Visitors of the Week: Lisa and Fred from Hartford, Connecticut

Planning a visit to the Tenement Museum? Send us an email to be our next Visitor of the Week.

Meet Lisa and Fred from Hartford, Connecticut. While cat-sitting for their son in the West Village, the couple is taking advantage of a week in New York. Their tour here at the Tenement Museum inspired their own memories of apartment living and family stories of the Great Depression.

What tour did you go on today?

Lisa: Getting by with Raj [a Tenement Museum educator].

He mentioned to me that you both have interesting connections to tenement buildings.

Fred: I was born in Brooklyn in a coldwater flat. I guess it’s the next generation of what we saw here. I lived there until I was six, and then we moved to New Jersey. So the tour was very interesting and I could relate to it.

L: Fred’s father came over from Germany in 1929. He was an immigrant, but he didn’t go through Ellis Island. My grandmother came over from Germany also when she was eight, but she landed in Chicago. I was interested in what happened to immigrants after they came to the United States and the struggles they had.

Did you see any structural similarities to the building you grew up in versus our tenement building?

F: One thing is the airshaft. Of course ours was newer, so we had running water. But it brought back a lot of memories.

L: Your father used to talk about how it was so hot in the summertime because you were never getting any air.

F: Yeah, the apartments were long and narrow. It had the airshaft in the middle, and then on one end was the street and the other end was the backyard where we had our clotheslines [laughs]. I still remember all that.

Do you think the summer or the wintertime was harder?

F: You know when you’re young the summer and winter all runs together. Heat or cold don’t bother you as much.

L: I think this was a wonderful opportunity to see how people actually lived when there were thousands of people in the streets. When there were so many people living in those apartments. Like, for example, there were eight people in one apartment with how many…20 apartments? With everyone sharing four latrines and one water pump in the back.

Plus, at a certain point the storefront level was a functioning saloon of sorts; the patrons were all also using the bathrooms.

L: It’s unbelievable that people could live like that.

This tour focuses on the Great Depression, did you have any memories since you both had relatives immigrating [to America] during that time period?

F: Yeah. Both our parents lived through the Great Depression and it’s very clear it left a mark on them. In turn, it left a smaller mark on us. They preached about what happened in the Great Depression. You’ve got to say that you have to use every piece of the soap down to the last molecule.

L: And your father used to talk about how when he came over here the Depression had just started. He had a series of jobs until the businesses closed. He had earned a dollar a day, and when he had some rent he just barely made it in terms of his expenses.

What was his line of work?

L: He actually was a machinist. When that business went under, he would take any job he could get so he was working as a baker making donuts in the morning. They say the pay was so small you didn’t even have a safety net.

Podcast: Pest Management

Collections Manager and Registrar Derya Golpinar talks about keeping pests away from the Museum's collection of documents, photographs and artifacts. How does the Museum keep rats and mice from living in a 147-year-old tenement on a very, ahem, active block? With integrated pest management, of course!

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Yes, we're open today!

97 Orchard Street in the blizzard of 2006. (c) Don Farrell.

Though it's snowy outside (brrrr), the Tenement Museum is open. Today we have tours from 10:30 am - 5 pm. Call if you've got any questions - 212-982-8420.

Podcast: Collections Management and Conservation

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

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Thank You! Let's keep spinning stories together...

The blog team at the Tenement Museum wishes to thank you for reading, commenting, thinking, sharing, and enjoying our blog over the last year. We like to think we've grown up a little bit since our very first post on October 1, 2008 and thank you for growing with us.

We still believe that history is a valuable resource for understanding contemporary issues and that historical perspective can shed new light on what's going on in our world today. When we talk about the immigrant experience in America, we aren't just talking about Mrs. Gumpertz "getting by" in 1873. We're also talking about working-class immigrants who live, work, love, raise children, and "get by" in our country today. For all that New York changes, in some ways it stays very much the same.

Thank you for joining us on the journey to discuss and explore people, culture, housing, religion, family, labor, factories, stores, business, food and so much more. We raise a glass to good things to come in 2011!

[And, psst - it's not too late to donate to the Museum for tax year 2010. Just specify that your donation goes to online education to keep the blog rolling. You could support staff salaries, intern stipends, podcast hosting, video editing, or a new camera. Promise we won't spend it all on coffees for the writing staff. ;)]

- Posted by Kate with best wishes from our interns, volunteer writers, and the Tenement Museum's Social Media Committee

Lore Beyond the Tour: The Day the Swiss Took me to Tea

Today's post is by Elly Berke, Tenement Museum Educator.

One of the greatest joys of working at the Tenement Museum for me is getting to meet new people from all over the world. By the end of each tour, there are usually a few visitors who want to continue discussions about history, current events or share their family stories. Some just want to ask what brought me to New York and how I landed at the museum.

