Questions for Curatorial: Water, water everywhere

During the late 19th century, did 97 Orchard Street’s water come from the Croton Reservoir on 42nd Street or the Croton Aqueduct in upstate New York?

By means of a hydrant in the rear yard, 97 Orchard Street also had access to fresh, clean water from upstate New York via the Croton Aqueduct. Completed in 1842, the Aqueduct for the first time delivered pure, uncontaminated water to the crowded tenement districts of Lower Manhattan—neighborhoods that had repeatedly been ravaged by water-borne cholera and yellow fever epidemics during the first half of the 19th century. Once the water arrived on Manhattan, it was held in a distributing reservoir at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue and, from there, distributed to buildings throughout New York City.

An inside peek at exhibit design

If you've walked down Allen Street recently or had the good fortune to visit the Museum in the last month, you may have seen the newly recreated rear yard exhibit. Now that the laundry is firmly in place, it's looking better than ever.

Our education assistant Katie recently put together a simulation for the rear yard that gives visitors the chance to feel what it was like to carry a bucket of water up from the water source in the rear yard to their apartment inside the building. We strive for historical accuracy here at the Tenement Museum, so Katie went to work:

According to our friends at Old Sturbridge Village, a historic bucket would weigh between three and five pounds and one gallon of water weighs approximately 8.5 pounds. Assuming an average healthy female living on the fourth floor (Bridget Moore) climbing close to 60 stairs from the rear yard to her apartment would carry as much water as possible to avoid a second trip while carrying as little as possible to avoid injury, I (with the help of Derya and Pam) calculated she would at minimum attempt to carry 2 gallons.

The total weight of our simulation bucket should then be 17 pounds for water and approximately 4 pounds for the bucket itself. I have filled the non-historic bucket with an estimated 20-25 pounds of gravel to allow visitors to feel the weight of the buckets of water our early residents would have been hauling up the stairs inside our beloved tenement.

All in the name of your education, dear reader!

- posted by Kate

Rear Yard Now Open!

This week the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is proud to announce the opening of “The Rear Yard at 97 Orchard Street,” a permanent exhibit that immerses visitors in a mid-19th century tenement yard. The exhibit – the first re-creating an urban American privy yard – explores important aspects of daily life in 19th-century urban America and sanitation reform efforts in the tenements.

The yard is finally complete! Above: recreated privy shed, or outhouse.

As part of the Tenement Museum’s tour The Moores: An Irish Family in America, the “Rear Yard of 97 Orchard Street” is recreated to depict 1869, six years after the building welcomed its first residents. The space includes a wooden privy shed (outhouse) with four individual stalls; a cast-iron water hydrant; original paving stones; a wood plank fence; and reproduction period laundry hanging from lines overhead.

 

 Workers install paving stones, artifacts that were excavated from 97 Orchard's rear yard in 1991.

From 1863 until 1905, when indoor plumping was installed at 97 Orchard Street, the yard was an extension of the tenement household, a space for residents to use the toilet, pump water for cooking and bathing, and wash laundry. The yard also served a social function as a space for women to socialize with one another and for children to play.

The recreation of the yard was completed with the help of period photographs, many taken by the Tenement House Department in around the turn of the 20th century. In addition, the Museum used research from urban archeologist Joan Geismar, whose team excavated 97 Orchard Street’s rear yard between 1991 and 1993.

Expecting to find the “ubiquitous, round, deep, dry-laid, stone-privy pit documented through archaeology in other 19th century urban rear yards,” the team was surprised to instead find the remnants of a water-cleansed brick privy vault believed to date from the building’s construction. The building’s financer and first owner, Lucas Glockner, was “a man ahead of his time when it came to backyard toilet facilities,” according to Geismar. (There were no laws governing outhouse construction in New York until the 1867 Tenement House Act.)

This physical investigation suggests that for 97 Orchard Street’s early residents, conditions were probably much more pleasant than the stereotype of tenement life might suggest. But, by 1900, 97 Orchard Street’s privies were shared by 105 tenants, living in eighteen apartments. Around 17 people shared each toilet. All of the building’s residents also shared a single water hydrant.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, tenement rear yards became the subject of an intense public debate about the relationship between sanitary technology, immigrant hygiene, and the public health. For middle-class reformers, the rear yard was ground zero for the linked threats of epidemic disease, social disorder, and moral degradation.

