"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

Commemorative Events for the 100th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

On March 25, 1911, as employees of the Triangle Waist Company finished their workday in the Asch Building (now known as the Brown Building; located on Washington Place and Greene Street), a fire broke out when a cigarette was thrown into a pile of lawn, an extremely flammable fabric used to make shirtwaists. As a result of poor safety conditions and a lack of emergency protocol in the Triangle factory, 146 men and women died tragically.  The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was a climatic moment in labor history because it spurred the United States government to pass legislative reforms that would protect workers' rights.

Wednesday, March 25, 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Fire. There are countless forms of commemoration occurring throughout New York City and even across the country. The following are events, resources, and websites that can help one learn about and become involved with the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

Official Commemoration on March 25, 2011
Workers United will sponsor the official commemoration of the Triangle fire at the Brown Building in New York City
11 am: Music
12 pm: Speakers
4:45 pm EST: Join churches, schools and fire houses across the country to ring a bell at the exact time the first alarm was sounded

Programs at the Tenement Museum
March 22, 2011 at 6:30 pm
Fire Escape: A Commemorative Performance
America-in-Play memorializes the 100th anniversary of the fire with a performance that honors the victims of this tragedy.
Located at 108 Orchard Street

March 23, 2011 at 6:30 pm
Triangle: The Fire That Changed America with David Von Drehle
The author of the definitive social history discusses American labor conditions before and after the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of our city.
Located at 108 Orchard Street
Visit Tenement Talks 

“Piecing it Together” Tour
See the homes and garment shop of Jewish families who lived in the tenement during the “great wave” of immigration to America.
Tours Given Daily

Comprehensive List of Events at the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition
Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition is supporting organizations and the collaboration between communities across the country by spearheading the creation of commemorative events.
Visit the Remember the Triangle Fire's Online Calendar of Events

Online Resources
Triangle Fire Open Archive
The Triangle Fire Open Archive is an online archive being created by community contributions to tell the story of the Triangle Fire and its relevance today.
Visit the Open Archive 

Remembering The Triangle Factory Fire 100 Years Later Online Exhibit
Cornell University's IRL School Kheel Center honors the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Fire through a detailed online web exhibit.
Visit the Triangle Fire Online Exhibit

American Experience: The Triangle Fire Documentary
PBS created a documentary on the deadliest workplace accident in New York City.
Watch the Triangle Fire Documentary

Next week the Tenement Museum blog will be solely focused on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Please stay tuned.

T.J. English and The Savage City

Visitors to the Tenement Museum often ask us if it’s safe to walk in this neighborhood. We laugh and tell them they’ll be fine; this is not the Lower East Side of 15 years ago, and it’s certainly not the New York City of the 1960s. The Savage City is the history of the city my parents were afraid of, all of the grit and none of the glory.

T.J. English’s newest book draws a viscerally detailed portrait of a city strained to the breaking point: murders, drug deals, institutionally corrupt cops, muggings in broad daylight, the gap between the very rich and the very poor is starkly obvious. Add to this racial tensions and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, and New York City becomes a powder keg ready to blow.

On August 28, 1963—the very day Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC—two young, rich, white women were brutally murdered in an Upper East Side apartment. The murder went unsolved for months, until an intrepid detective from Brooklyn used the notorious crooked cop methods of the third degree to extract a false confession from a young black man. Although George Whitmore, the accused, was cleared of this charge after the real murderer was convicted, he spent more than ten years in the penal system for two other murders he did not commit.

The Savage City is not only a nuanced history of this seminal case; it is a snapshot of the dark heart of our city. Get in on the conversation between T.J. English and Daily News reporter Michael Daly at Tenement Talks this Tuesday night at 6:30.

Posted by Katherine Broadway

How am I Doing?

On Tuesday, October 26 we hosted a Tenement Talk unlike any other. Historian Jonathan Soffer discussed his research—the Former Mayor Ed Koch—with his research subject himself. Introduced by New York Times journalist and writer Sam Roberts, the mayor and his biographer reflected on Koch’s entire political career in less than two hours.

The charismatic mayor told the audience that he had loved “belonging” to New York City and believed being its mayor was the greatest job imaginable. He told us what he thought of as his triumphs, including restoring NYC’s credit and bringing to life an economy long in decline. Koch felt that his ability to brush off failures, his willingness to put aside politics to assemble a talented staff, his respect of others rights—including his critics—and a sense of humor which saved him from harping on failures to the point of debilitating disappointment were all at the root of his success.

But with a critical historian face to face with a controversial and tell-it-like-it-is New York icon, the conversation predictably moved on to the negative aspects of Koch’s career. More than 20 years after his mayoral term came to an end, Koch tried to justify to the Tenement Talk crowd the decisions that led some to believe he was apathetic to the plight of the poor and people of minority, choosing instead to use available resources to privilege the rich and white.