A pair of ladies from Switzerland took particular interest in me after a Getting By tour last week. I was surprised to see that Tamia and Joanne were waiting for me outside of 108 Orchard Street when I was about to head home. They told me they had many more questions and wondered if I would join them for tea at 88 Orchard, our local café. Although my voice was a bit shot after six hours of talking, sometimes in dialect (as Victoria Confino), I gratefully accepted, and we began to get to know each other over steaming mugs of peppermint tea.

In addition to asking me how I felt being both Jewish and Italian, if I felt American, if I'd ever been to Italy, if I felt at home there, and why Americans know so much about their family history, they had much to share with me.

When I first asked Tamia what brought her to New York she said “Well, to get back to my roots and see who I am.” It turns out Tamia’s mother was born and raised in New Jersey and her father was originally from Algeria. Most of Tamia’s extended family still resides in the New York area, although she didn’t get to know them very well, having been raised in Switzerland.

Upon hearing that both of Tamia’s parents were immigrants, I asked about the state of immigration in Switzerland. They told me the Swiss government has a very harsh policy toward immigrants, Gypsies in particular, and they could be deported for even a minor offense.

Tamia was an elementary school teacher back in Switzerland, and she moved to Harlem when her husband was accepted into the Jazz Studies program at The New School. Currently she is working as a French-speaking nanny on the Upper East Side. She told me she never truly knew what about her culture and mannerisms were Swiss until she set foot in New York. She asked me why Italian Americans are more proud of their heritage than Italians who live in Italy. I told her I thought she’d pretty much cracked it: I never feel more American than when I leave the country, and immigrants need identity and solidarity the most when they land in a new place.

Joanne was visiting Tamia for the week and seemed pleased to have a brief break from her pediatric practice. She explained to me that she doesn’t really feel needed as a doctor in Switzerland, a wealthy country where most children are fortunate enough to not need doctor visits. Joanne’s parents were both born in Trinidad, and she goes there every year to see her extended family.

She hopes to travel with Doctors Without Borders to Haiti to help with the cholera epidemic and told me about various trips she’d taken which inspired her to help people in need. In Malaysia, Joanne slunk down in her seat and closed her eyes on the tour bus that took them through villages where people lived in shacks on stilts. She said it felt so wrong looking into peoples’ homes for amusement: “We were treating them like animals in a zoo.”

It’s a good thing the Baldizzis weren’t home on our "Getting By" tour, I thought to myself. But after all, don’t experiences like Joanne’s inspire us to make a difference in the world? Most recently Joanne traveled to South Africa, and she pulled out her iPhone to show me pictures from Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held prisoner for eighteen years. She pointed out that the structures which housed the guards’ dogs were better equipped than the prisoners’ cells.

Joanne’s tour guide at the prison-turned-museum was himself a former prisoner. Joanne found her tour guide’s perspective to be the most interesting part of the experience. I see a parallel to out museum, where our diverse staff and our own unique immigrant heritages enrich the visitor’s experience.

After an hour and a half of stimulating conversation with these two well-informed Swiss-American-Algerian-Trinidadians, my mind was full and my tea-cup was empty. We exchanged information, and I told them to please keep in touch and that no visitor had ever reached out to me in such a heartfelt way. I felt warm through and through, and it wasn’t just the tea. I wondered how I would pass on the kindness they showed me. As I stepped out into the first snowfall and made my way through Chinatown, I felt, maybe for the first time, that I was a citizen of the world.

- Posted by Elly Berke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Daniel Molina

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

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

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

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

[Part V will be posted tomorrow.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Part IV will be posted later this afternoon.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Part III to come tomorrow morning.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Part II will be posted later this afternoon]

Meet the Educators: Pedro Garcia

I was fortunate to recently sit down with Pedro Garcia, a great member of the Tenement Museum staff who juggles a few different roles here. He discussed his job, his own struggles as a young boy adapting to America, and how the immigration experience is ongoing.

Could you introduce yourself to our readers?
I'm Pedro Garcia. I work at the Tenement Museum as education associate for training and outreach.

How long have you been working here?
In total, I've been at the museum for five years.

What does your job entail?
I have two main roles. Training involves teaching all staff of the Tenement, both part-timers and full-timers, to lead public tours of the museum. So that's the bulk of my job. And outreach involves managing our ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) program called Shared Journeys and promoting the education program that we have to offer to the community of the Lower East Side.

What exactly is the mission of the Shared Journeys program?
Well, it's a program that was developed at the museum a few years ago, and the idea is to use history to teach English. Existing ESL classes from around the city can come visit the museum and in a two hour workshop, they will learn about immigration of the past and share their own experiences. Hence the name.

What do you find most gratifying about your job?
It's very rewarding when I teach someone how to do a tour and that person excels. It's also great when Shared Journeys accomplishes its mission, when the students come and they feel that, yes, my immigrant story is very similar to those from a hundred years ago.

Before you worked at the Tenement Museum, what did you do?
I used to work in education. It wasn't really history or museum stuff. I worked teaching for non-profits. Basically, I was an educator in small settings for children who had behavioral problems.

