Place Matters: Landmarking the Site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Guest Post by Marci Reaven

Marci Reaven is the Director of Place Matters, a project of City Lore and the Municipal Arts Society.  She was influential in the process to designate the Brown Building a New York City Landmark in 2003.  Reaven also collaborated with NYU graduate students on the exhibit Art/Memory/Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire at the Grey Art Gallery.  In this guest post, Marci discusses the resources she uses when studying and researching the Triangle fire.

One terrific source of information about the Triangle fire focuses on the building where the fire took place. It’s the report created in 2003 by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission as part of the process of designating the building a New York City landmark.

Getting to the online document takes some clicking and scrolling: http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/html/home/home.shtml

Forms & Publications, Designation Reports, Manhattan, Individual Landmarks, Brown Building.



Brown Building (originally the Asch Building)
Photo by NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission



The report is particularly interesting because the writer, Gail Harris, not only discusses the events leading up to and following the fire, but also the creation of manufacturing lofts like the one occupied by the Triangle Company and their importance to the garment industry. She helps us understand why the fire “happened here.” The garment unions and the NYC Fire Department have been holding regular commemorations at the now-named Brown Building (on the corner of Washington and Greene Streets) since the 50th anniversary of the fire in 1961. Their longstanding attention to the building has made it a critical support in sustaining public memory of the fire. This prompted the Place Matters project and many historians and labor and community activists to propose it for landmark designation.



Rather surprisingly, it was the first local building designated for its association with labor history! Since landmark designation not only protects buildings but also makes them part of an official NYC history, it would be great to now get some other labor landmarks protected as well.

Posted by Marci Reaven

Director, Place Matters, a project of City Lore and the Municipal Art Society

Art/Memory/Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: A Collaborative Project Between the Grey Art Gallery and NYU Graduate Students

When I first moved to New York, I didn’t know much about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. What I did know could be summarized by several key words: locked door, trapped workers, and fire. I’ve only lived in NYC for two years, I moved here for New York University’s Museum Studies graduate program. Many of the Museum Studies classes have been held in the Silver Center, the building adjacent to the Brown Building – formerly known as the Asch Building. Last fall, a course was offered to Museum Studies and Public History graduate students to create an exhibit on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire for the Grey Art Gallery – NYU’s fine art museum. I jumped at the chance to learn more about the workplace tragedy that occurred only steps away from my classes.

Firefighters spray water on the Asch Building
trying to put out the Triangle factory fire blaze,
March 25, 1911
Photo from ILGWU Archives,
Kheel Center, Cornell University 

This was my first experience researching and developing an exhibit from start to finish. This was also the first time students collaborated on an exhibit for the Grey Art Gallery. On the first day of class, we all sat expectantly, as our two professors, Lucy Oakley – the Head of Education and Programs at the Grey Art Gallery, and Marci Reaven – the Director of Place Matters and a collaborator on the NYC Landmarking of the Brown Building, introduced themselves. Marci pointed out how remarkable it was that a class of sixteen women was going to create an exhibit about the Triangle fire, which affected mostly young immigrant women. The content and themes of the exhibit were going to be multifaceted. First, we were to examine the events leading up to the fire, a chronicle of the fire itself, and the occurrences after the fire. Then we were to record the fire’s legacy through the New Deal era, and to follow the commemorative efforts from the fiftieth anniversary in 1961 to the present. We wanted to conclude the exhibit with a call for continued vigilance and political reform for the protection of workers’ rights both in the United States and internationally.

The most practical approach to creating an exhibit with sixteen students was to break up into four teams, with each team tackling one of the four sections of the exhibit. I was part of section one. Section one focuses on the years 1909 to 1919, and it explores the strike of 1909, the Triangle fire, and the aftermath that ensued in the days and years following the fire. Over the course of the semester, we did extensive research, chose objects, and wrote text for the panels and labels that were to be mounted in the exhibit. Selecting objects was one of my favorite aspects of the exhibition process. One of the women in my group had a friend who constructed a shirtwaist for the exhibit. My group felt it was extremely important for visitors to see a representation of a shirtwaist. Lawn, a highly flammable material, was the fabric used to make the shirtwaists at the turn of the twentieth century. The flammability of the material was one of the major reasons the fire spread so quickly on that fateful day in March.