Visitors to the Tenement Museum’s The Moores: An Irish Family in America tour will explore both the yard’s role in the city-wide housing reform efforts and its practical importance in the private lives of working-class New Yorkers.

Public tours are offered daily, 10:45 am – 4:45 pm. Tickets are available at the Visitor Center, 108 Orchard Street; online at www.tenement.org; or by phone at 866-606-7232.

We hope you will come for a visit and learn about this important space in person. And some day soon we will add it to our virtual tour!

- Posted by Kate

Rear Yard is almost complete...

The rear yard of 97 Orchard Street is coming along nicely. Over the weekend the wooden fence went up, and now there are doors on the privy shed as well.

 

 

In this last photo, you can see the wooden laundry pole on the left hand side as well as the slate / concrete flooring. Residents would have strung their laundry lines from this pole to the fire escapes at the rear of the building. In fact, the Curatorial Department's next task is to dress the exhibit with clothing hanging to dry.

We're pretty excited to see the exhibit almost finished. Hopefully by this weekend visitors will be able to experience it in person. If you'd like to learn more about the rear yard - how residents over the years used the space and why housing reformers paid it special attention - stop by for The Moores: An Irish Family in America. Tours leave daily, 11:15 - 4:45.

-- posted by Kate

Rear Yard Update - Privy Shed is Here

On Friday the privy shed was delivered!

 

Restoration contractor Kevin Groves, who has spearheaded many preservation and recreation projects for the Museum, built the shed at his workshop in Montgomery, N.Y. He'd hoped to create the structure out of salvaged wood, but it didn't prove possible.

Instead, the shed is made of new wood and several of the stalls will be roughed up and dirtied to make them look as they might have in the early 20th century. One of the stalls will be left clean to represent the era when the building, and the privy shed, were new. Over time, the rain, sun, and wind will also take their toll, weathering the structure naturally.

Next up: doors and decoration.

(Photos by Tenement Museum)

-- Posted by Kate

Rear Yard Update

Work is coming along on the rear yard exhibit... only a few weeks now until it's complete.

We have installed new plumbing to make the drainage better. Never again will educators stand in murky rain-waters up to their knees while expounding about life in the rear yards!

The middle section has been leveled and sand and gravel laid down as the base for the old bluestone which will cover most of the yard. This is the original flooring - it was buried under about two feet of dirt - and will pave the space once again. We'll also install colored concrete which looks like the real thing but provides a smoother surface for visitors traveling between the rear door and the stairs.

The end of the week will see the delivery of the privy shed itself, which will arrive in installments and actually put together in situ, along with the woodplank fence to the north and west. At the top of the photo below you can see the space where the shed will sit. This was its original location, 1863 to at least the 1920s.

After construction is complete, the Curatorial Department will “decorate” the rear yard – dirtying two stalls of the privy shed, hanging period laundry on the lines, and installing a reproduction wooden wash tub. This will give you a sense of how the space was used and how it would have looked at both the beginning of the building's life as a residence and the end.

In a previous post I wrote about some of the historical photos taken by the Tenement House Department. Check them out for a sense of where we're going with this exhibit.

- posted by Kate, special thanks to Arnhild Buckhurst

Work has begun on Rear Yard exhibit!

This week we started construction on the rear yard.

If you ever walked by in the past, or took The Moores: An Irish Family in America tour, you probably remember that the yard looked something like this:

The flagstones (stacked up around the edge) were removed from the yard. The large pieces of stone are architectural details from the old Daily Forward building, which the Museum salvaged when the building was being renovated into condos.

While the stone details will be put into storage, we're planning to use the flagstones in the restoration. We're building the wooden privy shed against that cinder block wall, installing a water pump next to that, and putting up a wooden fence around the yard, similar to what you see here:

This is Fanny Rogarshevsky and her son Sam in 97 Orchard Street's rear yard, early 20th century, but date unknown.















Here's what we plan for the final exhibit to look like:

The water pump is there on the left. Until well into the 20th century, there was a row of tenements up against ours on what is now the sidewalk and northbound traffic lane of Allen Street, so this image really does give a good sense of what our yard probably looked like circa 1904, when this photo was taken. (Courtesy New York Public Library, original source New York City Tenement House Department).