Did that help you prepare for your work here?
Yeah. It helps a little bit because I used to be a trainer there, too. It's very similar and helped me to build some of the skills I use here.

I know you have an immigrant story of your own. Where did you grow up?
Well, I was born in Venezuela. My family came to the United States when I was very young. I was about eight or ten years old. We came straight to New York, and I've been here ever since.

What year was that?
The late eighties, like '88 or '89.

When you got to New York, I assume you weren't an English speaker...
No, no, none of us spoke English.

How did you learn the language?
The great benefit that I always cherish is that I went to school in the Bronx where they have bilingual education. That helped make the transition easier for me... not easy because learning English is never really easy. It's actually one of the hardest languages to learn. But I was able to have a little bit of support and that helped me to transition and grow.

I heard you were recently on a panel where you spoke about being bullied as a kid because of your English skills. Can you tell me about that?
The panel was about professionals in New York City who grew up as immigrant kids, and we spoke to New York City teachers. And the question was, "What is the hardest part about being an immigrant kid newly arriving to school?" I said the hardest part is being bullied because you don't know the language and you don't know where to go. It becomes a very terrifying experience. I went to school in the Bronx and at that time, the neighborhood I lived in was very dangerous. Shootings and violence were all around me. That made it even scarier. I was trying to convey to the teachers one thing that can be done to resolve some of the fear experienced when immigrants arrive - they should have a buddy. There should be another immigrant kid helping them to get adjusted because sometimes, kids can be mean.

Did you have that?
No.

You felt like you were on your own?
I was on my own. My sister went to a different school, and my brother was very young, so he wasn't in my school either. Like I was telling the teachers at the panel, when immigrants come, it's a whole new world. It can be very scary already. It's very daunting to be in a new place. Why make it harder? Why not help them a little bit with a buddy?

Do you feel that your own immigrant experience was similar to the families that we feature here at the museum?
I've always felt that way, yeah. When I tell my own stories about how difficult it is coming to the United States, I think of the Baldizzi family. It was very hard for the parents to come over. It was very hard for the whole family. The Baldizzis had to share a one bedroom apartment with four of them. We had to share a one bedroom apartment with five of us. So I think more and more, our experiences are very similar. My parents wanted us to get the best out of being in the U.S., to learn English, to be Americans. It's the same thing the Baldizzis taught their children. I truly believe there are a lot of similarities.

What do you hope visitors to the museum take away from it? What do you hope they learn about immigration?
Well, I hope that they get to think about the immigration experience and how hard it was while realizing that it hasn't gotten easier. There's a bad misconception that everyone who came to this country in the last twenty or thirty years had it very easy. It's hard, but a different type of difficulty. If visitors pause for a second and just think about what they're seeing around them and what they just heard about the past, they can see a lot of similarities. I hope that by the time they leave a tour that I lead or a tour that is lead by one of my trainees, they at least think about it. I don't want to force anybody to change their minds or their opinions. I just want them to start discussing it. You just have to stop and think.

- Posted by Joe Klarl

Meet the Educators: Justin Gilman and Rachel Serkin

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with two of the Tenement Museum's educators, Justin Gilman and Rachel Serkin. They told me about their jobs, inside and outside of 97 Orchard.

How long have you been working at the Tenement Museum?

JG: I've been working here for a month a half.

RS: I've been working here for four years now.

JG: Pretty different.

RS: For your fifth year, you get a chamber pot.

JG: I can't wait!

Can you tell me about your day-to-day schedule?

JG: Basically, I give tours here. I mostly do the Moore family tour, the Irish immigrant family. I'm learning the Piecing It Together tour starting today. I'm learning it because I took Rachel's tour and she was really great.

On a typical day, I get here about fifteen minutes before the tour and hang out with the other awesome educators. There's so many new people to meet every day. The tours last about an hour, and each and every tour is completely different. So every day is a totally different experience with student groups or families that came from Ireland or people who have no idea of Irish culture at all. I work twice a week: Thursdays and Saturdays for about five or six hours a day.

RS: When I started out at the museum, I was an access intern four summers ago in the office [editor's note: "access" involves working to make the museum accessible to people with disabilities]. So part of my training experience was to give tours, and I loved it so much that I asked them, "Can I come back next summer?" I've stuck around ever since.

I've succeeded in doing all the building tours so I've got all the family stories. I just passed the test to do the Immigrant Soles walking tour, and in addition, I do the Shared Journeys program with ESL classes. I'm a teacher by profession so, for me, it's a combination of teaching/storytelling/performance art.

I typically work three days a week. My day starts at ten or eleven o'clock but I usually end up coming an hour early because I like everyone here so much. It's really fun to schmooze in our break room. It's like our warm-up for the day and then, typically, I'm doing anywhere from three to five tours a day.

I had my first school group of the year yesterday... eighth graders. I just finished graduate school and the tenement building is my unorthodox classroom.