Shirtwaist
Photo by Huffington Post

When creating the exhibit we had to be considerate of the different stakeholders that are involved in the commemoration efforts, and we had to respect the policies and aesthetics of the Grey Art Gallery. One of the greatest challenges was working together as a class. Of course each of us had a vision of what the exhibit should look like, but we were able to work together so our ideas became compatible.

Working on this exhibit was a wonderful experience. I learned more about myself in the process, such as understanding my strengths and weaknesses when working in a large group. Art/Memory/Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire has received an amazing response from the public, which makes the experience all the more valuable, because people are responding to our work.  If you want to learn more about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire or become involved in the commemorative events for the 100th anniversary, make Art/Memory/Place at the Grey Art Gallery your first stop.

Art/Memory/Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire will run until March 26, 2011 and will re-open on April 12 to July 9, 2011. The Grey Art Gallery is located at 100 Washington Square East, NYC 10003. For more information, visit the Grey Art Gallery website.


Posted by Alana Rosen

The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

New York’s reputation as amoral and debauched began far before the 21st Century. One newspaper clipping from the 1900s notes New York City as “a den of bootleggers, rum-runners, owners of speakeasy property, wet newspapers, underworld denizens, alcoholic slaves and personal liberty fanatics."

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum explores the history and chemistry of toxicology at the turn-of-the-century. Cold blooded murder, sex, corruption, booze – The Poisoner's Handbook has it all. I sometimes find myself bemoaning nonfiction as dry and uninteresting. But isn't real history often more interesting than fiction? This book is certainly no exception.

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Deborah Blum dissects the most popular poisons of choice, organizing each chapter by the designated venom. Including glamorous and exciting stories of poison laced pie crusts, faked car crashes and government bootlegging conspiracies, Blum begins by describing headline grabbing events and goes on to analyze the physical components of each poison.



Alexander Gettler, right, and colleagues in the first toxicology laboratory of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, City of New York, in a photo from 1922 or 1923.
Photo by justonly.com

The Poisoner’s Handbook focuses on the careers of Manhattan’s first professional medical examiner, Dr. Charles Norris, and its first toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, who together developed forensic science in New York City.

Join us on March 8th as Deborah Blum will speak about her newest book. Come and enjoy intriguing conversation and have a glass of wine. But keep your cyanide at home, won’t you?

Posted by Amy Ganser

The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on Edge with T.J. English

For the first time, the New York Times bestselling author T. J. English reclaims the story of this volatile period in our history through the eyes of three desperate men—an innocent man wrongly accused of murder, a corrupt cop, and a militant Black Panther.  All three men are alive and able to tell their story.

Watch as T.J. English discusses The Savage City

The Savage City begins with a horrifying double murder on the day on which Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and declared “I have a dream.”  Two young white women were murdered in their apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The murders marked the start of a ten-year saga of racial violence and unrest that ravaged the city.

English explores this traumatic decade through the stories of three very different men:

George Whitmore Jr., a 19-year-old black man, half-blind and destitute, who was railroaded for the  Career Girls murders—a living symbol of the inequities of the system.

Bill Phillips, a gleefully corrupt New York City cop who plundered the city through graft, extortion, and brutality—until he was caught and eventually turned state’s evidence in the famous Knapp Commission hearings.

Dhoruba bin Wahad, a founder of New York’s Black Panther Party, whose militant actions against the NYPD made him a target of virtually every local and federal law enforcement body in the city.

Visit Tenement Talks on March 15 at 6:30 PM for The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on Edge with T.J. English

Tenement Talks Inspiration

While listening to Michelle and James Nevius talk about their new book Inside The Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City last Monday, it became clear to me that history is everywhere – down every street and inside each building. I was inspired to find out what stories I could unearth about the Greenwich Village brownstone I lived in during my first year of college.

