Questions for Curatorial - the Influenza Outbreak of 1918

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

Did any former residents of 97 Orchard Street die during the 1918 influenza epidemic?

Among the most deadly epidemics in human history, the 1918 Great Influenza pandemic killed approximately fifteen to twenty-one million people world wide. When it reached New York City during the fall of 1918, 130,000 people contracted the virus, and approximately 33,000 died by the time it had run its course in November 1918. Unfortunately, no statistical analysis of influenza deaths in 1918 by neighborhood has been conducted to date.

Nevertheless, the virus spread rapidly once it arrived in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side—then considered the most densely populated place on earth with an average of approximately one thousand people per square acre—where it felled hundreds.

According to his daughters, Rumanian immigrant Jacob Burinescu died during the 1918 Influenza pandemic at 97 Orchard Street. Witness to the human toll wrought by the pandemic, one young Lower East Sider remembered that, “children died at an alarming rate and wagons came by on a regular basis to pick up the dead.”

The Story of a Tenant and Her Descendants

Earlier this year, two descendants of a family of 97 Orchard residents met with our curatorial team and shared their mother's childhood story. Jacqueline Burinescu was born in the building in 1919 and lived there until 1928. Her father, a Romanian immigrant, pushed aside dreams of performing Yiddish theater (he was in an acting troupe back home) and ran a clothes cleaning business at 92 Orchard. He died of influenza shortly after the 1918 pandemic, leaving Jacqueline's independent-minded mother, a member of a socialist group active in the woman's suffrage movement, in charge of making ends meet. Jacqueline and her five siblings took on odd jobs to help support the family, including a stint fluffing feathers in a factory. Their mother, an immigrant from Odessa, a seaside province of Ukraine, eventually remarried an Italian-born 97 Orchard resident. Curatorial Director Dave Favaloro and Collections Manager Derya Golpinar plan on visiting Jacqueline at her current home in New Jersey.


Marcia Richter and Judith Lewis graciously donated 40 family photos to the museum, including the snapshot of their mother Jacqueline (top), and their grandmother Sarah (bottom, seated second from the left, with members of her socialist group.)

-posted by Liana Grey