Justin, what other experience do you bring to the Tenement Museum? Do you have another outside job?

JG: Yeah, I got a couple of jobs. I'm an actor by trade. I just graduated from Columbia in May with a master's in acting. I don't have a teaching credential so I end up teaching acting because you don't always need a credential for that in university situations. They're just like, "Aw if you can do it, come on in." That's really fun and I love it. I'm also a nanny for a five month old baby boy, a four year old, and a six year old boy and an usher in an interactive bus tour that goes through Times Square called "The Ride."

When did you start doing that?

JG: I started doing that a week ago. I had a teaching job over the summer at Columbia where I taught high school kids acting, directing, and playwriting. Then I thought, I'm out of grad school and I have no job experience in New York City at all except for teaching. So I spent all of  September trying to find work and now finally, as of five days ago, can pay my rent.

RS: Mazel tov!

So being a tour guide is brand new to you.

JG: Yeah. Everything that's happening to me right now is new but I think that all of my acting training comes into it, like breathing so you can be relaxed. I'm more of a storyteller so my tours are very, very story heavy. They're about being as dramatic as possible.

What do you each find most rewarding about being educators here?

RS: I love my job. This is the coolest job that I've ever had. And the building itself is cool, too. As Justin said, we're really storytellers. I'm from Brooklyn, born and raised, so this is my history and my family's history. I love interacting with people from all over the world. Sometimes you touch people. I've had grown men get teary-eyed on my tours. And people share their stories. These families came to this country a hundred years ago and I try to get people to realize you have more in common with them than you might think.

JG: For me, it's the people as well. Teaching people is huge for me. And since I'm doing the Irish tour mostly, seeing people share what their ancestors had to deal with when they came to New York, it's really striking to me how that affects people. It gets me thinking too, because I'm half Irish, about my family, and thinking about what they had to deal with when they came to New York. I'm so lucky and so grateful that they dealt with that so we don't have to.

But the most rewarding thing is this job makes me feel like more of an activist because there's a lot we still have to do, especially in the Lower East Side, revving people up and saying, "we're not done yet." It's what helps me wake up in the morning.

RS: A lot of people sometimes come in with the mindset that their family was the only demographic to come through, and I love talking about Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) or the Five Points or Chinatown. This neighborhood is still a living, breathing thing. This community is still a living organism, still here.

What's most difficult about your job?

RS: Oh boy.

JG: I'm new to this, so I don't have a lot of difficulties right now. It's the simple things like remembering the dates, the names, the information, and being okay with not knowing the answers to everything. I'd like to be a know-it-all and make something up while saying it passionately but I can't do that because the visitors might know more than me. It's the idea of humbly giving a tour. I am not the end-all, be-all of this information. You clearly might know more than me and I'd love to hear your experience. The other thing is that people come in with their story and their family and sometimes it's difficult to open up their minds and say, "that's your experience, but we're talking about the Moore family. It's a different experience, but there may be correlations." It can be difficult, but when it happens, it's really rewarding.

RS: And if you work at a job like this, you learn a lot about human behavior and people. When there's fifteen, sixteen of us and 325 square feet, a lot of stuff can go down on a hot summer day, and sometimes people don't necessarily want to hear what you want to say. But we like to be challenged, and we like when people challenge each other. The majority of the time, the discussions are wonderful, but sometimes people just come in with a certain mindset and they aren't willing to change. They might not see any value in the history of the building, which is unfortunate.

One of the most challenging things for me is that I talk so much. We talk for a living, and it can be emotionally exhausting sometimes. When I was learning these tours, like the Moores tour, I started having dreams that I was giving the tour in my sleep.

Doing every tour here, you must be juggling a lot of information.

RS: It's amazing. I've learned that you can just turn it on for each tour. Sometimes you feel like you're telling the same tour but in the end, you can still bring it back to suit the individual theme or topic of the tour.

Do you ever confuse one tour for another?

RS: Oh yeah. One time I was doing a Getting By tour and I forgot Julius Gumpertz's name. I just drew a blank.

JG: That's something that I'm nervous about now that I'm learning my second tour. I've just been giving this one tour every day, and suddenly there's a lot of new information.

How do you prepare for all the question that you're asked?

RS: I'm used to some of them. "Is this the fireplace? Where's the toilet?" We get a lot of some of the same questions but I love it when visitors ask questions. I don't feel that I've done my job right when they're quiet. This is your tour. I like to talk, but I don't like to lecture. I want you to share. Open it up, ask anything you want.

JG: And we have tour content for every tour, and it's so much information that you couldn't possibly get out in an hour. So sometimes it's good for me to go back and reread the tour content because there's so much info that answers questions I have for myself. We have to study a lot because we're students at the same time as we're educators.

RS: We're always observing each other. They put us on observations because it's the same content, but every educator has a different way of spinning the same story. It refreshes your tour content.

JG: I observed somebody else today on the Moore family tour, and she does a tour that is 180 degrees from what I do, but in the end, there's the same result, and it's beautiful to see that.