Impassioned, he insisted that an audit of the numbers shows that the majority of the budget in the 1980s was channeled towards programs that overwhelmingly existed for the poor, the elderly, or people of color. But in a quieter tone, Koch confessed to Soffer and the Tenement Talk audience that although Sydenham hospital in Harlem was offering a degraded level of care in 1980, he regretted his decision to close it down because, in the end, the amount of money the city saved can not compare to the symbolic value of the hospital that was the first to admit black physicians.

At the heart of the talk was the question of what Koch meant to New York, for better or for worse. Here at the Tenement Museum, we are constantly trying to trace the lines between past and present New York, asking ourselves how the experience of New Yorkers, especially immigrants, through the years have changed. I was born only a year before Koch’s last in the Mayor seat and can’t imagine the dirtier, more chaotic, and less functioning New York of the 1970s that Soffer, Roberts, and Koch described, but many people in the room knew it first hand. Whether you believe that Koch revived the “greatest city in the world” or that he entrenched a socially unjust status quo, to what degree do you think today’s New York was molded by the brazen forces of the Koch era?

- Posted by Julia

Tenement Talks: The Man Who Never Returned

Courtesy of Indiebound.org

Anybody who loves a good mystery is going to want to join us tonight at Tenement Talks when novelist Peter Quinn discusses his new book, The Man Who Never Returned, alongside journalist and author Kevin Baker.

When Joseph Force Crater, a powerful Justice on the Supreme Court, suddenly vanished after dinner in the summer of 1930, the country was shocked as his disappearance made headlines. A grand jury investigation of the case was launched amidst swirling rumors about Crater's whereabouts, but with not much to go on, no conclusions were ever reached. Urban legends flourished as Carter's disappearance from W. 45th Street grew to be one of the biggest mysteries in New York City history.

Peter Quinn's novel revisits this bizarre story through the eyes of fictional detective Fintan Dunne, who comes out of retirement in 1955 determined to unearth what happened nearly three decades earlier. Dunne, who was introduced in Quinn's earlier book Hour of the Cat, faces nearly insurmountable odds while chasing the truth, as he answers to a greedy newspaper bigwig hungry for a story and confronts the case's perplexing, troubled history.

Quinn, who once worked as a speechwriter for governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, seamlessly blends the city's history with the fictional schemes and theories of his hardheaded protagonist. Best-selling author James Patterson says Quinn "is perfecting, if not actually creating, a genre you could call the history-mystery. The Man Who Never Returned is a dazzling story."

And as those of you who have seen Quinn at previous Tenement Talks know, he is a consummate speaker, witty and interesting as they come. 

So join Kevin Baker, contributing editor of Harper's Magazine and contributing writer of The New York Times, on September 30 at 6:30 pm to discuss a story he believes "you may never want to leave." The conversation begins at 108 Orchard Street at Delancey, and you can RSVP here.

- Posted by Joe Klarl

The Face of Child Labor

As September rolls around, many of our kids head back to school. It's a sometimes exciting, sometimes sad time - who wants to leave behind the beach, freedom, and Popsicles for the classroom? But a scholar friend of ours recently unearthed a pamphlet that shows the alternative to school for many Lower East Side children at the turn of the century: work. And not house work or farm chores - more like "sew buttons on 100 coats before bed."

The chart below, showing “Children Found at Work in Certain New York City Tenements October, 1906-April, 1907,” was published in 1908 in a pamphlet by the New York Child Labor Committee, National Child Labor Committee, and the Consumers' League.

As you can see, the chart shows that 558 of the children surveyed were working, while only 491 were attending school.

Even more interesting than this chart to me were the pamphlet's photographs, which immediately caught my attention.

The Museum’s Piecing it Together tour focuses on immigrants at work and how labor affected their lives. Both families we “visit” on the tour, the Levines and Rogarshevskys, were connected to the garment industry; the Levines ran a garment shop out of their home, the very thing the Consumer’s League was attempting to stamp out with pamphlets like this one.

As I stand in the Levine apartment on my tours, I find that some parts of the shop are easy to imagine. The crowded conditions, the low light, and the heat of the apartments in summer. I’ve felt these conditions myself working in 97 Orchard Street this year, our hottest summer on record!

But as many times as I’ve given the tour, I still have trouble imagining that children were the workers and often faced the terrible conditions in the garment industry alongside adults.

In their pamphlet, the Child Labor Committee makes it painfully clear that these child workers are not leading the kind of carefree lives we imagine children should. Most captions remind the reader how young the children are or what they should be doing instead of work. For example, the caption on the image below reads, “Work instead of play after school for these little flower-makers.”

Child labor was one of the facts of Lower East Side life, often a necessity to make ends meet in poor families. Illuminating this for visitors and helping younger guests contrast it to their lives today is a powerful way to demonstrate how much has changed for the children in our neighborhood.

Sometimes it's not enough simply to say that some of the people Harris Levine employed might have been as young as ten. Actually seeing the young children hard at work in these photographs, and being reminded of what more fortunate children would be doing instead, illuminates so much more. 

