The Jewish Daily Forward and the Daily Lives of the Rogarshevsky Family: Guest Post by Tony Michels -- Part I

Thanks to an NEH grant, scholar Tony Michels is advising the Tenement Museum on how we can use objects to tell stories in the Rogarshevsky family apartment. He'll be at Tenement Talks on February 17 at 6:30 pm. Here is the first in a two-part essay on how artifacts pertaining to the media have been used in the exhibit.

“Piecing It Together” vividly reconstructs the domestic life of the Rogarshevsky family, but how might we connect the Rogarshevsky domicile to the larger public arena? I raise this question because immigrant Jews spent much of their free time outside of their apartments: in parks and squares, on street corners, in cafes, and in other public and semi-public places. Unfortunately, few of those places still exist or, if they do they reveal few traces of past events. Rutgers Square, now named Strauss Square, used to be a gathering spot for young Jewish radicals, who congregated there nearly every day to discuss and argue issues of the day, but the square today gives no indication of this past. Linking the public and private realms thus presents a challenge, though not an insurmountable one.


A simple artifact—the Yiddish daily Forverts—can be used to connect the Rogarshevsky apartment to the world outside. We do not know for sure whether the Rogarshevskys read the Forverts. They could choose from no less than five Yiddish dailies during their years living at 97 Orchard. Nonetheless, we can reasonably surmise that at least one person in the Rogarshevsky family read the Forverts. This is because the Forverts was the most popular Yiddish newspaper in the United States, indeed the world. With a circulation topping 200,000 in 1917, the Forverts sold more than twice the number of copies than did its closest Yiddish competitor. Furthermore, the Forverts was not just a newspaper in an ordinary sense, but a force within immigrant public life. Its writers and editors played leading roles in Jewish communal affairs, the Jewish labor movement, New York City politics, and the American socialist movement as a whole. If an immigrant wanted to keep abreast of current events, he or she most likely turned to the Forverts (though not necessarily to the exclusion of other newspapers). Even immigrants who considered themselves traditional, religious Jews read the Forverts because they saw no contradiction between its socialist viewpoint and their Judaism. Religious articles of the kind seen in the Rogarshevsky apartment and the Forverts often shared space in a single household.

The Bintel Brief, a Yiddish advice column, began in 1906. Bintel means "bundle" and brief  means letter.
Courtesy of The Bintel Brief

Many of the events covered by the Forverts had to do with labor movement. An avowedly socialist newspaper, the Forverts’ masthead declared: “Workers of the world unite! The liberation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves!” The Forverts published countless articles on strikes, consumer boycotts, demonstrations, parades, and debates: all frequent occurrences on the streets of the Lower East Side. The newspaper did not merely report on events; it served as a tribune of the Jewish working class. Take the Forverts’ response to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire as an example. On the day following that terrible incident, the Forverts’ front-page headline wailed: “The morgue is filled with our dead/victims! 175 workers lose their lives in a burning shirtwaist factory. The entire Jewish Quarter mourns.” The Forverts refused to adopt a dispassionate tone or removed stance. The victims were “ours.” And masses of Jewish workers, who knew firsthand the hardships and abuses of the garment industry, looked to the Forverts to articulate their grievances and lead the way…forward.


The March 26, 1911 copy of the Forverts thus opens up the Rogarshevsky apartment, bringing to bear one of the major events of the immigrant era. The presence of the newspaper invites us to imagine how the Rogarshevsky family might have reacted and discuss the public outcry that followed, culminating in the reform legislation passed by the New York State Assembly as a result.

[Part II will be posted later this afternoon]

Photo of the Day: Clothes Rack

Photo by

Photo of the Day: Dumbbells in the Rogarshevsky Apartment

Photo by J*House Photo

“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]

Can You Guess the Artifact?

We keep on scavenging for the new exhibit about historic Lower East Side businesses, and we need your help to figure out how to use all this stuff! 