How do you react when you don't know something? Do you admit that you just don't know it and need to study?

JG: I have to because I feel like otherwise I'm not doing my job. I always say "please go to the Visitor's Center where we have so many books and online access for further research." If I honestly just don't the information, it's always better for me to say that than lie to you.

RS: Absolutely. There's some things I just don't know and I'll say "Sorry, but I'm going to be sure to get that information."

Do people typically react well when that happens?

RS: Yeah. Overall, people are very understanding. We don't know everything and that's okay.

JG: I think that's how I feel a leader should work. It's like I know something up to a point and then I may need your help. Because I think when we lie and give the wrong information, then we're sending them the wrong message about our position. And I'd rather just say, "if you know more than me, you might want to talk about this because I want to hear." It's not like I'm the dictator and they're my minions. We're all in this together and I just happen to know more about this particular family.

RS: I've had visitors step in and save me because they knew an answer I didn't. Thank you!

JG: When there's somebody who has come straight from Ireland because they've heard about this museum and they want to take this tour, I'll always look to them and ask if they want to elaborate on anything. I don't want to feel like I know more than them because if his or her family dealt directly with these issues, then technically I don't.

Are there any particularly odd or unique questions that you recall getting?

RS: I've had visitors obsess with the families about birth control and things like that. I have people all the time asking, about the Baldizzis, "So they're Italian Catholics and they really only had two kids? Can you explain that?"

JG: I got asked the question, "Why are you talking about the Irish people so much? When are you going to talk about the Jews?" and I had to say "I'm sorry ma'am, I think you're on the wrong tour?" I can't give all of the tours at once. It's impossible.

I also get a little political with my tour, and we talk about the "No Irish Need Apply" policy, when many people didn't want the Irish to hold jobs. I relate that to modern times, trying to understand who might be in the position of the Irish today. I mention the Arizona immigration law, and sometimes I'll encounter people from Arizona. One woman stood up and gave a speech about why the law was fantastic, but I loved it. I love that stuff because I'd never heard someone vocalize that side of the issue before. People can get super passionate and they've experienced things that I'll never know.

Have you been in situations where you've applied the experience you've gained here?

RS: I come from the belief that history and literature really compliment each other. You look at our bookshop and you've got some of the greatest works of literature. I'd want to teach my kids Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, excerpts from Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, the work of Abraham Cahan, the editor of The Forward, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Some of the greatest works of literature come out of this time, so I love when I get school kids and tell them it's not just for your history class. Literature is a product of a time period and a historical event. That's exciting for me.

I was doing my student teaching last year, and I was a little nervous because the kids who come to this museum are kind of my guinea pigs. We had a workshop last week about classroom management and the school kids who are coming back. Essentially, we are playing the roles of teachers. We don't see these kids after two hours but we want them to have a positive educational experience. I'm applying for a teaching job right now so I love that I can still apply these skills I've learned and use them somewhere. And I feel so gratified when I get through to a group of kids.

Justin, has it helped you as a performer?

JG: Yeah, for sure. It's taught me more clearly how to read a room. Just like with an audience on stage, when you're giving a tour, sometimes you'll see that there's a gloomy atmosphere going on, and the tour that I give is already specifically gloomy so I can make the decision to put more jokes in, to have a better time. We don't need to be miserable while dealing with sad subject matter.

I use that at my usher job in Times Square job as well, thinking about what these people need and how I can help them. How can I play with a person for an hour and be okay with things changing so that they can have a good experience? I don't have to force gloom and doom on them if I can tell they already feel that way.

And It's the same way on stage. If the audience isn't feeling it, okay, let's do it funny.

RS: You've got to improvise. For me, with school kids, eighth through twelfth graders are the toughest sell because they're at that age where it's hardest to engage and motivate them. They come and pretend they don't care about history but they really do. And I have so much fun really trying to challenge them. I've also become a much better listener as a result of working here, hearing so many other people. It's not all about us talking. Even the questions I ask are a skill. We have some great facilitators that really know how to challenge visitors and ask these open-ended questions. It's a difficult skill and a great skill to have.

JG: It's taught me to be more open and inviting. I want you to be able to open up to me. It's the same on stage, where even if I'm playing a villain, I have to play an inviting villain because I want you to come on the journey with me. I don't want to keep you at bay. The greatest villain performances are when you want to be that guy's friend even though he's a maniac.

Do you think that willingness to learn is contagious with the visitors to the museum?

JG: Absolutely.

RS: We're accessible. We're the face of the museum. We're approachable. I love talking about how I'm the girl from Brooklyn. My mom's from Brooklyn, my dad's from the Bronx, and people can relate to those kind of stories. We're all the children of immigrants.

- Posted by Joe Klarl

Teachers: This is for You!