Even though things have changed here, the sweatshop has moved elsewhere, and a new generation of children are experiencing similar conditions in other locations around the world. At the Tenement Museum we also strive to draw these contemporary connections, reminding folks that what you see below is still happening. The Child Labor Committee strove to stamp out child labor with promotional materials like this pamphlet. What tactics do you see reformers using to stop child labor today?

- Posted by Educator Ellysheva Zeira, with thanks to Sarah Litvin


Special thanks to Marjorie Feld, a professor at Babson College and historian of the Progressive era, who is currently working with the Museum on a grant and sent us this pamphlet.

Read more about child labor in New York State, 1910-1922, in another report.

IMAGE CREDITS: Photos taken by Consumers' League, National Child Labor Committee, and New York Child Labor Committee, 1908. Pamphlet in collection of Harvard University Library. This material is owned, held, or licensed by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Contact Library for further copyright, reprint, or distribution information.

Pigeon Flying: It's "war in the air"

Scene from On the Waterfront. Courtesy Indywire.

Tomorrow Tenement Talks presents The Pigeon Game, a documentary film work-in-progress about the disappearing culture of pigeon racing. While doing research for the Talk, I was delighted to find that the Tenement Museum’s own Benny Diaz, from the facilities management division, flies pigeons. Benny and I sat down to talk about flying flight pigeons, an admittedly different practice than pigeon racing.

Q: Tell us about your pigeons.
A: I have flight pigeons; the idea with flights is that you fly them around from your roof. You have a stick topped with a rag or a bag that you wave at the birds. Other people will fly their pigeons from other roofs, sometimes five or six blocks away. The idea is when all the birds are flying; you try to catch as many birds as you can from the other owners. You use the stick to draw in your bird and the other birds; then you walk them into their coops. It is war in the air. You can be friends on the street but it’s war on the roof.

Q: Do you have names for your pigeons?
A: We don’t name them, but the name is within the color of the birds. If it’s yellow in color, it’s called a Yellow Flight. If it’s a bird with two colors blended, it’s called a teager.

A yellow teager. Courtesy Steve.

Q: How many pigeons do you have?
A: Right now I have approximately 150 birds. At one time, I had up to 1500 birds.

Q: How long have you been keeping them?
A: I’ve been doing this for around thirty-five years.

Q: How were you drawn to pigeon keeping?
A: In my neighborhood growing up, there was a man who had pigeons. He was older, around sixty. I was drawn to the pigeons and went on his roof. I would help clean them, feed them, and take care of them.

Q: Is this something your family does?
A: No, I’m the only hobbyist in the family.


Q: Where do you keep your birds?
A: They are in Brooklyn, on the roof of my friend’s home. I visit them every day because I need to feed and water the birds. I could never leave them; I would miss them too much.

Q: Have you raced pigeons in the past?
A: No, I just do flights. Racing pigeons is very time-consuming. You must have a schedule to train the birds.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
A: I would like people to know that the pigeons we keep are very different from the pigeons in the streets. Pigeons in the streets are known “street rats.” The pigeons we keep are of all different varieties.

To watch flight pigeons in action, watch this film clip entitled “Up on the Roof.” (Benny has a cameo!)

And more pigeon talk tomorrow night at 6:30 PM. In addition to filmmaker Annie Heringer, who'll show clips from her documentary, you'll also meet Marty McGuinniss, who has had birds since he could walk and has become one of the top pigeon fliers in NYC.

Join us at the Museum Shop, 108 Orchard Street at Delancey.

- Interview by Alana Rosen

A Trip to the Merchant's House Museum

Most of us who work at the Tenement Museum are, as you might expect, museum geeks. We read the trade papers (such as they are – you go Museum magazine!) and keep an eye on what other institutions are doing. As NYC museum employees, we get free admission to other city museums (an amazing job perk), and we often take staff field trips together.

Tredwell home, circa 1899.
Courtesy MHM.

Recently, we got the chance to see the Merchant’s House Museum, located on East 4th Street between Lafayette and Bowery. This row house, inhabited by Seabury Tredwell and his family from 1832 to 1933, is considered “the best preserved” federal building in New York City, according to the New York Times.

It’s an especially interesting house museum because it contains artwork and furniture that belong to the family. Some of the artifacts include a collection of 12 chairs credited to Duncan Phyfe (a renowned New York-based cabinet maker who also made fine furniture), two matching gas chandeliers (circa 1852), and over 40 dresses and other fashion items that the Tredwell women wore.

Glass chandeliers.
Courtesy MHM

Seabury Tredwell made his money from a hardware importing business on Pearl Street in the first part of the 19th century. Like many other merchants, he and his family lived in fashionable Washington Square, which was less crowded than areas further downtown. Over time, as that neighborhood in turn became busier, the wealthy tended to move north, but the Tredwells stayed.

Our guide Elizabeth couldn’t say for sure why that was. Records show that the Tredwells re-furbished their home in the 1850s and might have been reluctant to leave a property into which they’d just invested a large sum of money. Perhaps they’d planned to retire to their farm in New Jersey and simply never got around to it. In any case, members of the family lived there until the youngest, unmarried Tredwell daughter died in 1933.