Our mystery artifact this week looks like a bell from afar but a closer look reveals an "X" shaped, rounded base, nailed to a heavy, metal handle.

What is this thing? Cookie cutter? Dangerous weapon?

Take a guess and find out Monday!

-Posted by Joe Klarl

And the Artifact is...

Last Friday we asked you to figure out what this artifact is:

It looks rather formidable, but it's actually a stove lid lifter. In the days when wood and coal stoves were common, every household would have had at least one of these. On top of the stove sat four or six round, cast iron lids that could be removed to put extra fuel into the stove or to expose your pot directly to the heat. You'd use the bottom of this tool, fit into a notch in the lid, to lift the lid out. Here's a picture in an old Popular Mechanics magazine (1937) which gives you a visual (bottom right of the page). Today you can find a plethora of these inexpensive gizmos on Ebay. I'm partial to this fancy one.

Tenants in 97 Orchard street would have consistently used coal stoves for cooking through the start of the 20th century. They were used as the main source of heat for the apartments, too.

- Posted by Kate

All Eyes (and Hands) On Our New Exhibit

We've got plenty of cool stuff planned for our new tour about 97 Orchard Street's businesses, but one especially exciting component allows curious visitors to get handsy with the past. Typically, we have to be pretty strict about guests touching museum artifacts since many of them are rare or fragile. But for this exhibit, we've brought in a number of historic artifacts that visitors will be allowed to touch.

Sarah Litvin, our education coordinator for living history and access, is helping curate these handling objects for the exhibit. Recently, she asked some of us at the Tenement Museum to choose the objects we personally found most alluring. We didn't get any info on what these objects are or what kind of stories might be connected to them - we were just asked to pick those that spoke to us.

Here's what I liked:

Keys follow a person everywhere and are a direct link to every important place in his or her life. So what better way is there to acquaint yourself with someone than to look at their keys? These feel just like they look: a great jumbled, jangling mess.

As a former trumpet player, this one is personal. I have to hear this thing! It's a light, little instrument and its finish is very worn. I can only imagine the music and stories behind it.

I was immediately drawn to this postcard, dated October 24, 1911 and delivered to Mr. Waldo Little at 31 Mulberry Street. I like any primary historical document that you can see and read, so I loved this. With its visible horse drawn carriage in the background and its old ink, it's in surprisingly good shape too.

I chose this wallet because I could feel the old leather, snoop around inside, and take a look at the person who owned it. Mrs. Helen Lee's wallet felt very similarly to my own nearly a century later.

Sarah's curatorial work is based on personal experiences and preferences, but it doesn't end with us. You'll be able handle artifacts the same way we did, toying around with whatever your eye catches. And you'll learn something too!

So what will you choose? Decide for yourself when our new exhibit opens next year.

- Posted by Joe Klarl

Can You Guess the Artifact?

We've prepared a lot of nifty artifacts for you to touch and discover once "Minding the Store" is open to the public. A lot of our collection isn't even recognizable to people today.

But you have to know what the artifact is before you can learn the story behind it.

Can you guess what this strange contraption is?

Tell us what you think and find out the answer on Monday!

-Posted by Joe Klarl

Don't Block the Box

We at the Tenement Museum have come across a lot of cool artifacts while building our new Visitors & Education Center at 103 Orchard Street. Recently, we found this intimidating relic of old New York:

A probable orphan of Delancey Street directly next to our construction site, the "Gridlock Busters" warning sign carries a cautionary message most of us still have memorized. Still, you'd be hardpressed to find a sign like this on our busy streets today. Perhaps unfortunate, considering how often our intersection at Orchard and Delancey is clogged with cars - maybe we're in need of a mean mascot!

Likely from the late '70s or early '80s when the citywide "Don't Block the Box" program was first implemented, the warning sign was designed to stop drivers from blocking interesections during a red light, just as similar (less menacing) signs do today. Stylized and scary, we can only wonder what motorists feared more: the fine of two points on their licenses or the jagged teeth threatening to chomp down on them.

