Questions for Curatorial: Where's the Wallpaper?

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

Why are the parlors of 97 Orchard Street’s apartments wallpapered, while the kitchens are not?

Collection of the Lower East Side
Tenement Museum, (c) 2010

While it is not certain when wallpaper made its debut at 97 Orchard Street, a rough estimate places its arrival in the early 1890s. Although evidence of wallpaper was found in the kitchen of apartment 11 on the fourth floor, extant layers of wallpaper were found only in the parlors of the remaining apartments at 97 Orchard Street.

While it is not known why the landlords of 97 Orchard Street chose to apply wallpaper only to the building’s parlors, a possible explanation may rest with room use. Despite the necessity of using space for multiple functions in cramped tenement apartments, historian Lizabeth Cohen has documented the prevalence of parlor-making among working-class immigrants, who defied the pleas of social reformers for simplicity by decorating their parlors with wallpaper, carpets, and a variety of Victorian knick-knacks. Papers designs to cover walls in a parlor featured patterns similar to those at higher-end retailers.

Interestingly, department store catalogs such as Montgomery Ward and Sears advertised a “granite” style paper that was “perfect for the kitchen.” According to the catalogs, the primary selling point for consumers was that the “granite” style paper would hide marks and stains. When advertising wallpaper with flower patterns, manufacturers claimed they were suited best for the bedroom.

Collection of the Lower East Side
Tenement Museum, (c) 2010

Judging by the number of vibrant patterns with colorful flowers used at 97 Orchard Street, tenement landlords seemed to have bought into advertisements with slogans claiming that wallpaper “brightens up a room with low light." But they also defied the advertising jargon by hanging these papers in the parlor, not the bedroom spaces.

97 Orchard Street's Decor and Architecture

What is the architectural detail on the façade, archways, and cornices of the buildings?

The front façade of 97 Orchard Street is an extremely simple version of the Italianate style, the most popular style for buildings erected in New York City during the early 1860s.
By the time 97 Orchard Street was built, the Italianate style, featuring arched openings for doors and windows, projecting stone lintels (a supporting wood or stone beam across the top of an opening, such as that of a window or door or fireplace), and foliate brackets (decorated with carved leaves), had filtered down to even the most modest projects. At 97 Orchard Street, the brick façade of the upper floors is ornamented by segmental-arch window openings (the circular arch above each window in which the inner circle is less than a semicircle) with brownstone trim. An Italianate projecting-metal cornice caps the façade and is coated with brownstone-colored sand paint.

What do we know about the wallpaper in 97 Orchard Street?

Around 1905, the main hall on the first floor was redesigned with the addition of an inexpensive, but durable covering of burlap painted red, and later shellacked with a brown varnish. In the late 1880s, wallpaper began to replace paint on the front room walls of apartments in 97 Orchard Street. We believe the landlord arranged for the walls to be papered probably every time new tenants moved into an apartment. Landlords may have opted to use wallpaper instead of paint because with its busy patterns, it better hid imperfections in the walls. In some cases tenants apparently added wallpaper in order to beautify the room.

In some of the apartments at 97 Orchard Street, up to 22 layers of wallpaper were discovered by paper conservator Reba Fishman Snyder. 7-10 layers of paint were found underneath the wallpaper in the front rooms. The walls of the kitchens and bedrooms exhibit an average of 37 to 39 layers of paint. Because the building was occupied for 72 years (from 1864 through 1935), simple statistical analysis shows that the interior surfaces were painted approximately every two years.

All photos can be found at the Tenement Museum's online photo archive, photos.tenement.org, and are part of the Museum's collection. Arch photo and facade photo by Jerome Liebling.

- Posted by Kate

Behind the Scenes : Wallpaper Removal

Below are some photographs of wallpaper conservator Reba Fishman Snyder working on the historic wallpaper that was found behind the sheet rock in the basement level of 97 Orchard Street. We are conducting a lot of new research in this part of the building and know very little about the wallpaper found here. Reba will be taking some wallpaper samples back to her lab for cleaning (so we can see the patterns/ designs better), and also to determine if any makers marks remain on the edges of the paper (also called the selvage) - this may help us date the wallpaper. 

We are also interested in finding out how many layers of wallpaper were used in this part of the building. On the upper floors of the building, Reba has found upwards of 22 layers applied one over the other. After conducting her research and analysis, the papers will be added to the museum's permanent collection which currently includes over 300 wallpaper samples from the building. 

Learn more about the wallpaper research conducted on the upper floors of the building here.

 

- posted by Derya

From The Archives - Peeling Back the Layers

This week, we're taking a look at the artifacts in our permanent collection.

The first staff members to set foot in 97 Orchard were shocked to find wallpaper covering the living room walls of each apartment. They'd assumed that tenements were drab places of squalor, where saving money to move out took priority over investing in home decoration. Luckily for residents, their landlord took charge of the building's aesthetics, hiring contractors to paper the walls with attractive prints every 2 to 3 years (most likely when new tenants were about to move in) and raising rents to cover the cost. We don't know exactly how much he spent, but invoices for a contractor working in the East Village at the end of the 19th century show that entire apartments could be papered for $24 to $32. According to other records, a decorator charged $1 to complete a parlor in Alphabet City. Wallpaper was difficult to remove, so contractors simply added new patterns over previous layers. Using water and a paint knife to scrape off samples, a paper conservator we hired in 1990 discovered a total of 18 - 22 layers in each apartment. Scraps, like those below, were added to our permanent collection.