I’ve been leading tours at the Tenement Museum one day a week for four years, but, as of July 6th, 2010, I’m now a full-time employee. And now I do a LOT more than just lead tours. Every few days, our esteemed vice president of education, Annie Polland, hands me a new duty (thankfully she always waits until I’ve digested the last duty she assigned me.)

Two weeks ago she handed me one of the biggest duties of all: management of our Professional Development Program. In this relatively new series, schoolteachers from across America can visit the Tenement Museum for half- or full-day workshops. We lead the teachers on tours and explain how we’ve made learning fun for students of all ages. We then work with them on lesson plans they can use with their students back home.

It’s a great opportunity for those who aren’t within an easy drive of Manhattan - instead of bringing the class to the Museum, they can use the many resources we offer for classroom instruction.

In the past year we’ve had nearly 300 teachers on this program. We offer eight Professional Development workshops, and a group can choose whichever training session most fits their needs.

“How to Read a Building” shows how to use buildings, architecture, and the decorative arts to understand the past.

In “Housing the Masses,” attendees pretend to be tenement inspectors in 1906. They explore the building, expose violations in building codes, and talk to “tenants” and “the landlord” about why the building is the way it is.

There’s “The Irish Americans” workshop, in which visitors explore that group’s particular immigrant experience. They learn how outsiders viewed the Irish by studying racist anti-immigrant cartoons from the 19th century. If this doesn’t sound relevant to current events, think again: The Irish Potato Famine was the first global human rights cause celebre, and you can find echoes of the responses to the famine and its refugees in today’s popular press.

Feeling peckish, as the English might say? Then go on our “Taste of the Tenement” program, which uses the foods of the Lower East Side to demonstrate how immigrants use cuisine to preserve culture – and how some “ethnic” dishes became American staples.

Storytelling is one of the best ways to teach, and on our “Telling My Story” workshop you’ll learn how conduct your own oral histories.

The “Immigrant Family” workshop shows primary school teachers how to use all the tools at their disposal – artifacts, oral histories, historical documents, and more – to bring history alive for students.

In “How the Other Half Lives” (yes, name inspired by the famous Jacob Riis book), you’ll learn how industrialization shaped day-to-day life for different classes – in radically different ways.

And finally, there’s “Following the Trail,” which follows in the footsteps of immigrants as they travel from their homeland to a new life in America.

As you can see, there's really something for everyone here. To learn more about our teacher training workshops, visit our website, www.tenement.org/education_workshops.php. The site hasn't been updated yet, but the next public workshop is November 2. Workshops for a school or a private group of teachers can also be booked. For rates and availability, contact Harrison at 212-431-0233 x241.

- Posted by Adam Steinberg

400 Years of Immigration History

If you're on Twitter, be sure to follow us this July as we tackle 400 years of American immigration history via 140 character tweets. Drawing on a timeline of immigration from JFK's A Nation of Immigrants, we'll share several tweets every day, starting from the beginning of the nation's history in the 17th century. In conjunction, we'll be posting longer explorations of this history on the blog, hopefully a few times a week. It'll be a great chance for our followers to learn more about America's immigrants, past and present, and hopefully engage each other on a variety of different topics.

You don't even need to have a Twitter account to read along - just find us at Twitter.com/tenementmuseum.

Visitor of the Week: Thomas Killeen

Over the summer, look out for this new feature - Visitor of the Week! Each week we'll profile a different person who's been to the Tenement Museum. If you're coming to visit and would like to be profiled on the blog, send us an email.

Here is Thomas Killeen, a recent visitor of the Tenement Museum. He is pictured here with his son, eight year old Connor, who really enjoyed coming to the Museum. Thomas lives with his family in Severna Park, Maryland where he works as a union sheet metal worker. When we interviewed him he was on vacation with his family here in New York City.

When asked why he came to the Tenement Museum, Thomas replied, “I have always wanted to see the Museum. I’m very much interested in genealogy.”

Thomas, whose background is mostly Irish, has been researching his own family’s genealogy. He discovered he has New York City ties, as his grandmother was born on the Upper East Side. He was also able to trace back to when the first member of the Killeens came to the United States (1855 ), and he found the first mention of his great-great grandparent in an 1868 city directory of Troy, New York.

After taking the Moores Tour, Thomas was really taken aback by how difficult it must have been to cook in the late nineteenth century.

“The cooking conditions must have been awful,” he said. “There was very little light to see what you were doing. And imagine on a hot August day, having to cook with coal.”

(The tenement dwellers used coal stoves because that was what was available. Cooking with coal inside a tiny tenement kitchen was less than ideal because it made the walls and floors constantly dirty with soot. The heat would also be pretty unbearable in the summertime, as there was ineffective ventilation in the window-less kitchen and of course no fans or air conditioning.) [Read more.]

-posted by Devin

Sitting down with Live! at the Tenement staff

I recently got the opportunity to sit down with Sarah Litvin, coordinator of Live! At the Tenement, and Jeffrey Marsh, one of the Museum’s educators, who had a lot to say about the program that runs from June 24th to July 29th.