As the construction process continues, you never know what great, strange time capsules we'll discover next. Make sure to check back to find out!

-Posted by Joe Klarl

Photo of the Day

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

Photo of the Day

By KathleenLKent.

Did You Know That...

A palm reader once lived at 97 Orchard Street. During restoration work, a business card advertising "Professor Dora Meltzer" as a palm reader in both Yiddish and English was discovered beneath the floorboards. By the turn of the century she would have been one of many selling fortunes to women within the Lower East Side's Jewish immigrant community.

Collection of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
Found in 1993 at 97 Orchard Street.

Wrongly assumed by outsiders to be criminals, palm readers or fortunetellers were more likely traditional housewives, though not necessarily reputable businesswomen. Common tricks, including searching through visitors' belongings, were frequently employed to gather information.

Such behavior might seem devious, but fortune telling helped liberate otherwise housebound immigrant women like Dora Meltzer from the isolation of the tenement, allowing them to participate in the local economy and interact with the outside world. America was an unfamiliar place, especially for Jewish immigrant women. Fortunetellers could offer customers advice about adapting to their new home or, even better, reveal the future and prepare them for what life in America held.

In 1911, however, New York State Assembly outlawed fortune telling, or even advertising it, for money. Although it remains illegal to accept money for forecasting the future today, fortune telling is still widely practiced throughout the five boroughs of New York City.

He Who Does Not Love Wine...

Curator of Furnishings Pamela Keech has been working hard to develop plans for our new exhibit on 97 Orchard's businesses, opening next year. Our team has done extensive research about the businesses, and the families who ran them, and Pamela is sourcing artifacts and furniture that will re-create the basement storefronts and apartments back to a specific place in time. You've already seen her handiwork in each of the Museum's restored apartments. Here she reports on one of the new artifacts she's found for Schneider's Saloon, circa 1870s:

I recently purchased a stoneware pitcher for the exhibit on Ebay. It has an inscription on the collar that says (in German): "Wer nicht liebt Wein Weib und Gesang Bleibt Ein Narr sein Lebenlang". This translates to, "He who does not love wine, women, and song will be a fool his whole life long.” The saying is variously attributed to Johann Heinrich Voss (1751-1826) and to Martin Luther (1483-1546).

The print below was published in 1873 and demonstrates the popularity of the saying at the time the Schneider family was operating the saloon. This is why history is so much fun.

Rugs Installed in Gumpertz and Rogarshevsky Apartments

Have you ever wondered if the residents at 97 Orchard would have had bare floors or rugs? We've found evidence that suggests residents may have had rugs (in, for example, the front room of apartment 8, the Rogarshevksy residence). With that information in mind, rugs were recently installed in the front rooms of the Gumpertz and Rogarshevsky apartments. They are both reproduction carpets that are true to the period, made in the same way they would have been made at the time. In addition to making the recreated apartments look more authentic, the rugs also provide valuable protection for the wood floor against wear and tear from foot traffic.

The rug in the Rogarshevsky apartment is a rag rug, woven of scrap fabrics, perhaps by another tenement dweller in the area who made them as part of a "cottage industry"-style business. It is woven of three pieces, each three feet wide and hand stitched together.

The rug in the Gumpertz apartment is an ingrain carpet, made of two pieces, each four feet wide.

Special thanks to Dave Favaloro and Bayard N. for their help with the installation.

-posted by Derya

Shortwave Listening at the Baldizzi Apartment

In the kitchen on the second-floor apartment at 97 Orchard Street, a 1930s-era radio sits nestled within a cabinet alcove. Tucked behind the family’s kitchen table, this unassuming object is one of many that help educators at the Tenement Museum talk about the everyday activities of the Italian family who lived in the apartment from 1928-1935. This little radio can help us understand the experience of immigration and better imagine the lives of those who lived within the tenement.

