Great Question: Which objects belonged to the Baldizzis?

Questions posed by our visitors lead to great conversations. Occasionally, we'll post a great question that's frequently asked, along with the answer, to give you a bit of back story on our exhibits.

Which objects in the Baldizzi apartment actually belonged to the family?

Some of the most precious objects in our collection are displayed in the Baldizzi apartment. Unlike other families we talk about, we were lucky to have a first-person link to the Baldizzi family through former resident Josephine Baldizzi. Josephine shared her family's story with us, giving a detailed account of her life in our tenement.

The Baldizzis were generous with objects as well as stories, so among the period-appropriate housewares that we've gathered from other sources, we also have family heirlooms on display in the Baldizzi home.

Among these precious objects are three monogrammed dishtowels--you can see them hanging from an improvised laundry line in the Baldizzi apartment below.

The Baldizzi kitchen

Baldizzi family heirlooms on display

These towels once belonged to Josephine's mother, Rosaria, who emigrated from her native Sicily as a very young woman in the 1920's. The embroidered monogram "R.M." stands for Rosaria Mutolo, her maiden name. They were precious possessions, among the few things that Rosaria was able to carry with her across the ocean on the long journey to her new life.

We're also fortunate to have a handful of other objects that once belonged to the Baldizzis, including some other textiles, cookware, and a box of Linit laundry starch. On our Hard Times tour, visitors hear an audio clip of Josephine recalling her mother's use of Linit to starch their clothes when she was a little girl.

Take our "Hard Times" tour to get a firsthand look at these objects in the Baldizzi apartment!

-- Posted by Kira Garcia

What is in a Photograph?: Educator Jason Eisner on the Past and Present Program

During the dialogue component of the Past & Present (P&P) program, where we share, bring to life, and re-examine our memories, we frequently use a space in our historical Tenement informally known as “the parlor.”  Three decades ago, “the parlor” space was a storefront. Generations before that it served as an apartment -- a home to countless numbers of immigrant families. Walls were removed and painted innumerable times, locks were changed, plumbing and electricity installed, but being in this parlor you might think it had originally been designed as a communal meeting place.

      
The tables in the parlor are akin to the kind my grandmother had (tin topped with enamel-ized patterns and faux wood gaining), lined end to end like a banquet, and the chairs are all mismatched. There is a sense of collective memory in this parlor. Framed old photographs line the pink painted walls. 

      
I return time and again to the photographs on the wall -- images of people and times long gone but ever present. There are moments where discussions in the parlor heat up and the exchanging of memories provokes debate. Silently bearing witness to these rich dialogues are those people depicted and framed on the wall.

      
“Who are they? Where did they live and what did they do? Who took the picture -- A parent? A lover? A stranger? What became of them? And what was their story?” These are questions I have about the pictures, and in the quiet moments when I am cleaning the parlor at the end of our discussions, I am haunted by the idea that perhaps the people in the photographs are asking the same questions about us.

      
Photographs, like history, are slippery when you begin to look more closely. The stories they tell or conceal are not static; rather they are alive and fluid. We all have a collection of photographs and those images serve as a record of our memory. These pictures punctuate the stories we tell of our families and our history, but they may be suggesting an alternative narrative. Dare we look closer and ask of those silent mouths and far away eyes?

     
At two points during the tour portion of the P&P program, we share photographs of the families whose stories we tell: Natalie Gumpertz and Josephine Baldizzi. If we engage with the pictures of these women, we can more personally connect to their life.

      
Natalie Gumpertz is depicted wearing an elaborate Victorian style shirtwaist. As a dressmaker herself, did she make the garment she is wearing for the photo? Would this be a garment she would wear for only special occasions? Rather than looking directly at the camera, she is looking slightly to the right. Was she instructed to do this?  Or perhaps she was frightened by the photographic process? Her eyes do not betray a sense of fear. Could she have brought one of her children with her and was focusing her attention on what they were doing beyond the lens of the camera? And it looks as though she might speak, her lips caught between smile and austerity. Could Natalie be about to tell us her last memory of her husband before he vanished from her life?