Can you tell me a little bit about the Live! At the Tenement program and your role in it?

SL: Sure. Live! at the Tenement is basically a new way of looking at the spaces that we as a staff have talked about in third person. What happens when we look at it in first person? What are all the tiny little details that come up?

JM: A million details.

SL: A million details about what life was like for these people. Generally, this program is an opportunity to visit three different apartments in the building, to see more of the recreated homes that we offer, and to interact with the actors playing the part of these characters who really lived in the building. It’s a chance to get inside of their heads, interact with them, find out what their lives were really like and how they created a home, oftentimes their first in America.

JM: It’s a human way, a very touching way to encounter them.

SL: It’s about learning emotionally. With a lot of our tours, it’s so much about the history, and people are very interested in specific details of architecture and so on. But it’s also really important to look at these spaces with an emotional eye and say, “What was this like? How can I relate to this? What does my life have to do with the people who lived here?”

JM: And that’s the real bridge to the present, the contemporary mission of the program.

Sarah, did you take the brunt of the work putting this program together?

JM: She did. I can answer that.

SL: [Laughs] It’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a really big challenge to think through all the millions of details but also to create a big cohesive thing. It’s six different characters, eight different actors playing the parts, and educators who have to make the framework to bring everyone through it. And then all the details on the administrative side of how to make all the ticketing work, how to promote it, how to get marketing and education on the same page…

JM: Timing for the tours…

SL: Timing for the tours, timing for scheduling, and there are all the different educators with lives outside of this place. It’s been a lot of logistics, but also a lot of content and a lot of research which is really fun.

How long has all of that taken? When did you start?

SL: The first thing we did was throw together a program in a couple of weeks [in October 2009]. It started out as a Halloween family day and we realized this wasn’t just for kids. Lots of people who showed up weren’t kids and they loved it. So we said, “Let’s just make this into an interpretive program suited for any audience.” Then, really since December, we’ve been working on creating [Live! at the Tenement].

How did you choose which real-life people should be portrayed by the actors?

SL: The short answer is that there are thousands of people who lived in this building, but we only have the set pieces for four different families. Our staff determined who, of those families, we decided to interpret. We wanted to get different types of people involved in costumed interpreting – right now the only program we have is for women who can pass as fourteen years old [on the Confino Family Living History tour]. There are a whole lot of other people who are excellent costumed interpreters so we started out with Bridget Moore, Fannie Rogarshevsky, Harris Levine, and Al Baldizzi. Then we just went from there and said, “Well, let’s bring in Al’s wife Sadie and Harris’ wife Jennie and go with that.”

How are these historical men and women similar and different from one another?

SL: That’s what I think is so fun. We didn’t really know at the beginning. We were just focusing on each character individually. As we thought more and more about who these people were, we thought, well, for Harris Levine who had a sweatshop in his home, home was very much work. For Al Baldizzi, as a carpenter who wandered the streets trying to find work, coming home was most decidedly not work. He was doing his work in other homes, seeing a lot more of the city. So we had to think about how to bring out that contrast.

For the women, for instance Bridget Moore, when she worked as a domestic in somebody’s home uptown, it was not her own kitchen, she was cooking their food, she was being told what to do, there were serving bells there that were driving her crazy, and now here she is at 97 Orchard Street and she has her own kitchen, the biggest space she’s ever had for herself. Compare that to Jennie Levine who’s sharing this tiny space with a presser [from her husband’s garment shop]. They have no space and they can’t get their work done because they’re in each other’s way all of the time.

JM: So it’s not just a contrast of time periods or countries of origin. It is a contrast of attitudes toward home and what that concept means.

What resources did the actors use to try to nail their parts?

JM: Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork.

SL: The first thing we did was use the information in tour content, and then we started going to the oral histories, to the archival records, all the prior resources, thinking, “Who was on Harris Levine’s naturalization papers? Jacob Vogelman. Great! That’s a name we can use in the program. We know they knew each other.” So that’s helped us. If we don’t know exactly what soap opera Sadie Baldizzi listened to, we know what soap operas were playing generally, at the time.

JM: You need to be trained on a specific level with information and day-to-day stuff but also on this meta-level on how to craft that into something that fulfills the mission of the program.

Is it fair to say that it’s about half the real-life person and about half a composite character of that community?

SL: For Fannie Rogarshevsky, we have two different oral histories and all different kinds of documents. She lived in the building for a long time. She had a big family. So it makes it really hard because that constricts our options in some ways: we know so much that we have to be true to those facts. It’s easier when we have specific guidelines but we can interpret the rest of it.

Another interesting resource we have is a furnishings plan. Pamela Keech, the furnishings curator, researches what [these immigrant families’] homes would have looked like, so we have a perfect basis to interpret why they bought these things. She used a lot of historic context.

JM: In addition to all that homework stuff, we’ve also received dialect training, stuff to fuel us as actors in this space, crafting a dramatic story that connects with the visitor.

And you have an acting background?

