Questions for Curatorial - Open Door Policy

Find out which was more receptive to newcomers in the early 20th century - the federal government or 97 Orchard's narrow hallway. Questions answered by Curatorial Director Dave.

Was there a ban on certain immigrant groups moving into 97 Orchard Street at any time in the building’s history?

Legislative acts banning certain immigrant groups from the United States were first instituted during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, though nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment are as old as immigration itself.

Passed in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act represented the first federal law banning a group of immigrants solely on the basis of race or nationality. In 1917, Congressional legislation further restricted immigration by barring the entry of Asian Indians. A prohibition on Japanese and Korean immigration followed in 1922 so that, after 1924, among East Asians only Filipinos were untouched by immigration restriction laws.

Beginning in the 1920s, Congress passed a series of quota laws aimed at stemming the mass immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans that had occurred over the course of the past two decades. Each European nation received a quota based on its proportion to the foreign-born population in the 1910 census, resulting in a drastic reduction in the number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. In 1929, another system, the national origins quotas, was put into effect, giving each European country a proportion equal to its share of the white population according to the 1920 census.

Was the front door of 97 Orchard Street generally locked?

Based upon the available evidence, the front door of 97 Orchard Street was probably not locked. Describing his travels among the tenements of the Lower East Side, turn-of-the-century reformer Jacob Riis found unlocked tenement front doors opening onto a “hall that is a highway for all the world by night and by day is the tenement’s proper badge. The Other Half ever receives with open doors.”

A Look Back in History - Japanese-American Internment Camps

67 years ago on this day, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into effect a law that was used to justify the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans. East Asian immigrants had faced discrimination since they first began streaming into California in the late 19th century, but in the wake of Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment skyrocketed. People of Japanese descent were excluded entirely from the West Coast, and were forced into "War Relocation Camps."

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has preserved a number of sites connected to this period, including abandoned Japanese homes and stores, as well as the internment camps themselves. Read more here.

Immigrant Stories - Sephardic Jews in New York

Joseph Coen, a barber from Kastoria, in present-day Greece, was a hero to New York's growing Sephardic population at the turn of the 20th century. He vouched for the Greek, Spanish, Turkish, and other Sephardic Jews who stepped off the boat at Ellis island, sometimes offering them temporary lodging. Isolated from their Ashkenazi neighbors by language and cultural barriers, these immigrants benefited enormously from Coen's efforts to help them find family and friends.

Want to learn more? Judaic and Near Eastern scholar Aviva Ben-Ur will be giving a Tenement Talk tomorrow night on the Sephardic immigrant experience, drawing on primary sources like oral histories and the Ladino press. RSVP here.

Tenement Talks - Who Will Write Our History?

A few weeks ago Samuel Kassow shared the remarkable history of the Oyneg Shabes, who secretly recorded Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1940 to 1943, with our Tenement Talks audience.

His talk will appear on Book TV this Saturday and Sunday, February 21 and 22. Check your local listings and see the Book TV website for more details.

Artifacts - A Valentine's Day Mystery

Of the 2,892 artifacts we have found in 97 Orchard Street, few are as evocative as this amorous letter. Undated and torn at the edges, it's also a mystery. We don't know who wrote it, who it was sent it to and even what part of the letter says. All we know is that researchers discovered it inside our tenement in 1993.

Here's what we could decipher:
________The seat of my pants________hot from where your lovely papa left________of his brogans but love laughs________. Nobody can keep us apart, for________(n)ever dies--does it dear? Saturday I'll give the usual whistle--pack________suitcase and we'll elope and________married. The Rolls-Rough will be (?)ined up for the occasion, and we'll________bully time. Your own only-est.

What do you think the letter says? Who might have written it? Did they really run away with each other? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Facts and Findings - St. Mark's Church

Our staff recently visited St. Mark's Church In-the-Bowery, the oldest site of continuous Christian worship in the city and a registered New York City Landmark. It was built by Peter Stuyvesant's great-grandson in 1799 on the plantation (or bouwerie) where Peter Stuyvesant's private chapel once stood, back when much of lower Manhattan was still farmland. The church is the burial site for a number of famous New Yorkers, including two mayors, members of the Beekman and Tompkins families, and, of course, Peter Stuyvesant.

Photos courtesy of nyc-architecture.com

Immigration Today - Flocking to the Bronx

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Lower East Side was a mecca for immigrants. Today, that role is served by areas like Queens and, more recently, the Bronx, a borough once dominated by Puerto Ricans and African Americans.

We've pulled a couple of interesting statistics from the New York Daily News on the Bronx's changing demographics:

31% of the borough's 1.4 million residents were born overseas

55% of residents speak a language other than English at home

Hispanics and Latinos make up 51% of the borough's population

8,749 Albanians live in the Bronx

The West Indian (primarily Jamaican) population has doubled since 1990

The number of Italian and Irish immigrants has decreased over the last decade