My search for the past started at 147 West 4th Street. Even when I was living there, it was obvious from the antiquated fixtures and detailed crown moldings that history had moved up and down the wraparound staircase, through the doorways, and over the creaky wooden floor planks.

A simple internet search revealed that I had inhabited a unique piece of history. Around 1918, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney created the Whitney Studio Club at 147 West 4th Street. This artist sanctuary served as the precursor to the Whitney Museum where works by acclaimed artists such as Edward Hopper were first exhibited; and in a rented room atop the studio, John Reed, the journalist and socialist, compiled the series of articles that became his masterpiece - Ten Days That Shook the World.

In this busy city it's easy to forget to look at the past, but with just a bit of digging, I was able to discover my hidden gem that better connected me to the city I love.

If you missed James & Michelle's talk, listen to a podcast, now up on the Tenement Talks page of our website.

- Posted by Tenement Talks intern Ariel Kouvaras

Questions for Curatorial - Rugs in Tenement Apartments

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

Would the residents of 97 Orchard Street have had rugs? How much would a rug have cost, and was it something that the landlord provided?

During the building’s early history, some of the families who lived at 97 Orchard Street appear to have had rugs in their apartments. For new immigrants, rugs were among the range of amenities available for the first time in the American commercial marketplace.

Historian Richard Stott has written, “Most amazing to immigrants was the presence of rugs in workingman’s apartments… Rugs, in act, were more than just furnishings; to many of the city’s workers, they were a symbolic representation, an icon, of the high standard of living.”

Several of 97 Orchard Street’s front room floors feature extant paint around the perimeter of the room. The front room floor of apartment 8 (the Rogarshevsky apartment), for example, shows evidence of paint around the perimeter of the room, and a bare section in the center, as if there had once been carpet.

Interestingly, in apartment 8, the paint also appears inside the parlor closet, indicating that the floor was painted prior its installation, a change that may have occurred circa 1895. In addition, tacks are visible in the surviving wood floors.

It is possible, however, that elsewhere in the building, paint around the front room perimeter and tacks left in the floor may date from a later period in its history, when linoleum became more common. It also appears that many of the floorboards were replaced over time, suggesting that they too may date from a later period in the building’s history.

While there is little evidence to suggest who was responsible for providing rugs, the landlord or the tenant, it seems likely that tenants brought their own floor rugs with them when they moved. Just as each tenant was responsible for bringing and installing their own cast-iron stove, they may have been expected to carry floor coverings from residence to residence.

During the 1870s, carpets and rugs could be purchased nearby at Lord & Taylor department store on the corner of Grand and Chrystie Streets, where “tenement houses could be fitted up in twenty four hours.” Although figures are difficult to obtain for the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, the 1890s Sears & Roebuck Catalogue offered carpets that ranged in price from 35 cents per yard to $1.25 per yard.

Questions for Curatorial - Fireplaces in 97 Orchard Street

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

I heard that all of the fireplaces at 97 Orchard Street are boarded up. When and why did this happen?

Paint analysis suggests the fireplaces at 97 Orchard Street were covered up when the building was built in 1863 or shortly thereafter. Whoever designed the apartments may have never intended the parlor fireplaces to operate but installed them because Victorian-era “parlor making,” even in working-class homes, required a hearth in the parlor.

The fireplace enclosures vary in style and suggest alteration over time. By the late 1860s, the openings were simply enclosed with shutters. Later in the 19th century, the fireplace mantels were removed and either the entire wall was replastered or the fireplace opening was enclosed with bead board.

A shuttered fireplace in the parlor of a second-floor apartment at 97 Orchard Street.

An unrestored apartment, which shows a plastered-in fireplace in the kitchen. The large hole is where the coal stove pipe would have been inserted, using the chimney for ventilation. Photo by Keiko Niwa.

The Charnel Ground

In honor of National Poetry Month, and in anticipation of tonight's Tenement Talk with poet Stephen Wolf, we're posting some of our favorite poems from his New York-centric collection I Speak of the City.

By Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997)

...Rugged and raw situations, and having accepted them as part of your

home ground, then some spark of sympathy or compassion could take place.

You are not in a hurry to leave such a place immediately. You would like to

face the facts, realities of that particular world...

Upstairs Jenny crashed her car & became a living corpse, Jake

sold grass, the white-bearded potbelly leprechaun silent

climbed their staircase

Ex-janitor John from Poland averted his eyes, cheeks flushed with

vodka, wine who knew what

as he left his groundfloor flat, refusing to speak to the inhabitant

of Apt. 24

who'd put his boyfriend in Bellevue, calling the police, while the

artistic Buddhist composer

on sixth floor lay spaced out feet swollen with water, dying slowly

of aids over a year -

The Chinese teacher cleaned & cooked in Apt. 23 for the

homosexual poet who pined for his gymnast

thighs & buttocks - downstairs th' old hippie flower girl gell

drunk over the banister, smashed her jaw -

her son despite moderate fame cheated rocknroll money,

twenty thousand people in stadiums

cheering his tattoed skinhead murderous Hare Krishna

vegetarian drum lyrics -

Mary born in the building rested on her cane, heavy legged with

heart failure on the second landin, no more able

to vacation in Caracas & Dublin - the Russian landlady's

husband from concentration camp disappeared again -

nobody mentioned he'd died -

tenants took over her building for hot water, she couldn't add

rent & pay taxes, wore a long coat hot days

alone & thin on the street carrying groceries to her crooked

apartment silent-

One poet highschool teacher fell dead mysterious heart

dysrhythmia, konked over

in his mother's Brooklyn apartment, his first baby girl a year old,

wife stoical a few days -

their growling noisy little dog had to go, the baby cried -

Meanwhile the upstairs apartment meth head shot cocaine &

yowled up and down

East 12th Street, kicked out of Christine's Eatery till police

cornered him, 'top a hot iron steamhole

near Stuyvesant Town Avenue A telephone booth calling his deaf

mother - sirens speed the way to Bellevue-

past whispering grass crack salesmen jittering in circles on East

10th Street's

southwest corner where art yuppies come out of the overpriced

Japanese Sushi Bar - & they poured salt into potato soup

heart failure vats at KK's Polish restaurant

-Garbage piled up, nonbiodegradable plastic bags emptied by

diabetic sidewalk homeless

looking for returnable bottles recycled dolls radios half-eaten

hamburgers - thrown away Danish -

On 13th Street the notary public sat in his dingy storefront,

driver's lessons & tax returns prepared on old metal desks -

Sunnysides crisped in butter, fries & sugary donuts passed over

the luncheonette counter next door -

The Hispanic lady yelled at the rude African-American behind

the Post Office window

"I waited all week my welfare check you sent me notice I was

here yesterday

I want to see the supervisor bitch do't insult me refusing to

look in -"

Closed eyes of Puerto Rican wino lips cracked skin red

stretched out

on the pavement, naphtha backdoor open for the Korean family

dry cleaners at the 14th Street corner -

Con Ed workmen drilled all year to bust electric pipes 6 feet deep

in brown dirt

so cars bottlenecked wait minutes to pass the M14 bus stopped

midroad, heavy dressed senior citizens step down in

red rubble

with Reduced Fare Program cards got from grey city Aging

Department officers downtown up the second flight by

elevators don't work -

News comes on the radio, they bombed Baghdad and the Garden

of Eden again?

A million starve in Sudan, mountains of eats stacked on docks,

local hangs & U.N.'s trembling bureaucratic officers sweat

near the equator arguing over

wheat piles shoved by bulldozers - Swedish doctors ran out of

medicine - The Pakistani taxi driver

says Salman Rushdie must die, insulting the Prophet in fictions -

"No that wasn't my opinion, just a character talking like in a

poem no judgement -"