Since the Merchant’s House Museum interpretation encompasses roughly the same time period as the Tenement Museum, our sites are complimentary, though very different. While 97 Orchard Street’s residents were working-class laborers, the Tredwell family was quite well to do (for most of Seabury Tredwell’s life, at least). It is estimated that 7,000 people lived at 97 Orchard for its 72 years as a residence, whereas 29 East 4th Street was home to roughly 14 people over a 101-year span, with a single person, Gertrude Tredwell, inhabiting the four-story residence for several decades.

It’s interesting to observe how different the lives of these two buildings’ residents were during the same time period. The Tredwells had a parlor for callers and bells throughout the house for ringing servants. Mr. and Mrs. Tredwell slept in separate bedrooms. 97 Orchard Street’s residents lived in three-room apartments and didn’t even get front door buzzers until sometime after electricity was installed around 1924. Married couples were lucky if they got to share a bedroom – and didn’t also have to share it with several children.

We were curious to hear about the daily lives of the family’s servants, since someone like our own Bridget Meehan probably worked as a domestic servant before marrying Joseph Moore in 1865. She might have spent hours in the basement kitchen, baking in a beehive oven and scrubbing pots before retiring to her fourth-floor bedroom, like the Tredwells’ scullery maids did.

We were very fortunate to be able to visit the building’s top floor, normally off limits to visitors, to see the former maids’ quarters. While the space has abundant light coming from several dormer windows and a large skylight, it’s easy to see how it might have been hot and stuffy in the summer and cold in the winter. And domestic servants rarely got a respite from their work, not even up here – Elizabeth told us that the large, open space in between the four, small bedrooms was used for ironing, mending, and other household chores. The only free time a servant had was typically Thursday evenings. You can imagine why marriage might have seemed a cheerful alternative for many working girls.

Gertrude Tredwell.
Courtesy MHM.

I heartily recommend a visit to all those interested in American social history. Check the calendar and find a day when they’re offering a special program, like a restoration and furnishings plan tour (August 25) or Gertrude Tredwell’s 170th birthday party (September 17). And don’t miss the ghost tours in October!

Admission is $10 for adults and $5 for students and seniors, and they're open Thursday - Monday, 12-5 pm. Click here for more information.

- Posted by Kate

Adaptive Reuse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard

The Tenement Museum is the perfect example of “adaptive reuse,” a term that describes the preservation of old buildings and structures for new purposes.  The apartments of 97 Orchard Street have been restored from ruin to their current function as a museum that tells the true stories of immigrants who lived there between 1863 and 1935.  Other examples in Manhattan include The High Line, a defunct elevated railway that has been redesigned as a beautiful public park, and the Victorian-Gothic style Jefferson Market Library, a former courthouse that the City converted to a public library branch in the 1960s.

Across the East River in Brooklyn is another exciting example of adaptive reuse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  The navy yard, which was established in 1801 by the U.S. Navy, is today a 300-acre industrial park home to over 240 businesses.  On a recent bus tour hosted by the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC), and Urban Oyster, I learned about the history of the navy yard and its revitalization as a model of sustainable industry.  The BNYDC, which manages the site for the City of New York, is leading this effort.  Capsys is one tenant that builds environmentally-sensitive modular units to construct affordable housing, hotels, and assisted-living facilities.  Surroundart, a fine arts company, is located in the Perry Building, the country’s first multi-story industrial building with Gold LEED certification.

The Perry Building

As Andrew Kimball, President of the BNYDC, explained in a recent Metropolis magazine article, “We’ve demonstrated here that urban manufacturing is back...It doesn’t look anything like the days of the smokestacks. It tends to be small-scale, with very nimble businesses that tap into the creative class...”

The Paymaster Building (built 1899),
whose windows reflect the wind turbines across the street.

The BNYDC continues to adaptively reuse the yard.  It is expanding its capacity to meet the demand for industrial space, turning massive, currently inoperative warehouses into a sustainable manufacturing center.  The BNYDC is also planning to update the former Naval Hospital Annex, whose hospital and surgeon’s house are both national landmarks, for use as media campus in connection with the production company Steiner Studios.  There is discussion of creating a memorial park at the annex as part of the Brooklyn Greenway, a 14-mile path that will run from Sunset Park to Greenpoint.  Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at Building 92, a visitor’s center and exhibition space that will examine "the past, present, and future of the BNY and its relationship with the community,” is scheduled to open in the renovated 1857 Marine Commandant’s home in late 2011.

However, historic preservation questions remain.  Developers plan to demolish nine of the eleven dilapidated, but historically-significant, Naval Officers’ Quarters on a six-acre site called Admiral's Row, managed by the National Guard, to build a ShopRite supermarket and a retail center.  (Admiral’s Row is not yet owned by the City, a transaction that would need to take place before redevelopment.)  This $60 million project will provide access to affordable, healthy food and jobs for residents in nearby public housing projects, though preservationists want to protect all of the existing buildings.

