease?

The guided tours of 97 Orchard Street generally focus on the lives of the tenement's residents. But have you ever wondered who owned the building since its completion in 1863? Browse these images from the Tenement Museum's online photo database to learn more about the landords of 97 Orchard.

Nathan Loewy (pictured here with his wife Emily and their daughter in Atlantic City) was the landlord of 97 Orchard Street in 1889.

In 1896, seven years after purchasing 97 Orchard Street, Loewy sold it to his father-in-law, Bernard Drachman, who sold it the following day to his daughter (and Nathan’s wife) Emily Drachman Loewy, pictured here.

Barnet Goldfein owned 97 Orchard Street with his partner, Benjamin Posner, from 1905 to 1906. Here he stands next to his wife Dora Goldfein, circa 1923.

Bertha Rosenblatt, the daughter of Albert and Lena Rosenblatt, stands in costume for Purim (a Jewish holiday celebrated one month before Passover), circa 1915. The Rosenblatts owned 97 Orchard Street between 1907 and 1919.

Gottlieb Helpern and a friend stand on a roof top in 1930. Check out those suits! Helpern undertook ownership of 97 Orchard Street in 1953.

Landlord Gottlieb Helpern stands in front of 96 Orchard Street. Gottlieb was also the landlord of 97 Orchard Street when this photograph was taken circa 1979.

-posted by Amita

97 Orchard Street's Decor and Architecture

What is the architectural detail on the façade, archways, and cornices of the buildings?

The front façade of 97 Orchard Street is an extremely simple version of the Italianate style, the most popular style for buildings erected in New York City during the early 1860s.
By the time 97 Orchard Street was built, the Italianate style, featuring arched openings for doors and windows, projecting stone lintels (a supporting wood or stone beam across the top of an opening, such as that of a window or door or fireplace), and foliate brackets (decorated with carved leaves), had filtered down to even the most modest projects. At 97 Orchard Street, the brick façade of the upper floors is ornamented by segmental-arch window openings (the circular arch above each window in which the inner circle is less than a semicircle) with brownstone trim. An Italianate projecting-metal cornice caps the façade and is coated with brownstone-colored sand paint.

What do we know about the wallpaper in 97 Orchard Street?

Around 1905, the main hall on the first floor was redesigned with the addition of an inexpensive, but durable covering of burlap painted red, and later shellacked with a brown varnish. In the late 1880s, wallpaper began to replace paint on the front room walls of apartments in 97 Orchard Street. We believe the landlord arranged for the walls to be papered probably every time new tenants moved into an apartment. Landlords may have opted to use wallpaper instead of paint because with its busy patterns, it better hid imperfections in the walls. In some cases tenants apparently added wallpaper in order to beautify the room.

In some of the apartments at 97 Orchard Street, up to 22 layers of wallpaper were discovered by paper conservator Reba Fishman Snyder. 7-10 layers of paint were found underneath the wallpaper in the front rooms. The walls of the kitchens and bedrooms exhibit an average of 37 to 39 layers of paint. Because the building was occupied for 72 years (from 1864 through 1935), simple statistical analysis shows that the interior surfaces were painted approximately every two years.

All photos can be found at the Tenement Museum's online photo archive, photos.tenement.org, and are part of the Museum's collection. Arch photo and facade photo by Jerome Liebling.

- Posted by Kate

Behind the Scenes : Wallpaper Removal

Below are some photographs of wallpaper conservator Reba Fishman Snyder working on the historic wallpaper that was found behind the sheet rock in the basement level of 97 Orchard Street. We are conducting a lot of new research in this part of the building and know very little about the wallpaper found here. Reba will be taking some wallpaper samples back to her lab for cleaning (so we can see the patterns/ designs better), and also to determine if any makers marks remain on the edges of the paper (also called the selvage) - this may help us date the wallpaper. 

We are also interested in finding out how many layers of wallpaper were used in this part of the building. On the upper floors of the building, Reba has found upwards of 22 layers applied one over the other. After conducting her research and analysis, the papers will be added to the museum's permanent collection which currently includes over 300 wallpaper samples from the building. 

Learn more about the wallpaper research conducted on the upper floors of the building here.

 

- posted by Derya

Rear Yard Update - Privy Shed is Here

On Friday the privy shed was delivered!

 

Restoration contractor Kevin Groves, who has spearheaded many preservation and recreation projects for the Museum, built the shed at his workshop in Montgomery, N.Y. He'd hoped to create the structure out of salvaged wood, but it didn't prove possible.

Instead, the shed is made of new wood and several of the stalls will be roughed up and dirtied to make them look as they might have in the early 20th century. One of the stalls will be left clean to represent the era when the building, and the privy shed, were new. Over time, the rain, sun, and wind will also take their toll, weathering the structure naturally.

Next up: doors and decoration.

(Photos by Tenement Museum)

-- Posted by Kate