Here are some more photos from the NYPL to give you a better sense of what the privy shed will look like. (Warning, I'm sending you down a time-suck rabbit hole if you like looking at old pictures from the Tenement House Department - they're pretty interesting, and there are lots of them in the NYPL's collection.)

There will also be laundry lines and wash buckets to simulate the activity that would have constantly been going on in this space (for years, the only source of water for the building was the rear yard water pump, and the only toilets were back here, so you can imagine how many people would have been in and out all day long).

The restoration will be semi-visible from the street and will enhance The Moores tour by giving some context to the discussion about health and sanitation in tenement housing. For now, there are no plans for it to be its own free-standing tour or exhibit.

We'll keep you posted as work continues. We should be done in a few weeks!

- Posted by Kate

Rear Yard Update - Paving Stones To Be Installed

In order to recreate the yard behind 97 Orchard, we've had to import some items - like the water hydrant staff member Melissa Cabarcas began installing last week. But other elements were part of the privy and laundry area's original fabric. While excavating the yard in the early 1990s, archeologist Joan Geismar dug up some historic paving stones (among a number of interesting trinkets, like shards of ceramic place settings and containers). We're laying them out in the yard to get a sense of how much space they cover, and how much new stone will be needed to fill any gaps.

-posted by Liana Grey

A Hydrant in the Rear Yard

The water hydrant we bought for our rear yard exhibit, right, is identical to one in a period catalog.

Slowly but surely, we're recreating the yard behind 97 Orchard where residents used the bathroom, did laundry, and even socialized. In a basement collections room, archeological fellow Jessica MacLean is busy studying and cataloging artifacts dug out of the privy over a decade ago. And Melissa Cabarcas of the Curatorial Department is in the process of installing a period water hydrant manufactured by the Kupferle Foundry, a St. Louis company that's been churning out hydrants since the 1850s (the earliest version of this model is 1887, according to a patent we have).

According to a 1903 book compiling investigations made by the New York Tenement House Commission, backyard hydrants weren't always reliable. Tenants sometimes faced an inadequate water supply and had difficulty dragging water from the rear yard to higher floors. An inspector noticed, for instance, that a Second Avenue tenement's hydrant was broken and an Elizabeth Street building wasn't receiving enough water. "On the East Side and in Williamsburg, families were without water for whole hot summer days," he wrote. No matter the weather, areas surrounding the hydrants were coated with slimy stagnant water - a source of disgust for women who did their laundry there, but one of joy for children who used tenement yards as playgrounds.



-posted by Liana Grey

From the Archives - Hair Care Product in the Privy

When Jessica MacLean, our archeological fellow, was catologing artifacts excavated over a decade ago from the privy behind 97 Orchard - as part of an effort to recreate the rear yard where tenants did laundry, socialized, and used the bathroom - she came across a scrap of ceramic that once belonged to the lid of a jar containing 19th century hair care product. The formula originally called for bear grease. But once the animals had been over-hunted, manufacturers switched to beef marrow, readily available in every large city's meatpacking district.

This particular product, Jessica determined through an online search that turned up an image of an identical container, was manufactured by a well-known soap maker named Jules Hauel, who worked in a row house at 120 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. (The name and address were inscribed on the jar's lid, and Jessica found an illustration of his workspace in an old atlas of Philadelphia businesses.)

Hauel, who displayed some of his work at the 1851 World's Fair, likely produced the beef marrow solution, designed to strengthen and add shine to hair, somewhere between the late 1830s and early 1850s - decades before 97 Orchard was built.

So how did the container, which was used in New York in the 1850s and 60s after being shipped here by boat, wind up behind 97 Orchard?

When the outhouse was shut down, sometime after hallway toilets were installed in 1905, trash was packed into the abandoned privy vault. The redeposited fill is a treasure trove of everyday objects from around the city that illustrate life on both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. Jessica found, for instance, a piece of expensive hand-painted porcelain imported from China - as well as scraps of a lower quality ceramic mass-produced in British factories. (Jessica's extensive work with ceramics helps her readily identify the type and date range of a given piece.)

Only two objects dug out of the fill belonged to residents of 97 Orchard: a German beer mug, possibly from Schneider's Saloon in the building's basement, and a chamber pot.


-posted by Liana Grey