While we wait to see the outcome of these contentious issues, I encourage everyone to visit the site.  Tenement Museum members can get 10% off all Urban Oyster tours.

-Posted by Penny

Fireworks on the Lower East Side

Yesterday we posted about how Lower East Side tenement dwellers may have celebrated the Fourth of July. You may be wondering—what about the fireworks? Here's my research on the history of fireworks in New York City.


An image of New York City lit up by fireworks, 1876.
Courtesy New York Public Library.

Firecrackers are nothing new to Fourth of July celebrations. Early settlers used them to celebrate the signing of Declaration of Independence in 1777, and by 1800 the first advertisements for fireworks were published.


An image from Harper's Weekly, July 4, 1857
Courtesy New York Public Library.

The opinion about fireworks has changed drastically over the years. In a July 1871 issue of Harper’s Weekly, one writer proclaimed, “there is no use in protesting against the good old orthodox fashion of celebrating the fourth of July with bonfires, cannon, guns, pistols, rockets, fire-crackers, snakes, Roman candles, fire-balloons, and every other possible contrivance for making a blaze and a noise.” In July of 1894, just 23 years later, an anti-fireworks Harper’s Weekly article stated that these “methods of celebration are obsolete and barbarous.”

Fireworks were very hazardous when not properly handled (as they are today). On July 5, 1900 the New York Times recounted the previous day’s celebrations, noting several injuries due to fireworks. One article detailed how three women were riding in a horse-driven coach at Coney Island when boys startled the horse with firecrackers. The scared animal ran crazily on Surf Avenue, causing pedestrians to run out of the way, until the coachman caught the horse’s bridle and calmed it down. Thankfully no one was injured.

Unfortunately, some sad events happened did on this day. Nine-year-old Henry Schneider of Second Avenue was holding a firecracker when it randomly went off. His right hand was shattered and he lost his right eye, as it was “blown out.” Another article reported how seven-year-old Gustave Rosmarin of 70 First Street fell out of a window and died instantly. He was shooting off firecrackers on the window ledge when some boys on the street threw more up at him to set off. He was frightened, lost his balance and fell. [Read more.]

In a 1910 Harper’s Weekly article titled “Our Murderous Patriotism,” the writer detailed the injuries and deaths on or shortly after the Fourth of July. Here are the recorded numbers from 1903-1909:

901 deaths from tetanus
630 deaths from other causes, including fireworks
114 cases of complete blindness
518 losses of one eye
406 losses of legs, hands or arms
1,420 losses of one or more fingers
30,606 other various injuries

A grand total of 34,603 were either injured or dead in seven years of Fourth of July celebrations. The article did not say whether these figures were specific to the New York area, so they are probably national statistics. In a July 5, 1912 New York Times article, one orator proclaimed that “on one Fourth of July there were more people killed in New York than there were in the Battle of Lexington.”

By 1911 New York City was starting to change the way the holiday was celebrated. In a June 1911 Harper’s Weekly edition, an article titled “A Sane Fourth makes a Happy Fourth” detailed how the celebration would run that year. It read, “To assure an old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration in New York City, with a minimum of fireworks and a maximum of patriotic enthusiasm,” the city would focus on the “procession of the nations.” The article claimed that “every nationality in the borough will be represented” by one family marching and holding their homeland’s flag. It is interesting to see how the definition of “old-fashioned” changed from 1871 (when they felt it patriotic to use all kinds of explosives) to 1911.


This ad would never be published today...
Courtesy New York Public Library

In the late 20th century fireworks become illegal in many counties and states, usually because of safety concerns. But in 2007 New York City repealed its ban of firecrackers, and people enjoyed seeing 300,000 set off in Chinatown’s Chatham Square. 

A happy and safe Fourth to all our readers!

-posted by Devin, with thanks to Mary Brown, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building and the New York Public Library Digital Gallery

Poems of New York

April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, tonight we host poet and teacher Stephen Wolf, who also happens to be editor of a wonderful volume of New York-centric poems, I Speak of the City. He, along with young poets from the New York Writers Coalition, will read some of our favorite works by poets whose names you might recognize (Whitman, Ginsberg) and those you may not at all (Lindsay, Koch).

To get the ball rolling, here's a portion of a poem by Charles Hanson Towne called "Manhattan" that probably speaks to many of us. Read it aloud!

Manhattan

When, sick of all the sorrow and distress
That flourished in the City like foul weeds,
I sought the blue rivers and green, opulent meads,
And leagues of unregarded loneliness
Whereon no foot of man had seemed to press,
I did not know how great had been my needs,
How wise the woodland's gospels and her creeds,
How good her faith to one long comfortless.

But in the silence came a voice to me;
In every wind it murmured, and I knew
It would not cease, though far my heart might roam.
It called me in the sunrise and the dew,
At noon and twilight, sadly, hungrily,
The jealous City, whispering always -- "Home!"