"Not till the sun rejects you do I," so give you a quarter by the

Catholic church 14th St. you stand half drunk

waving a plastic glass, flush-faced, live with your mother a

wounded look on your lips, eyes squinting,

receding lower jaw sometimes you dry out in Bellevue, most days

cadging dollars for sweet wine

by the corner where Plump Blindman shifts from foot to foot

showing his white cane, rattling coins in a white paper cup

some weeks

where girding the subway entrance construction saw-horses

painted orange guard steps underground - And across the

street the NYCE bank machine cubicle door sign reads

Not in Operation as taxis bump on potholes asphalt mounded at

the cross road when red lights change green

& I'm on my way uptown to get a CAT scan liver biopsy, visit the

cardiologist,

account for high blood pressure, kidneystones, diabtes, misty

eyes & dysesthesia -

feeling lack in feet soles, inside ankles, small of back, phallus

head, anus -

Old age sickness death again come round in the wink of an eye -

High school youth the inside skin of my thighs was silken smooth

tho nobody touched me there back then -

Across town the velvet poet takes Darvon N, Valium nightly

sleeps all day kicking methadone

between brick walls sixth floor in a room cluttered with collages

& gold dot paper scraps covered

with words: "The whole point seems to be the idea of giving

away the giver."

Questions for Curatorial - Crime at 97 Orchard Street

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

Is there any evidence of crimes committed at 97 Orchard Street? Is there a way of measuring crime in the surrounding neighborhood?

Museum researchers know of few crimes committed at 97 Orchard Street between 1863 and 1935. However, in the 1894 Report and Proceedings of the Senate on the Investigation of the Police Department of the City of New York, a note appeared indicating the 97 Orchard Street was the site of “policy and gambling.” Unfortunately, the Report does not specify who was responsible for this gambling operation. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that the incidence of prostitution, crime, and gang activity on the Lower East Side during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was high.

Prostitution was a pervasive part of immigrant life on the Lower East Side. Located one-block west of Orchard Street, Allen Street stood as the neighborhood’s most notorious thoroughfare of commercial sex. There most prostitution took place in tenements. During the 1890s, for example, one observer remarked that in “broad day light you can see them [prostitutes] at their windows and calling to passers by at night. They are so vulgar in front of their houses that any respectable person cannot pass without being insulted by them.” Another resident lamented that neighborhood women could not walk the street after dark “without becoming a victim to the because of the paramours who hang around corners awaiting the proceeds of their concubines.” For most, there was little recourse. “It is useless to appeal to the police,” decried another resident, “as the very men who are sent out in citizen clothes stand and talk with them and go in saloons and drink with them.”

Criminal activity in the form of robbery and extortion was also common on the Lower East Side during the early twentieth century. One resident remembered that, “Horse poisoning was a big problem. They were called the Jewish Black Hand. They were a bad bunch of people. They wanted tribute, a dollar a month for your horse. If you had ten horses, they wanted ten dollars a month or they poisoned your horses.” Another resident found an Italian gang also known as the Black Hand particularly menacing. In later years he remembered, “It was very tough around Avenue D. You couldn’t walk through there...they were Italians. They’d show you a knife. ‘Give me your money or I’ll kill you.’”

On December 8, 1891, an article appeared in the New York Times describing a incident of theft on Orchard Street. According to the article, burglars stole the Torah scrolls out of a synagogue at 91 Delancey, when the 3 men saw a police patrolman in front of 105 Orchard Street, they threw the Torah scrolls under a truck and ran away. The article doesn’t mention if they were caught, but the scrolls were returned to the President of the congregation, Mogan Abraham Ansche Ostrolenko.

Several years earlier in July of 1882, the New York Times reported an attempted murder-suicide at 106 Orchard Street. The incident, according to the Times, involved Mr. Martin Hoernlein and his wife, a “German couple well advanced in years.” Apparently, Mr. Hoernlein, who had a history of mental illness, cut his wife’s throat before attempting to cut his own. Although their wounds were “of a serious nature,” they were not fatal. Both husband and wife appear to have survived.