Josephine and Johnny Baldizzi

And there’s Josephine on the roof with her brother Johnny- she in her summer dress, and he in his sailor suit. Are these clothes that they only wore on special occasions? Why is Josephine sitting in the picture while Johnny is standing? Was she taller than he? Is this a composition Adolfo (their father and presumed photographer) was responsible for? Was Josephine happy about the composition -- her head is turned away slightly, but her gaze is fixed on the camera. She is almost scowling! Did her father have strong words with her about her protest?

Ultimately we will never know the answers, but if we open ourselves up to the inner drama of the picture, we are overtaken by it.

Likewise, by engaging history through the filter of the families who endured it, we intimately connect to the past. The P&P program allows us to expand this connection and to add our personal narratives to it. In the process is the discovery that we are not very different from people who lived one hundred fifty years ago; immigrants from Germany, Russia, Italy, or China who worked through hardship and who suffered, who lost and found jobs just as they gave birth to and lost children, who lived and loved, argued and made amends, and died in rooms.


There are revelations along the way, old myths and preconceptions shattered, and all of this because we dare to ask questions of our past. It is challenging but essential work in continuing the search for identity. For encouragement, I take heart in the words of a German immigrant whose picture I used to have on my refrigerator -- he was standing on the streets of New York sticking his tongue out at the camera: “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.” --Albert Einstein

     - Posted by Jason Eisner, Tenement Museum Educator

Unsung Immigrants: The Bonofiglios

The Tenement Museum is always compiling more information about the immigrants featured on our tours, but have you ever wondered about the thousands of other people who have lived at 97 Orchard Street? Well, we keep track of them too.

One of those families is the Bonofiglios. Like the Baldizzis, who are featured on the Getting By tour, the Bonofiglios were Italian immigrants who lived at 97 Orchard Street during the early 1930s. In fact, they lived just upstairs from the Baldizzi family.

Parents John and Rose Bonofiglio had two sons, Vincent and Anthony, with them in their small apartment. John's sister Rita Bonofiglio, or "Rita Bono," lived on the top floor.

Here you can see a family portrait featuring John, age 41, Vincent, age 4, and Rose, age 30, taken sometime in 1938 or '39:

Collection of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum © 2010

Adolfo Baldizzi, his wife Rosaria, and their two children Josephine and Johnny became fast friends with their neighbors.

John and Rose were Godparents to little Johnny and Josephine, and Rosaria Baldizzi was Godmother to Rita Bono. Anthony Bonofiglio recalls that Josephine may have even been the flower girl at his parents' wedding.

The following photograph shows Rita and and her Godmother at Rita's confirmation in 1937.

Collection of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum © 2010

Though John and Rose are now deceased, the Bonofiglio children still live nearby in areas of Brooklyn and New Jersey.

In 1939, Adolpho Baldizzi got a job in Brooklyn Navy Yard and his family left the Lower East Side, but they never forgot their friends. When Josephine spoke with the Tenement Museum in 1989, she told us that the Bonofiglios are "related with me now."

While we have more information today on the Baldizzis than the Bonofiglios, it's safe to say that many of 97 Orchard Street's residents wouldn't have been the same without their neighbors and the lifelong bonds that were forged there.

-Posted by Joe Klarl

Ho Ho Ho

Collection of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (c) 2010

Merry Christmas from the Tenement Museum!

In the old days (aka 2000 AD) we used to deck the Baldizzi family apartment out for Christmas. In 1934, the heart of the Great Depression, the family didn't have much money to splurge on a big tree or decorations. But we know through oral histories with the daughter Josephine, that their father Adolpho (a skilled carpenter) would have fashioned the home with a homemade Christmas tree made of some little branches, tinsel, and maybe a few shiny glass globes purchased from one of the pushcart vendors.

“Always Praying . . . Going to Mass, and All That”: The Religious World of the Baldizzi Family: A Guest Post by Robert Orsi -- Part V

Thanks to an NEH grant, scholar Robert Orsi is advising the Tenement Museum on how we can use objects to tell stories in the Baldizzi family apartment. Here is the final part in a five-part essay looking at how Catholic artifacts have been used in the exhibit.