Mick Moloney, a Gorgeous Former Synagogue, and Brooklyn Brewery Beer

All of these things came together Tuesday night at a Tenement Talk entitled "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews." Mick Moloney, an ethno-musicologist, specializes in 19th and early 20th century American music. He's particularly interested in the way that cultures intermingle in song. He's done a lot of work to investigate the American music scene in its early days.

His latest CD focuses on an unlikely cross-cultural collaboration between Irish and Jewish Americans at the end of the 19th century. Musicians, songwriters, and performers easily swapped identities based on the direction the music industry was going... George M. Cohan, for instance, the writer of such classics as "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "You're a Grand Old Flag" was the son of Irish immigrants whose family name was Keohane. His parents were in show business on the Vaudeville stage, so perhaps there was specific intent when they changed their name to Cohan, which at a glance seems like Cohen, a common Jewish name. Working with many Jewish songwriters and performers, Cohan likely took advantage of this misconception to gain a foot hold in his industry. As always in show biz, performers would change their names if it helped to insure their success.

Here's a bit of the title song, written and composed by William Jerome (ne Flannery) and Jean Schwartz:

What would this great Yankee nation
Really, really ever do?
If it wasn't for a Levy,
A Mon-a-han or Don-a-hue,
Where would we get our policemen?
Why Uncle Sam would have the blues
Without the Pats and Isadores.
You'd have no big department stores,
If it wasn't for the Irish and the Jews.

McDonald built the subway and his name we'll not forget.
A word of praise is due to Nathan Strauss.
For pasteurizing baby's milk,
the world owes him a debt.
He's a friend to every kiddie in the house.
Without Big Tim Sullivan what would the Bowry do?
Just ask the man that needs a pair of shoes.
There wouldn't be an East Side in the City of New York,
If it wasn't for the Irish and the Jews.

Below are some photos from our event, held at the beautiful Angel Orensanz Foundation Center on Norfolk Street. Many people asked on Tuesday about the building's history. It was formerly the Ansche Chesed Synagogue (constructed 1849). Click here for a link to a pdf history pamphlet.



Full-sized photos can be found directly on our Flickr page.

Thanks to all who joined us for the event!

- Posted by Kate

Tenement Talks on Channel Thirteen

One of our Tenement Talks was recently posted to Thirteen FORUM, the online education arm of Channel Thirteen. The talk was with Jennifer Fronc, author of New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era. The book details the way that Progressive-era reformers used private citizens (journalists, social workers) to spy on gangs, brothel workers, or radical political groups. Interestingly, she ties this era to the present day, suggesting that modern federal surveillance policy has its roots in the private investigations of the late 19th century.

Click here to watch the talk on Forum's website.

Book Review: Empire City

The imagination has a powerful effect on the shape of the built environment. The nineteenth-century planners described in David Scobey’s book Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape imagined Victorian New York as a symbol of progress towards the nation’s imperial destiny and shaped the built environment to fulfill this particular vision.

New York had emerged as the financial capital of the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century. From 1845 to 1875, the population of New York grew from 370,000 to more than one million people. Scobey writes that “New York seemed swept up in changes of almost seismic proportions.” Victorian New Yorkers viewed these urban transformations as symbols of the city’s and the nation’s progress.

Major building projects from this time, such as the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park, reflect the focus on commerce and civilization. John Roebling, who engineered the great bridge, described his design as a symbol of New York’s commercial dominance. Elite planners also believed that the built environment could educate and socialize the population of the young American democracy. Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park as a site of education and leisure where the lower classes could learn the “values of civilized life” from upper classes, although in reality the park and the city were often segregated by class.

Although the Victorian planners did not always realize their ambitious goals, they did transform the built environment of New York, creating lasting monuments to American idealism.

(Bottom photo: New York: Ditson, C. H., 1883. Courtesy Library of Congress)

- Posted by Penny King

A Little History of 75 Essex Street

Hello all! It’s Allison Siegel, Tenement Museum educator. In the upcoming months I’ll be writing some posts for the blog on neighborhood history stuff. First up is a mini neighborhood landmark!

Not too far from our lady of Orchard Street is another relic of a bygone era. At the corner of Essex and Broome Streets stands 75 Essex Street (left), once home to the Eastern Dispensary.

A little background on dispensaries is required, so please allow me to tell you about the Eastern Dispensary’s sister, the Northern Dispensary in Greenwich Village (right). You may know it as the place where that somewhat famous writer, Edgar Allen Poe, once stayed as a patient. Founded in 1829, the Northern Dispensary is the only building in New York City with one side on two streets – Christopher and Grove Streets – and two sides on one street – Waverly Place.

Both the Eastern and Northern Dispensaries are freestanding buildings, which are pretty rare in our fine city of party walls and few alleyways.