Murder and rape, however, were far less common on the Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century. While many local criminals stole handbags and lifted watches, violent crimes were rare, especially in the predominantly Jewish tenth ward. “East Side Jews are the most peaceful people I have ever come in contact with,” observed James Reynolds of the University Settlement. Historian Jenna Weissman Joselit writes, “…on those occasions when Jews were indicted for murder, the Jewish community was simply astounded and found the association between Jews and violence to be ‘without precedent…in the whole course of Jewish history.’”

When violence did occur, it was often rooted in ethnic tension and conflict. Youth gangs frequently battled over territory in their respective parts of the Lower East Side. One resident recalled that, “We had fights galore, the Italians and the Jews. They called us kikes and we called the wops. The Italians lived on one side of the bridge, and the Jews lived on the other side. There were terrific battles with stones and bottles, broken heads...”

While prostitution, robbery and extortion, murder and rape, and gang violence played a role in the daily lives of Lower East Siders during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, residents were much less likely to come to harm than outsiders. Lower East Siders better understood the unwritten geography and social order of the neighborhood—which areas to steer clear of, which people to avoid. Indeed, residents of the neighborhood during the 1920s and 1930s remembered a general feeling of safety when walking the streets at night. Knowing where not to venture and who not to cross no doubt mitigated residents’ likelihood of falling prey to crime and violence.

(Join us for more about crime on the Lower East Side at "Jews Behaving Badly: New York's Gangsters and Other Law Breakers," a panel discussion with Rose Keefe, Ron Arons, and moderator Rich Cohen. March 11, 6:30 PM. 108 Orchard Street. Tenement Talks website.)

Questions for Curatorial - Middle Eastern Immigrants

According to a Nepali newspaper, the U.S. military is recruiting over 500 immigrant speakers of Arabic, Hindi, Pashto and other Asian languages in New York City as part of a pilot program. (The last time the military allowed immigrants with temporary visas to enlist was during the Vietnam War.) New York's Middle Eastern and South Asian communities have a rich history; the tenants of 97 Orchard likely heard some of the above languages on the street. Curitorial Director Dave explains.

Was there ever a significant Arabic-speaking population on the Lower East Side or in New York City?

New York’s Arab community, largely Syrian-Lebanese, dates from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1900, half of the Syrians in the United States resided in New York City. The first Arabs did not arrive in the city until the 1870s, but that population grew to several thousand by 1920, mostly located on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Others lived in Brooklyn, eventually the center of the city’s Arab community, although many still commuted to work in Manhattan. New York’s Syrian population was overwhelmingly Christian and large enough to support several churches, newspapers, and ethnic organizations, such as the Syrian Ladies Aid Society, which helped new immigrants. Male immigrants made their living by peddling, factory work, and running small businesses, while the women who worked were concentrated in factories manufacturing negligees, kimonos, lace, and embroidery. Syrian craftsmen were noted for rugs and tapestries.

After 1907, a community of Levantine Jews settled among the Romanians between Allen and Chrystie Streets on the Lower East Side. These approximately 10,000 refugees from upheavals within the Turkish Empire with their distinctive customs, religious practices, and languages were an island in a sea of East European Jews. The majority conversed in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), but there were also some 1,000 Arabic-speaking Syrian Jews and a slightly smaller contingent whose first language was Greek.

Post-1965 liberal immigration policies encouraged a considerable number of Arabic-speaking Middle Easterners to immigrate to the United States. They had economic motives for doing so, but the constant turmoil in that region also fed their desire to escape. The center of this more recent Arab settlement in New York City was Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue section with its many restaurants, bakeries, and Arab-run shops. This new Arab immigration differed from that of the early twentieth century. While those that came before World War II were typically Christians, most of the newcomers were Muslims. Growing numbers of Muslim New Yorkers attended the seventy old and newly established mosques that existed in 1993 and participated in the annual fall observation of Ramadan. Such occasions brought Arabs together with Muslims from Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as well as African-Americans of that religious persuasion. In April 1991, the newest and largest mosque in New York opened on West 96th Street in Manhattan, with space for 1,000 worshippers. Muslims have also established ten schools in the city to provide religious and secular education for their children.