Crucifix in center frame, between bottle and books.
Photo by Shawn Hoke Photography.

The crucifix too would have had its place in the rounds of stories and relationships. Such crucifixes came to a young couple as a wedding present, often from one of their godparents. This seems an odd gift for such a happy occasion. But it was given so that the newlyweds (who were not thinking about such things on their wedding day) would have it in their new home for the when the time came—much later in their married lives, hopefully—that a family member, perhaps one of them, was close to death and the parish priest had to be called to the apartment for the Last Rites. Then this crucifix, flanked by candles on either side, was propped up in the sickroom to make a temporary altar for the only church sacrament performed in the home.

So the crucifix in the Baldizzi apartment spoke not only of Christ’s death and suffering but of human destiny itself, of the inevitability of pain, and of mortality, reminding the family that even the most joyful moments were not free of such realities (just as the joyful and glorious mysteries alternated with the sorrowful).

Sometimes the crucifix was buried with a family member or it was placed temporarily beside the coffin at home and then put back on the wall, now a reminder of the one who was gone. But because the crucifix, like the rosary, held stories and relationships, and its message was also that suffering and death both were set within these memories and ties.

Madonna can be seen on the wall, to the right of the Linit starch box.
Photo by Kathleen Kent.

Finally, the Madonna was central to southern Italian and to Italian American piety and everyday life, increasingly so as the 19th and 20th centuries proceeded and the Virgin Mary, whose cult was promoted by the church precisely for this reason, replaced local village saints as the focus of Italian American devotions. The Madonna’s preeminence in Italian piety resonated with the prominence of mothers in Italian American experience and memory (e.g, "my mother’s apartment," as Josephine refers to the home at 97 Orchard Street where she grew up with her mother, father, and brother). The Madonna exists under many names; one of the most popular among Italians was Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

The Blessed Mother was understood to be present in her images (a metaphysical assumption that American Protestants found alternately compelling and contemptible), so that as they went about their days, the Baldizzis touched the image, often first kissing their fingers before they brought them to the Madonna, or spoke to it, telling Our Lady of Perpetual Help their needs and fears. The Blessed Mother was called on to witness everyday events (think of the common Italian exclamation, “Madonna mia!!”) and to take sides in family disputes. Italian Americans imagined their lives in relation to the Madonna’s, so that their stories and histories and hers became entwined. The regular practice of the rosary deepened this imaginative everyday engagement with the Madonna, which in turn gave life to the rosary.

The devotional image of Our Lady of Perpetual in the Baldizzi apartment may have come from one of the feste about which Josephine was so ambivalent. Sharing her mother’s devotion to Mary (Josephine remembers going along with her mother to novenas on Wednesday nights) was one way for Josephine to honor her family and to be seen as a good southern Italian girl while taking her own steps into the world, in the company of the Blessed Mother.

One last word: Josephine did not practice her faith in the same way that her parents did. Catholicism is not a single, static entity, always the same over time and everywhere, but a fluid and available repertoire of possibilities and limitations that changes over time and space, is porous to other cultural influences, and is practiced differently amid varying life experiences and circumstances. Josephine was clearly well on the way as a young woman to becoming an American Catholic. She went to church regularly (not only on family occasions); she certainly wanted the interviewer to understand in 1989 that she had grown up a good Catholic; and in her memories there is not a trace of the alienation from the institutional church or ecclesiastical rebelliousness that southern Italians often carried with them to the new country. As she said in her oral history, “I didn’t mind the church part and the saints,” she said (my emphasis).

This is a reminder to us that the religious objects in the Baldizzi apartment live in time, even though they appear to be frozen now in one particular moment of the past. Their meanings and uses were both the same and different across the generations, as the immigrants first and then their children and grandchildren made their way from Italy to the Lower East Side to Brooklyn and perhaps later at some point out of New York City altogether. The life and the meanings of the rosary, the crucifix, and the image of the Blessed Mother as Our Lady of Perpetual Help are not in the objects themselves, which is why I cannot say, “this is what the rosary or the crucifix or the image mean.”