But back to the Lower East Side:

The Eastern Dispensary (also known, by the late 19th century, as the Good Samaritan Dispensary) opened in 1832 and was built to provide the sick and poor with a place to receive aide and medicine. Helen Campbell, a 19th century missionary, described its patients in her 1898 book Darkness and Light; or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life:

Weary mothers with sick and wailing babies in their arms; women with bandaged heads and men with arms in slings; children sent by sick fathers and mothers at home for needed medicine. On most is the unmistakable look that tells of patient suffering and half-starved lives. . . .

Other publications focused on promoting the Dispensary’s success in aiding New York’s impoverished:

The dispensary is open daily, and furnishes gratuitous medical and surgical aid to the destitute sick of the eastern portion of the city. It also gives special attention to vaccination, which is freely performed upon all who apply for it, without respect to their station or pecuniary circumstances. Those able to pay for this service are invited to, and it is stated, generally do contribute to the funds of the institution.

Since its opening, it has aided seven hundred and sixty-four thousand persons, at an average cost, of fifteen cents each. The number treated the past year was twenty-six thousand two hundred and eighty-six…

The institution was visited June 4th [1870], and its operations observed.... The medical staff consists of a house physician and full boards of visiting and attending physicians and surgeons, the latter serving without pay. It is a well ordered and finely managed medical charity, worthy the gifts of the benevolent and the aid it receives from the State. (The 1870 Annual Report of the Board of State Commissioners of Public Charities of the City of New York State Page 170)

Fifteen cents! Somebody get Obama on the phone. Actually, there are still many clinics around the city providing pay-as-you’re-able health care – the Community Healthcare Network's downtown health center on Essex has been serving the Lower East Side since 1971. It’s certainly the legacy of the 19th century dispensaries.

But the Dispensary provided more than just doctor care. Have any of you been on our Moore family tour? If so, you already know about the 19th-century contaminated milk epidemic and its fatal effects on infants. One of the city’s “milk laboratories,” which provided sanitary milk for infants, was located at 75 Essex Street. Read yesterday’s post for more on that.

The Good Samaritan Dispensary closed in 1955. The New York City Register shows that on April 25, 1977, the City foreclosed on 75 Essex Street due to unpaid taxes. Cue the Eisner Brothers!

Shalom Eisner grew up in Williamsburg and rented the first floor space of 75 Essex Street in 1977. It was there that he opened the Eisner Brothers Store. They sell everything! Here’s a blurb from their website:

Our tremendous selection includes tee shirts, sweat-shirts, golf shirts, jackets, caps and hats… [we’re] the haven for uniformed officers; they know they can count on us for all their wardrobe needs.

Professional sports buffs and amateur wannabes: you won't find a better array of boxing equipment and licensed sports products than this.

Our collection of "I Love New York" items is beyond compare: creative, original and stimulating.

By 1985, Shalom Eisner and his family purchased the entire building. They’ve been in business for over thirty years. In this internet age, they’ve also been pretty successful with online sales.

Last year, 75 Essex Street was placed on the market for a cool $18 million. I had to know why, so I called the store and spoke with Shalom. He cited the recession as the reason why he decided to try to sell. (May I just add: People. Eisner Brothers is a neighborhood institution. GO SHOP THERE!)

While gushing over the 20 ft ceilings on every floor and the 14 ft-high ceiling in the basement, Shalom told me it’s his dream that if he sells the building “it will be left as is on the outside and become a single-family home for a famous person… Someone like Madonna. She could have her own Lower East Side home.”

He emphasized that whoever (in case Madonna isn’t interested) purchases 75 Essex Street will have to leave the outside as is (“that will be set forth in the contract”). So, not to fear, Lower East Siders and friends of preservation – while the Eastern Dispensary and its patients are long gone and Shalom and his brothers are on their way out, I can say with certainty that although Shalom believes there’s “potential for a swimming pool in the rear yard,” 75 Essex Street is going to stand strong for another 180 years.

Peace and Blessings until next time,

- Allison B. Siegel

Allison is an educator at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, self-proclaimed (and some other folks think so, too) 19th/20th century local historian and preservationist-in-training.

The tragedy of the steamship General Slocum

Many of New York’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ethnic neighborhoods have long since disappeared, but none met such a tragic end as Little Germany, also known as Kleindeutschland.

Millions of German immigrants arrived in the United States during the nineteenth century and established a thriving community on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. On June 15, 1904, thirteen hundred members of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church boarded the steamboat General Slocum at the East Third Street pier for an outing to Locust Grove on Long Island.

As the ship headed up the East River, a fire broke out, engulfing the wooden steamboat as it sped into the wind. Faulty life jackets increased the number of deaths to between 800 and 1200 people - New York City’s deadliest tragedy before September 11th. Many bodies were burned beyond recognition. This photograph depicts a gathering of mourners burying the unidentified dead.


Burial of the ‘unidentified’ ‘Gen. Slocum’ disaster June [15, 1904] : Corner Ave. A & 6th St. Gustav Scholer papers. / Series XI. Photographs. New York Public Library.