JM: Correct, as do most of us in the program.

This program seems unique because it’s so immersive. What role do visitors to the museum play in the reenactment and what do you encourage them to do when they experience Live! at the Tenement?

JM: When you interact with an interpreter, you will be a reporter from The New York Times, which is just a certain way of looking at the world, a certain attitude to take into that space. An attitude of inquisitiveness, of being engaged.

SL: Inquiry, observation.

JM: And it all comes back to that curation that Pam did, the spaces, the physical aspects of what they’re looking at, which we thought would be a great and easy tool for folks to use in order to jump to larger issues.

So you fully encourage all your visitors to ask as many questions as possible?

SL: Oh yeah! That’s what makes it fun as an interpreter. Sometimes visitors ask you things that you just don’t know so you have to be on your toes.

- Interview by Joe Klarl

Online Photo Database Launches TODAY!

Today we are excited to announce the launch of our online photo database, accessible at http://photos.tenement.org. This project has been over four years in the making. Wow! And hooray!

The database features images of the neighborhood, historic and contemporary photographs of 97 Orchard Street, and historic portraits of those who lived and worked there. All images are part of the Museum’s permanent collection, which features over 5,000 objects and 130 linear feet of archival records. For the first time, researchers from around the world can access the photographic archive online, making our historic resources available to a wider audience.

We imagine that if you are a teacher or researcher, you'll find a lot of useful information on the database. But if you're a history nut, an artist, or a Museum visitor, you'll also find something to love here. Either way, we hope you will dig in and explore. You can even create a log-in and save your favorite images.

Some of our favorite parts of the database include:

• Photographs of former 97 Orchard Street residents and their descendants, 1860s-2000s. Families whose stories are told on Museum tours are represented, as well as many others.
• The last days at Sidney Undergarment Co., a photo essay taken on closing day of this business at 97 Orchard Street, 1979
• The WPA photographs of Arnold Eagle, taken on the Lower East Side in the 1930s and early 1940s.
• Lower East Side images taken by photographer Donald Sheppard in the 1940s.
• Edmund Gillon’s photographs of Lower East Side street scenes during the 1970s
• Images of the Tenement Museum’s restored apartments, as well as the building pre- and during restoration, from 1988 to the present day

So, what are you waiting for... head over to photos.tenement.org and check it out!

Many thanks to our collaborators, staff and sponsors:
Software: PastPerfect
Database production: MWeb System by Systems Planning
Consultant: Picture Projects
Designer: Jeff Tancil
Curatorial Staff at the Tenement Museum along with interns and volunteers.

This project is made possible, in part, by the David Berg Foundation and the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Historic Sites Fund.

All images Courtesy Lower East Side Tenement Museum, (c) 2010. Tenement rear yard photo by Arnold Eagle. Orchard & Delancey photo by Edmund Gillon.

- Posted by Kate

Our Construction Shed Is Up...

You may have noticed a bulky new addition to the corner of Orchard and Delancey Street. Having begun work on our new visitor center, we recently installed a construction shed around the lower floor of the building, which allows work to be completed safely.

But blue plywood is awfully boring. We thought we'd spruce it up a bit. Below - photos from our collection, images of the Lower East Side, and other colorful graphics. Enjoy!

Visitor of the Week: Jasmine Tanasy

Over the summer, look out for this new feature - Visitor of the Week! Each week we'll profile a different person who's been to the Tenement Museum. If you're coming to visit and would like to be profiled on the blog, send us as email.

Meet Jasmine Tanasy, who visited the week of May 24. Jasmine, a New Jersey resident who is in branding, came to New York for school but also to learn about some of her ancestors.

Jasmine, like many of our visitors, has immigrant and tenement ties. Half of her mother’s side of the family came through New York City and eventually settled in Brooklyn. On her father’s side, her grandfather and his father immigrated from Ireland and came to live in Jersey City.

“I remember my grandfather telling stories of how he and his father lived in one room apartments, which is very similar to tenement living,” recalled Jasmine.

We were very pleased to find out that Jasmine has done all the tours the Tenement Museum has to offer. After she took her first tour, she was so intrigued that she felt compelled to come back and do them all.

“I’ve been recommending it like crazy!” she said.

Her favorite was the Getting By tour featuring the Gumpertz and Baldizzi families. When asked what was most resonant about the tour, Jasmine mentioned two parts.

“With the Gumpertz family, it was really great to see the story come to the present,” Jasmine explained, referring to the way family members helped piece together the story of their ancestors. She was also moved by the connection between the Gumpertz' 19th century tragedy (Mr. Gumpertz' disappearance) and their 21st century one (Frank Riesman, a Gumpertz descendant, was killed in the World Trade Center attacks).

Jasmine also found that listening to the daughter of the Baldizzi family reminisce on tape about her time at 97 Orchard Street was very poignant.

“To hear Josephine talk was one of the best pieces of the tour,” Jasmine said.

-posted by Devin