Josephine herself, in any case, makes any attempt at such definitions impossible by how she remembers her past on the Lower East Side. Life is not in the things but in the relationships in which the things are taken up, within the apartment, down on Orchard Street, in the neighborhoods and around the city. It was within relationships among people and between heaven and earth (she liked the saints, Josephine emphasizes, who were a regular part of her everyday life, like her neighbors and relatives), that the rosary, the crucifix, and the image of the Blessed Mother came alive and did their work for the Italians on the Lower East Side.

Many, many thanks to Robert Orsi for this wonderful essay and for last night's Tenement Talk.

“Always Praying . . . Going to Mass, and All That”: The Religious World of the Baldizzi Family: A Guest Post by Robert Orsi -- Part IV

Thanks to an NEH grant, scholar Robert Orsi is advising the Tenement Museum on how we can use objects to tell stories in the Baldizzi family apartment. He'll be at Tenement Talks tonight at 6:30 pm. Here is the fourth part in a five-part essay looking at how Catholic artifacts have been used in the exhibit.

So what do the rosary, the crucifix and the devotional image of the Madonna tell us about the faith of the Baldizzi family? What did the religious objects in the apartment mean within Baldizzi family life?

The Baldizzis' rosary.
Photo by mister paul larosa, on Flickr.

The rosary is a way of praying that goes back to medieval Europe. The beads on the rosary are organized in five groups of ten (called decades) separated by spaces in which there is a single bead; the beads are attached in a circle to a crucifix which is immediately followed by a single bead, three beads, another single bead, and a small image of Jesus, Mary, or one of the saints. Moving the rosary through their fingers, Catholics begin with the Sign of the Cross at the crucifix; say an Our Father at the first single bead; a Hail Mary at each of the next three beads; another Our Father at the second single bead; the special prayer called the doxology at the image; and then moving counterclockwise, a Hail Mary at each bead in the decades, then the doxology again, and the Our Father at the single bead in between. Josephine’s family would have said the rosary in Latin or Italian.

They also would have known (more than most contemporary Catholics perhaps) that there were three different story lines for the rosary, depending on the church season or on the desires and needs of the person or persons praying the rosary.

Photo by Daniel Molina

Each narrative was divided into five stories, called “mysteries,” taken from the gospels that sequentially unfurled like a newsreel the story of salvation as the rosary was said. There were the joyful mysteries, which recall the five happiest moments in the Blessed Mother’s life with Jesus (the first is the angel’s announcement to Mary that she is pregnant with Jesus); the sorrowful mysteries, which speak about the suffering of Jesus and of Mary’s grief; and the glorious mysteries, which commemorate the holiest and most transparently divine episodes in the lives of Jesus and Mary (these begin with the resurrection of Jesus and end with Mary’s coronation as Queen of Heaven).

Catholics were encouraged actively to see themselves as being present in these moments, making the rosary a powerful imaginative exercise and a medium for men and women to express and reflect on their own joys and sorrows and those of their families.

Rosaries were most often given as gifts: just as in some cultures, people do not fill their own wine glasses at dinner, so it was not so common for Catholics simply to acquire rosaries for themselves. The rosary in the Baldizzi apartment might have come from one of the children’s godparents—the godmother who lived across the street from Vincent’s?—from one their First Communion sponsors, from grandparents or other relatives. It may have made the journey from Italy to the Lower East Side in Signor Baldizzi’s pockets, serving in this case as a visible link to the old country.

Rosaries were said privately or in groups. The Baldizzis would have brought the rosary with them to Mass on Sundays, to funerals—it was common for a rosary to be said on the last night of a wake in front of the open coffin by all the people present together—and to the novenas that Josephine remembers going to with her mother. The rosary in the Baldizzi apartment in this way embodied the family’s stories and memories and the bonds of kin and neighbors so important to them, a material, blessed, and tactile counterpart to Josephine’s memories and stories.

[Part V will be posted tomorrow.]