Facts and Findings - Freebird Bookstore

Freebird Books, a used bookshop in Red Hook, Brooklyn, has added a couple of novels and memoirs about immigrant life on the Lower East Side (and the eventual exodus of Jewish settlers to wealthier uptown Manhattan and the suburbs) to their collection. The store's owners took a tour of the Tenement Museum last week, which they describe, along with the books, in their blog.

Immigration, Then and Now - A History of Housing

Overcrowded, illegally partitioned apartments are as common in New York's immigrant neighborhoods today as they were back in the 19th century. The New York Times made the comparison in an article last week, opening with a description of a Mexican couple's 23 X 11 foot room in Bushwick, one of nine to twelve apartments squeezed into a five-family brownstone.

“Have you ever been to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum?” asked Javier Valdes, who visited Guadalupe’s room recently and who is deputy director of Make the Road New York, a community services group of which Guadalupe is a member. “It’s like a repeat of history. It’s just a different group of people going through it.”

The only difference? When 97 Orchard was built, housing regulations were next to nonexistent. When the first crop of tenements sprang up in the 1860s, landlords tried to cram as many working-class families into the buildings as possible. Beyond these squalid apartments, cheap housing options were limited. Some immigrants squeezed into subdivided one-family houses. Others lived in dark, airless basements, rear tenements (which sat behind streetfront buildings), or shantytowns on the fringes of the city, where Central Park is today.

The residents of 97 Orchard were lucky, because Louis Glockner, their landlord, had an incentive to keep standards high (even before NYC passed the nation's first housing law in 1867): he himself lived in the building. In 1870, 97 Orchard's apartments were relatively bright and spacious, housing, on average, no more than 3-4 people.

Then - Officials investigate a crowded tenement in 1900, several decades after housing codes are passed. Photo courtesy of the History Place.

Now - New York Times photo of an immigrant couple's 11 x 23 ft. room

Artifacts - A Valentine's Day Mystery

Of the 2,892 artifacts we have found in 97 Orchard Street, few are as evocative as this amorous letter. Undated and torn at the edges, it's also a mystery. We don't know who wrote it, who it was sent it to and even what part of the letter says. All we know is that researchers discovered it inside our tenement in 1993.

Here's what we could decipher:
________The seat of my pants________hot from where your lovely papa left________of his brogans but love laughs________. Nobody can keep us apart, for________(n)ever dies--does it dear? Saturday I'll give the usual whistle--pack________suitcase and we'll elope and________married. The Rolls-Rough will be (?)ined up for the occasion, and we'll________bully time. Your own only-est.

What do you think the letter says? Who might have written it? Did they really run away with each other? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Questions for Curatorial - Garment Shops on the LES

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

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

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

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

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

Facts and Findings - Tainted Milk

Yesterday we mentioned the baby Agnes Moore, who died of malnutrition on April 20, 1869, probably from drinking watery, contaminated milk.

Last year a milk contamination scandle shook China. Today a court has deemed the milk producers resonsible.

Bee Wilson, author of “Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud From Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee,” wrote an enlightening NYT op-ed piece last September about historical food contamination in America, which uses past events to shed light on what's happening today:

THE milk was marketed as pure and wholesome, and it looked fine to the naked eye. How were the mothers to know they were poisoning their babies? They had paid good money for it on the open market. It would take thousands of sick children before lawmakers did anything to stop it.

China in 2008? No, New York City in 1858. Missing from the coverage of the current Chinese baby formula poisoning, in which more than 53,000 babies have been sickened and at least four have died, is how often it has happened before.

The disaster unfolding now in China — and spreading inevitably to its trading partners — is eerily similar to the “swill milk” scandal that rumbled on in New York for several decades of the 19th century.

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Facts and Findings - Milk and the urban food supply chain

On our newest program, The Moores: An Irish Family in America, we talk a lot about the consequences of poor milk production in the 19th century. Children drank milk that was spoiled or adulturated with ammonia, chalk, and water. Many died from bacterial infections or simply malnutrition, including Agnes Moore, a baby who lived at 97 Orchard Street in 1869.