The General Slocum disaster decimated St. Mark’s membership and caused many families of German ancestry to leave the neighborhood “so intimately linked with the death of their loved ones,” writes historian Edward O’Donnell.

The number of German residents of Kleindeutschland decreased in the 1890s, but the General Slocum disaster accelerated this trend because the vast majority of the victims lived within a forty-block area.

Today you can visit a memorial of this tragedy in Tompkins Square Park, located in the neighborhood that was once called Kleindeutschland.

- Posted by Penny King

History Resources at the Library

Around here, we love the New York Public Library for many reasons - free books, cool digital archive, ferocious mascot. But mostly the Library is a tremendous resource for anyone doing research about the city. Recently I found a great list of sites relating to "Manhattan history on the web" on their own new-and-improved website. Check it out here.

Naturally, we make the cut, but there are lots of other great links about 19th century history, housing, and life. Check out an excerpt from William Dean Howells' "An East Side Ramble," 1896:

[The East Side] is said to be more densely populated than any other area in the world, or at least in Christendom, for within a square mile there are more than three hundred and fifty thousand men, women and children. One can imagine from this fact alone how they are housed and what their chances of the comforts and decencies of life may be...

What the place must be in summer I had not the heart to think, and on the wintry day of my visit I could not feel the fury of the skies which my guide said would have been evident to me if I had seen it in August. I could better fancy this when I climbed the rickety stairs within one of the houses and found myself in a typical New York tenement. Then I almost choked at the thought of what a hot day, what a hot night, must be in such a place, with the two small windows inhaling the putrid breath of the court and transmitting it, twice fouled by the passage through the living-room, to the black hole in the rear, where the whole family lay on the heap of rags that passed for a bed...

My friend asked me if I would like to go into any other tenements, but I thought that if what I had seen was typical, I had seen enough in that quarter. The truth is, I had not yet accustomed myself to going in upon people in that way, though they seemed accustomed to being gone in upon without any ceremony but the robust "Good-morning!" my companion gave them by way of accounting for our presence, and I wanted a little interval to prepare myself for further forays. The people seemed quite ready to be questioned, and answered us as persons in authority. They may have taken us for detectives, or agents of benevolent societies, or journalists in search of copy. In any case, they had nothing to lose and they might have something to gain; so they received us kindly and made us much at home among them as they knew how. It may have been that in some instances they supposed that we were members of the Board of Health and were their natural allies against their landlords.

- posted by Kate

Antique Footwear!

If you haven't seen it already, check out this trove of old rubber boots found in the Mark Miller gallery space across the street from the Museum.

The video and photos we took are posted on the Bowery Boogie blog.

Here's a little video of the guy who was doing excavation work in the basement taking a giant lump of fused rubber boots to the dumpster.

Here are some of the photos along with some info about the shoes from Derya, our collections manager.

Boy, do we wish these shoes were from 97 Orchard Street! They would be a great find for our new storefronts exhibit.

Here's something interesting for those of you who are interested in labor history. We talk a lot about the garment industry and unions on the Piecing it Together tour.

This is pulled from the NY Times City Room blog, where historian Joshua Freeman (author of Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II) is answering questions.

Q: In your opinion, what were the primary causes and repercussions of the early 20th-century conflicts between the various leftist unions in the New York City’s garment center?

For example, in his landmark book “World of Our Fathers,” Irving Howe wrote: “If anything, the Jewish Communists were more ferocious than their gentile comrades, for when Joseph Boruchowitz, the Communist leader of the cloak union started debating a Forvetsnik (a Forward supporter), what erupted was not just a difference of opinion but a seething hatred between men who only yesterday had known one another intimately.” (Page 333) — Posted by Miles T. Wood

A. The battles among leftists in the New York garment unions were part of a worldwide fight between communists and socialists, which broke out in the wake of the Russian Revolution. New York leftists had disagreements about union strategy and national politics, but the heart of their conflict lay in loyalties to contending international movements. As Irving Howe suggested, the social and political proximity of the factionalists added to the bitterness between them. In few places in America besides the world of radical New York labor were socialists called “the right wing.” During the mid-1920s, leftist factionalism crippled several unions, including the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. The inability of communists and socialists to work together, except during brief periods, diminished their influence on the larger labor movement, (though it nonetheless was considerable, especially in New York).


Anyone have a different perspective?

- Posted by Kate

Quick Bit o' Bagel

Ed Levine taste tests the City's bagels... with surprising results.

We sell this book on the history of the bagel at the Museum Shop.

Kossar's on Grand Street is a neighborhood favorite, and when we have a staff breakfast, this is where we get our stash.

For a quick bagel-and-egg sandwich, we hit up Happiness on Delancey, which is run by the nicest guys ever. They have been there forever, and they know everybody - from the high school kids who come in for lunch to all of us at the Tenement Museum. They use bagels from H&H.

If you are ambitious, try making your own at home. They are less trouble than you might think, and everybody will be very impressed.

(Photo via Serious Eats)

- Posted by Kate