“Always Praying . . . Going to Mass, and All That”: The Religious World of the Baldizzi Family: A Guest Post by Robert Orsi -- Part III

Thanks to an NEH grant, scholar Robert Orsi is advising the Tenement Museum on how we can use objects to tell stories in the Baldizzi family apartment. He'll be at Tenement Talks tonight at 6:30 pm. Here is the third in a five-part essay looking at how Catholic artifacts have been used in the exhibit.

This discrepancy in the quality of Josephine Baldizzi’s memory echoes what contemporary critics and later scholars said about the Catholicism of southern Italian immigrants and their children. Immigrants from southern Italy to the United States in the years of the “great migration,” from the 1880s to the 1920s—Josephine’s father slipped in after the gates had been closed in 1924 by federal legislation—had the reputation of being especially bad Catholics. They were “the Italian problem” in the American Catholic church, in the phrase of the times.

Southern Italians were bad Catholics, moreover, in a particular way: they went to church, it was said, only for baptisms, weddings, and funerals—in other words, only on occasions important to their families. Otherwise, the immigrants failed to support the building and maintenance of churches like other Catholics did; they left the practice of the faith to women and old people; and they refused to send their children to parochial schools as good Catholics were supposed to do. The saw nothing wrong with free public education, up the sixth grade, when enough was enough, and they took their children out of school and sent them to work to support the family. As Josephine remembers, “My mother used to say, what are you doing in high school? Go to work and you make a few dollars.”

Milstien Division, NewYork Public Library. San Genaro on Mulberry Street, 1929 and 1930.

All Italians cared about religiously, American Catholics complained, were their feste. These riotous public celebrations in honor of regional southern Italian saints were occasions for paisani to get together in the streets and in their homes to eat and drink, to talk and to play games of chance, much to the embarrassment of other, better established, more “American,” Catholics, who were mostly Irish. Priests and prelates protested that saints’ feasts wasted financial resources better spent on the church.

The bargaining and dealing that went on between the people and the saints on these days—if you heal my child, give me a husband, or find me a job, I will give you in return . . .—was evidence of a magical and immature religious consciousness out of step with the modern world. Sociologists accused southern Italians of being “amoral familists,” meaning that their sense of ethical responsibility extended no further than their own families. It was not until the 1970s that the Catholicism of the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants was thought to have caught up with that of other ethnic groups.

[Part IV will be posted later this afternoon.]

“Always Praying . . . Going to Mass, and All That”: The Religious World of the Baldizzi Family: A Guest Post by Robert Orsi -- Part II

Thanks to an NEH grant, scholar Robert Orsi is advising the Tenement Museum on how we can use objects to tell stories in the Baldizzi family apartment. He'll be at Tenement Talks on Wednesday, Dec. 15 at 6:30 pm. Here is the second in a five-part essay looking at how Catholic artifacts have been used in the exhibit.

The vividness of Josephine’s memories of her family contrasts strikingly with what she has to say about her Catholicism. While her comments about the family’s religious practice are brief and perfunctory, at times even dismissive—“always praying,” she says, “you know, going to Mass, and all that”—her memories of 97 Orchard Street and of the Lower East Side are richly detailed and evocative. These stories are all about family. They recall in sensuous immediacy the experiences of everyday life and Josephine’s pleasure in sharing these cherished recollections is evident.

The first thing she says in the conversation is how thrilling it was for her to be back in the tenement building on Orchard Street and to remember “all the little things that we did together as a family.” The streets were messy, loud, and crowded, but the family’s apartment—which she always refers to as “my mother’s apartment”—was “immaculate.” Her beloved mother was “a hard-working woman,” a “supermom.”

Rosario Baldizzi on the roof of 97 Orchard Street.
Collection of the LESTM.

Signora Baldizzi was employed part time sewing the linings into coats, but she was primarily a homemaker. Josephine emphasizes over and over how clean her mother kept the apartment. “My mother was a fanatic,” she says early in the interview. “No matter what she had, it had to be clean . . . that was a big thing with her, being clean.” Josephine describes her mother teaching her and her brother how to wash in the apartment’s small bathtub. “I see her vividly,” Josephine says, “standing there and stripping and saying this is how you’ve got to wash. She would show us . . . and put the two of us in the tub.”