When the Baldizzi family lived in this apartment, the radio filled the room with familiar sounds from the old country, helping transport Rosario, the lady of the house, back to her native Palermo, Sicily. Thanks to interviews with Rosario’s daughter, Josephine, we know that her mother used to listen to – and often weep along with – Italian-language soap operas.

Rosario Baldizzi

As a summer intern at the Tenement Museum, I spent several weeks researching Italian radio – scouring through dusty card catalogues, speeding through Italian language newspapers on microfilm, and corresponding with radio experts from coast to coast. Bit by bit, I pieced together information about Italian radio in Rosario’s time period and began to understand the role it played in Italian immigrant communities.

Surveys of the Italian community living in Boston’s North End in the early 1940s show that people there had diverse motivations for listening to the radio, which impacted what types of programs they preferred.

Not surprisingly, many Italian-Americans enjoyed listening to programs in their native tongue. Many were still beginning English speakers, and many also appreciated finding familiar storylines, dialects, and humor in these programs.

Respondents from the survey stated that popular programs included Pasquale C.O.D., a program about an Italian grocer, and La Rosa Macaroni Hour, “the noon time drama of Lives of the Saints.” Italian companies selling products such as tomatoes, macaroni, and cheese often advertised to the community through these programs.

While serial dramas, sometimes referred to as “washboard weepers,” were popular with housewives who were at home during the day, female survey respondents largely stated that in the evenings the men of the housed decided what station to turn to, often choosing news broadcasts. Younger listeners, more interested in “becoming American,” preferred to listen to English language programs. Music hours and variety shows were quite popular for this group.

Italian radio slowed by the 1940s as the United States became involved in World War II, but English language radio attempted to capture the experience of Italian immigrants.

Actor J. Carroll Naish
playing Luigi Basco.
Courtesy Old Time Radio
Catalog.

Little Italy on NBC Blue told the fictional story of the Morenos, an Italian-American family, and their experiences living in the Italian “ghetto” not far from 97 Orchard Street. This program, created by Himan Brown, the child of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, was a short-lived counterpart to a Jewish serial drama, The Goldbergs.

Another popular show, Life with Luigi, centered on the experiences of an immigrant making his way in America. The CBS comedy series began every episode with a letter from Luigi to his Mama in Italy, describing his adventures as he tried to adapt to his new country. (Listen to a clip of the show here.)

Exploring the history of particular objects in the tenement apartments allows educators to set the scene for the families who lived here: we can imagine Rosario excitedly turning on the radio to hear the latest segment of her favorite soap opera, while her daughter Josephine waits impatiently to listen to her own choice of programming. How did it make Rosario feel that Josephine might have preferred English programs to Italian dramas from the old country? Would the Baldizzi family have recognized the experience of the Italians in Little Italy or Life with Luigi as their own?

Step into the Baldizzi apartment, and you just might be able to hear the faintest crackle of a shortwave radio, an object which helped connect a family to a culture they left behind in Italy, while also introducing them to a new way of life in America.

- Posted by Shana Weinberg

All photographs (c) Lower East Side Tenement Museum 2010 unless otherwise noted. See more at photos.tenement.org.

Lost Shoe Found in 103 Orchard

On Thursday, the Tenement Museum’s collection acquired a new object: a worn leather boot found inside of 103 Orchard Street.

The boot was found in the basement by workmen who are renovating the space for our new Visitors & Education Center. The boot, a leftie, is leather and features a zipper on the inside of the shoe.

Shoemakers began to introduce zippers on their products after the technology was patented in 1917. The shoe’s owner could have been involved in one of the commercial businesses located in the first and/or ground floors of the building after that year. (After 1913, no residential units existed on the first or ground floors of 103 Orchard Street.)

While an exciting acquisition for the Museum’s collection, I continue to wonder ‘what happened to the right boot?’

- Posted by Alana