Our friends at Saxelby Cheesemongers in the Essex Street Market know a lot about milk production, as befits cheese mongers. Their latest newsletter included this interesting round-up of milk production and dissemination in New York in the mid-20th century:

From the late eighteen hundreds to the 1930's and 1940's, milk trains were the commonest way of supplying urban populations with milk. As cities grew, and farmland in and around them diminished, urbanites began depending more and more on milk from the country. Milk trains were so important and vital to the urban food supply that they often took precedence over passenger trains and frequently caused backups and delays on various lines entering the city from upstate and Connecticut. It is rumored that milk by ferry was tried, and abandoned, for the simple reason that milk lacks sea legs... the jostling of the boat would churn it into butter.

So where did our milk trains come from? Milk was shipped to New York City from the far reaches of New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Vermont, averaging a distance of about 250 miles by train, but sometimes nearing distances of up to 400 miles away. Before dawn in small towns all across New England, farmers would bring their fresh milk (in milk cans) to their local train station or depot. In some special cases, if the farm was far from a town but near to a rail line, the farmer would leave the milk at a 'milk stand' which was an elevated building next to the train tracks where the milk cans could be easily schlepped into the boxcar. Milk trains were cooled by large chunks of pond ice (harvested in the winter and kept in thickly insulated buildings for use in the summer) and kept the fragile delicacy intact for its journey to the city.

In New York, the 'milk yard' was located at 60th Street on the West Side, and the creameries (responsible for pasteurizing and bottling the milk) were located as close as possible to the rail yards. There were creameries in the Bronx and Brooklyn as well, but the largest and most impressive operation was a company called Sheffield's, who set up shop literally alongside the rail lines at 60th St. The milk would arrive in the city around 11:00 pm, be pasteurized and bottled by 2:00 am and sent out for delivery either to dairy stores or on local milk routes.

Tenement Museum records show that a milkman living on Orchard Street was responsible for delivering milk to 97 Orchard in the 1930s, the last decade people lived in the tenement.

Fatcs and Findings - The Tenement Diet

Talk about dedication: New York-based artist Sarah Lohman is spending this week eating as though she was an 1870s tenement dweller.

Lohman was inspired by an 1877 pamphlet titled Fifteen Cent Dinners, which includes a meal plan to feed a family of six for $3 dollars a week, or $57 in today's money.

Lohman's tenement diet has included Boiled Rice with Scalded Milk and Broth and Bread. MMMM! Future treats will include an apple, which Sarah will eat because she "would like to poop sometime this week."

You can follow her culinary journey at fourpoundsflour.blogspot.com. Good luck!

The Ladies of Allan Street

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Lower East Side’s Allen Street was a notorious red light district.

Cast in shadow by the Second Avenue elevated train, Allen Street and its tenements were awash with prostitution. So pervasive was the commercial sex trade that it caused one observer in 1890 to protest, “[In] broad daylight you can see them [prostitutes] at their windows and calling to passersby at night. They are so vulgar in front of their houses that any respectable person cannot pass without being insulted by them.”

For some young immigrant women, prostitution offered a more remunerative alternative to difficult wage labor. Where pieceworkers in a garment factory earned $8 or $9 dollars a week, some prostitutes made as much as $30. Married and unmarried working-class and poor immigrant women were also vulnerable to economic hardship, and some sought occasional work as prostitutes.

More about prostitution in 19th Century New York:
City of Eros
The Murder of Helen Jewett

Jay P. Dolan on The Irish Americans

Last Tuesday we hosted Professor Jay P. Dolan, author of the first comprehensive popular history of Irish-Americans. Mr. Dolan spoke about his own history, growing up in a working-class home, and tied it to the broader social history of the Irish immigrant story in New York and across the country. His visit to Tenement Talks wrapped up our mini-series on the Irish in New York, which included talks by Terry Golway, Peter Quinn, and Mary Gordon. We’ll offer another mini-series next spring, when we plan to bring back novelist Colm Toibin, among others.

Excitingly, Professor Dolan’s talk was also captured for CPAN’s Book TV, so keep your eyes open for an airing.