Her father, also much loved, contributed to the beauty of the apartment by planting flowers in empty cartons of government-surplus cheese. She and her brother looked out for each other in the streets and at school, Josephine says. She maps the spaces of her Lower East Side world with a web of family connections—her brother’s godfather lived next door; there were cousins upstairs; her godmother ‘s apartment was “diagonally across from this place called Vincent’s where everybody goes to have their fish now.” Josephine’s stories of her childhood Catholicism too come alive when her family enters them: the treat of cake after Sunday Mass with her mother, her father’s gift at the festa.

Reversing the expected hierarchy in the relationship between religion and everyday life, the apartment on Orchard Street is clearly what Josephine holds sacred; her Catholicism has the qualities of the profane, unmarked and unremarkable, not particularly special, “and all that.”

[Part III to come tomorrow morning.]

“Always Praying . . . Going to Mass, and All That”: The Religious World of the Baldizzi Family: Guest Post by Robert Orsi -- Part I

Thanks to an NEH grant, scholar Robert Orsi is advising the Tenement Museum on how we can use objects to tell stories in the Baldizzi family apartment. He'll be at Tenement Talks on Wednesday, Dec. 15 at 6:30 pm. Here is the first in a five-part essay looking at how Catholic artifacts have been used in the exhibit.

There are three things in the Baldizzi apartment associated with the family’s Catholicism—a crucifix, a rosary, and a devotional image of the Blessed Mother as Our Lady of Perpetual Help. These are the most common religious objects to be found in Italian American homes, and each of them has something to tell us about the religious practices of the people who lived in the apartment at 97 Orchard Street.

But I want to begin thinking about the Baldizzi family’s Catholicism by first carefully following what Josephine Baldizzi Esposito had to say about her childhood faith in the interview she did at the Tenement Museum on August 2, 1989—to begin, in other words, not with a clear expectation of what Catholicism is or entails, e.g., crucifixes, rosaries, and images of the Mother of God, or what these objects mean to Catholics generally, but with Josephine’s experience and memories.

In response to the interviewer’s query, “Was your family religious, or . . . ” (the alternative is not specified), Josephine replies, “Yes[!] My mother, every Wednesday we went to novenas, every Wednesday. Very religious. Always praying, you know, going to Mass, and all that.” Josephine means emphatically to reject here whatever was implied by the interviewer’s trailing and interrupted “or.”

Josephine, right, with family, in 1992.
Collection of the LESTM.

Earlier in the conversation, talking about food and her mother’s cooking, Josephine recalled, “And when we used to go to church[,] once in a while [my mother] would stop, and there was a bakery” where they bought a small square of sheet cake.

Then, towards the end of the interview, Josephine addresses the question of what noises she recalled from her childhood on Orchard Street. The subject came up in an exchange about sexuality in the tenement and whether or not children heard ‘things.’ Josephine describes the sounds of the street coming in through the apartment windows. “Peddlers yelling . . .and of course, the organ grinder with the monkey we used to hear.” And it is here that she introduces the one other explicitly religious subject in the discussion, her family’s attendance at the local neighborhood’s saint’s street festa.

And they would take us to the feast once in a while. You know, the feast that they have? The—the saints? Saint Gen[n]aro and all that. They would take us to the feast . . . And I remember my brother had to carry a flag and I carried a candle, and I hated it, because you’re little and everybody’s crushing you, you know. The only thing I liked about it was my father would buy me that fancy doll. This was later on, when he was working. That was the only thing I got out of the feast, was a doll. And I remember that we had to march, and I hated it. I didn’t like it. Too messy, too many people, you know?”

Josephine and her brother Johnny, circa 1935.
Collection of the LESTM.

She concludes by saying that the feast, talking about the festival in Little Italy in the 1970s, has gotten more crowded and messier over time, and she likes it even less now. Then Josephine moves on to talk about her godmother.

