Last week to see Tea Cart Stories!

Tea Cart Stories, Michelle Brody's installation project in the windows of 97 Orchard Street, will be closing this Thursday, January 14th.

With this interactive and ever-changing exhibit, the artist has explored the worldwide tradition of sharing tea.





In early 2009, Michelle held tea parties with students from the Museum's ESOL program, "Shared Journeys." Students from Argentina, Yemen and China shared stories about their home countries, which they wrote down on their used tea bags. Michelle also collected stories from passerby on Orchard Street, who stepped into her tea cart over the summer to share a cuppa and talk about tea. The cart was crafted out of an old pushcart in the Museum’s collection.





These stories, along with photographs of the participants, were strung along a copper support structure inside the front windows of the tenement. Each tea bag holds a unique story about the most widely drunk beverage in the world next to water. Together they form a quilt-like narrative. The viewer is invited to contemplate how tea might connect lives across cultures.

As the artist notes: "In Great Britain they drink tea as a break from the work day. In the Middle East tea is served as a welcoming gesture to guests. In Japan the Tea Ceremony is highly ritualized cultural production. One drink has an enormous place in the lives of millions of people. To look at our world through tea is to see our differences as well as the similarities that bind us."

- posted by Kate

Tea Cart Stories Continue on 14th Street

Artist Michele Brody created the Tea Cart Stories exhibition on view in the windows of 97 Orchard Street. She wrote in to let us know that the interactive aspect of the project - listening to people's tea stories over a cup - will continue into the fall:

During the month of October I will continue to gather tea conversations in my roving Tea House - set inside a NYC coffee cart - through the alternative public art Festival Art in Odd Places.

I will be parked on the northeast corner of Irving Place and 14th Street during the following dates and times:

Friday, October 2 (4-6pm)
Saturday-Sunday, October 3-4 (2-6pm)
Friday, October 16 (4-6pm)
Saturday-Sunday, October 17-18 (2-6pm)

Pay Michele a visit and tell her your stories.

Adventures Inside the Tea Cart

Artist Michele Brody chats with a visitor outside 108 Orchard over tea served in cups passed down by her grandmother

Pick a nationality, and you're bound to find its variety of tea somewhere in the New York metro area: South African rooibos, British Earl Grey, green tea, or masala chai, a delicious blend of black tea, milk, spices, and sugar that my friend Kavita's mom, who grew up in a South Asian community in Kenya, would serve when I'd come to visit back in high school. (I've tried, and failed, to replicate the drink at home using a box of masala mixture Kavita gave me, and the sugary, mild Starbucks variety just can't compare.)

The universal quality of the steaming hot drink - it draws friends together in cafes and living rooms around the world, and is something immigrants bring with them when they settle, say, in the Lower East Side - is what artist Michele Brody had in mind when she set up a tea cart, designed to evoke the pushcarts that once crowded the neighborhood, in front of the museum shop earlier this summer, and invited passersby to drop inside.

While chatting in the handmade copper cart two weeks ago on the exhibit's opening night, Brody and I sipped, in keeping with an ancient Argentinian tradition, a ceramic bowl of Yerba Maté from a single straw. On display were two intricate Moroccan glasses, mugs of all shapes and sizes, and a pair of floral china cups passed down from Brody's grandmother, a descendant of Eastern European immigrants who took classes at the Henry Street Settlement here on the Lower East Side. (Brody herself grew up in Brooklyn and New Jersey).

Local cafes donated the tea leaves, and visitors (including a European tourist and a New York native who moved to Vietnam over a decade ago to run a business) supplied the stories that Brody will eventually transcribe onto tea-soaked paper bags and hang in the windows of 97 Orchard.

Come share your stories with Brody tonight from 4-7 pm outside 108 Orchard Street.

L. to r: Green tea, rooibos, and masala chai, a spicy South Asian tea

-posted by Liana Grey

Tea Cart Stories

Last Thursday, artist Michele Brody took to the streets with her tea cart. After being rained out the past two Thursdays, we were really excited to finally start on this public art project.

Michele invited passerby into her cart, made of copper pipes and the Museum's early 20th century pushcart. There they shared a cup of tea and talked about their family stories and connection to the ancient beverage. Michele recorded the stories and plans to transcribe them on the tea bags used to steep tea during their conversations.

You can see some of the stories have already been transcribed and are hanging on the cart. Eventually the entire structure will be covered with fluttering sheets. After July, these papers will hang in the windows of the Tenement Museum for all to read and enjoy.

Come out next Thursday, July 9, or Thursday, July 23 to share your story. Michele will be outside during tea time, 4-7 pm.

All photos by Patricia Tscharskyj.

- Posted by Kate Stober

Neighborhood Tea Houses & Cafes

The Lebanon Club, New York working men's coffee house, 1880. Courtesy NYPL. (Click for larger image.)


Syrian coffee-house, by Jay Hambridge & engraved by Henry Davidson. NYC, August 1901. Courtesy NYPL. (Click for larger image.)

In his 1905 account of social life on the Lower East Side, journalist A.H. Fromenson wrote, "What saloons there are on the East Side do but an impoverished business and are dependent to a large extent upon the chance passerby."

However, he was quick to point out that social life thrived on the East Side--if not in beer saloons, but "coffee saloons." These cafes--totalling close to 300--offered places to discuss socialism, play chess, critique the theater, and listen to music. What united them was their elevation of tea as the social drink.

Tea was sometimes accompanied by lemon, or imbibed while clenching a sugar cube in the teeth. "And where the cigarette smoke is the thickest and the denunciation of the present forms of government loudest, there you find women!" In a neighborhood in which most women and men were crammed into tenements, to social spaces offered by cafes were all the more important.

Cafes also served as box-offices for local theater productions, as this 1899 poster diplays:


Courtesy NYPL. Click for larger image.

Partial translation reads: 'Bizet's world-famous opera will be performed for the first time [in Yiddish] with Miss Guttman as Carmen, Miss E. Siebert as Micaela, Miss Elkas as Frasquita, Mr. Cantari as Escamillo, Mr. Harti as Remendado, Mr. Steinhof as Zuniga, and Mr. M. E. Medvedieff as Don Jose. A special choir of 20 children, together with full chorus, orchestra, scenery, and costumes.

Tickets available at the box office, at Herrick Brothers, at Schinkman's Cafe, 126½ Canal Street, at Schmuckler's Cafe, 167 East Broadway, at Schreiber's Cafe, 256 Grand Street, and at Rosenberg's Sausage Store, 200 Broome Street. Children under five years of age positively not admitted.'

- Posted by Kate Stober, with special thanks to Annie Polland

Tonight's Tea Cart Stories: Rained Out

We're sorry to tell you that Tea Cart Stories, our interactive art project, is rained out this evening. Come by next week (provided it doesn't rain again, of course!) from 4-7pm to share your tea stories with artist Michele Brody. In the meantime you can check out images from an ESOL workshop she did back in May, as well as see an image of the tea cart itself.

-posted by Kate Stober

A New Art Exhibit in 97 Orchard's Windows

Later this summer, the grave markers in 97 Orchard's street and stoop level windows will be replaced with tea-stained strips of paper recording visitors' family histories. Artist Michele Brody kicked off her project with a group of ESOL students, offering them cups of tea and transcribing their stories onto paper that, steeped in the brown leaves, looked at least a century old. Starting tonight, passersby are welcome to drop by Brody's handmade cart (pictured below, while it was still a work in progress), which will be parked on the sidewalk near the museum. Rain date: Next Thursday.

-posted by Liana Grey