These are the only references to Catholic practice in the conversation: the stark and perhaps defensive assertion that her family was “very religious”; the brief mention of Sunday Mass, which brings to Josephine’s mind her mother’s company and the smells and tastes of a neighborhood bakery; and memories of being taken to the festa, which are associated with the discomfort of crowds as experienced by a little child, resentment at being compelled to march (“I hated it”), and with her father’s kindness to her. Josephine’s last words about Catholicism in the conversation come when she is complaining about the present-day San Gennaro feast: as a child, she says, “I didn’t mind the church part and the saints.”

There is not very much for us to go on here for thinking about the rosary, the crucifix, and the devotional image of the Madonna in the Baldizzi home. The sparseness of Josephine’s memories of her childhood faith deepens the silence of time that surrounds the religious objects in the apartment today. What did they mean to the family? How did they use them? What made these objects holy or special? Josephine does not seem to give us any help in answering these questions.

[Part II will be posted later this afternoon]

Photo of the Day

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

Windows into the Past

Enter the apartments at 97 Orchard Street and you’ll see many objects crammed into these tiny spaces. Some, like toasters, lamps, and vacuums, served practical roles, while others, such as dumb bells and books, represent the interests of specific individuals.

Regardless of their uses, objects in these apartments are more than just furnishings; they can be used to tell stories about daily life in the tenement. With a Coney Island souvenir, we can talk about how immigrant families maintained the cultural traditions of their home country while adopting American customs. By highlighting wallpaper, tablecloths, and other decorative items, we can discuss how tenants made their apartments into homes.

A recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is allowing the Museum to rethink the way it uses objects to talk about 97 Orchard Street and the broader history of the Lower East Side.

To kick off the grant, educators explored the apartments and wrote their own “biographies” of objects – imagining what they meant to the people who used them. Below are some of our favorites:

Josephine’s Skippy Jar Lamp

Photo Credit: Keiki Niwa

“Josephine had begged and pleaded and promised perfect behavior to Rosario. She only wanted one thing: to try peanut butter. Peanut butter made you American, made you strong, she reasoned. Rosario protested: too American, unnatural, expensive. But one week in October of 1931, the Home Relief Box contained a surprise – a jar of Skippy! It was the most delicious thing Josephine had ever tasted. She and Johnny ate one huge spoonful each the first day of the jar’s life in 97 Orchard, then carefully made it last until almost April of the next year. Not wanting to get rid of the jar, Josephine asked Rosario if she could use it. Si! She had just been given a kerosene lamp top by a woman at work whose husband made them, but didn’t have anything to use it with. The jar then lit the families’ late night stories, after they’d turned the lights off. The jar got tossed with the move out of 97 though, too much a symbol of sticky times.”

(c) Tenement Museum

Baldizzi’s School Books

“On the kitchen window sill sit books for Johnny and Josephine Baldizzi’s education. The proud parents bought them so their children would not have to use the books that were falling apart in the school. By buying the books, the parents could also have their children do homework and read at home. As Rosario bustles around the kitchen, Johnny and Josephine sit at the desk reading in between numerous distractions.

The primers and normal readers allow the children access to America. Here in the Baldizzi apartment, the school books show everyone the hopes and aspirations that Rosario and Adolfo have for their children. When the children finish, the parents may peruse the books, picking up useful words and phrases. It is a bittersweet moment, though, as they realize all their children will learn and know. The struggle of immigration becomes comprehensible and worthwhile in those fleeting moments – staring at the foreign words on the page.”

Fannie Rogarshevsky’s New Bissell’s Grand Rapid Vacuum

Photo Credit: Keiki Niwa

We imagine Fanny as an amazing housekeeper, but I think of her as a sap for new cleaning innovations. Each week, it’s a new purchase: powder/disinfectant, lino-wash.

"Oh no. The day this came home.

After repeated protestations to Abraham and family that they NEEDED a vacuum, that all of her friends had them (even though her son, Sam was the first to point out they didn’t have a rug), even though Ida said they had a Bissell’s at the factory and it was a piece of junk, the family finally caved.

It cost $65.

When it arrived, everyone crowded around it. Fanny had just cleaned, so there was nothing to vacuum up. “What are we going to do?” they all cried. A piece of bread was summoned. But it wasn’t stale enough. So they toasted it for a while so they could crumble it on the floor.

A pause.

A roll over the crumbs.

And the crumbs remain.

“It must have a switch wrong somewhere…” Hours disassembling and reassembling the Bissell. The crumbs remain. Finally, Fanny cleans them up with a wet rag, just as she always has done."

Rogarshevsky Family Toaster

Photo Credit: Keiki Niwa

“Hanging on the wall above the stove in the Rogarshevsky apartment is a metal circle with holes in the bottom and four wire sides that connect to form a base. People often ask about this object, which I have imagined to be a toaster. I imagine that this wasn’t a very expensive item. It could probably be purchased in a 'hardware' store, some place that sold metal items. Perhaps it was something made locally and sold everywhere. It doesn’t seem important enough to bring from the home country.

Because it’s a rather small object, I don’t imagine the neighbors having much interest. Maybe one of the other women in this building suggested that Fannie should purchase a toaster. Maybe it was seen as a time saver. Maybe the same woman suggested which shop or peddler had the best price.

It’s not a special object. It’s not something to be passed on from one generation to the next. Perhaps for this family it meant that they were settling in to their new American lives and schedules.”

Natalie Gumpertz’s Clock

(c) Tenement Museum

"Natalie was beside herself as she watched from the carriage her home fade into the distance. She had sold all her belongings in the past days and now had enough money for her journey to America.

In America, Natalie felt scared, but she was getting more accustomed to life here every day. Her neighbors all spoke German, although many didn’t speak her dialect. Mr. Glockner’s wife was Prussian and had a close friend, who introduced her to some young men, potential suitors, although she was staying with her cousin and didn’t have much room to herself. She enjoyed shopping and thinking about a home for herself.

She walked by William’s Clockworks that week and something caught her eye. It was a clock, a clock that reminded her of her grandmother’s home in Prussia. As the wave of nostalgia passed over her, she knew she had to buy it. She took out her small savings and went into the store.

For years Natalie had kept the clock inside her suitcase covered in cloth. But today was the day she would take it out. She and Julius had just married, and Mr. Glockner had an apartment in his building for them. Finally, a home."


What’s your favorite object from 97 Orchard Street? Share your own object biography with our readers.

-posted by Shana Weinberg

Family Photos

Did you visit the Tenement Museum this summer and leave wanting to know even more about the families of 97 Orchard Street? Our online photo database contains images of some of 7,000 people who lived in the tenement building from 1863 to 1935, including the Baldizzi family (whose apartment you can explore virtually or visit on the “Getting By” tour). Adolfo Baldizzi, who immigrated to the United States from Italy in 1923, lived at 97 Orchard Street from 1928 to 1935 with his wife Rosaria, and children Josephine and Johnny. While Adolfo worked odd jobs and Rosaria found employment lining coats in a garment factory, the family struggled to survive the depression. You can learn more about the Baldizzis by browsing through their family photos below.

Rosaria Baldizzi stands on the roof of a building. She is holding a purse in her right hand, ca. 1925-40. When Josephine’s job at the garment factory threatened her family’s Home Relief benefits, she quit.


Adolfo Baldizzi poses beside a wood inlay of the New York City skyline “home bar” he made, ca. 1930-50. Adolfo had formally trained as a fine woodworker in Italy, but after immigrating, was forced to work odd jobs.


Johnny Baldizzi and Josephine Baldizzi stand on the roof of 97 Orchard Street, ca.1935. Josephine remembered the anxiety people felt during the depression and recalled that as a child she felt more like a “little old lady.”


Josephine Baldizzi Esposito and family attended the MetLife/Tenement Museum Family Reunion in 1992. Pictured here are Roger Esposito, Maria Esposito Capio, Josephine’s husband George Esposito, Josephine Baldizzi Esposito, Gina Grzelak, and James Grzelak. Josephine was very involved in the restoration of her family’s apartment in 97 Orchard Street.


-posted by Amita