Other Museums - 19 Princelet Street

This week, we're taking a look at immigration museums off the beaten path. Today, our membership coordinator and resident museum expert Pamela Mattera guest blogs.




Waves of immigrants passed through 97 Orchard Street and the Lower East Side before moving on to destinations like Brooklyn, Queens and the Upper East Side. 19 Princelet Street, a Georgian home in the Spitalfields section of East London, served as a similar gateway for immigrants to the Big Smoke (aka London). Built in 1719, 19 Princelet Street was home to the Ogiers, a Huguenot family escaping religious persecution in France. The Ogier family entered the silk weaving industry, which became a major industry in East London. Most Huguenot immigrants moved on and were followed by the arrival of Irish immigrants and later, Eastern European Jews. By the late nineteenth century, 19 Princelet Street housed a synagogue and served as a community center (where strategies to combat intolerance and fascism would be discussed years later). Today, the neighborhood is home to a vibrant Bangladeshi community. 19 Princelet Street, however, is now in great disrepair, and is thus only open to the public a handful of times each year. A local charity and volunteers manage the site’s preservation and plan to create a London immigration museum.

Other Museums - German Emigration Museum

This week, we're taking a look at immigration museums off the beaten path.



Bremerhaven, a small port city in northern Germany, is the exact inverse of New York: it's where millions (7.2 to be exact) set sail for Ellis Island over a century ago, when a population boom and rocky transition from agriculture to industry rendered jobs and land scarce. So rather than documenting immigrant life, the Emigration Musem recreates conditions on a departing steamship and in the waiting areas where family members said their goodbyes. The museum has some quirky touches: lifesize mannequins dressed in 19th century garb are stationed in the main building, which fittingly evokes a boat, and in addition to learning about the lives of millions of emigrants and their descendants (chances are, some of them wound up near 97 Orchard), visitors can trace their own family history using an extensive database. Click here for a more detailed overview.



Few historic buildings remain in one of Germany's most important port cities

Other Museums - Angel Island Immigration Station

This week, we're taking a look at immigration museums off the beaten path.

Recently re-opened to the public after three years of renovation, San Francisco's Angel Island Immigration Station was once known as the "Ellis Island of the West" by locals, and the somewhat grander "Guardian of the Western Gate" by Immigration Services. Unlike the Ellis Island of the East, Angel Island was used to enforce the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and detain hundreds of thousands of Asian immigrants, who were held on the island for anywhere from two weeks to two years. Also unlike its cousin in New York, the Angel Island museum doesn't doesn't give access to immigration records. Instead, it recreates the experience of living in the complex's barracks, and preserves fascinating details like poems carved on the walls by Chinese detainees. If you happen to be going to San Francisco soon, the museum can be visited by guided tour.

Angel Island barracks, then and now

Other Museums - Hull House

This week, we're taking a look at immigration museums off the beaten path.



Immigrant families in New York visited the Jacob Riis Neighborhood Settlement House for programs like sewing classes and health care. Working class newcomers to Chicago turned to the Hull House for social enrichment. Founded by Jane Addams in 1889, Chicago's first settlement house offered free concerts, art galleries, lectures, daycare, and English classes. Rather than housing immigrants themselves, settlements were populated by middle classs volunteers (often women) wishing to living among and assist the poor. The Hull House was located in Chicago's Near West Side, a vibrant melting-pot community of Jews, Italians, Germans, and Greeks. Today, it's a museum run by the University of Illinois Chicago with a collection of 0ver 1,000 artifacts and 100 oral histories documenting life in the neighborhood.





Children gather in the Hull House complex, which grew to 13 buildings by the early 20th century, and included a summer camp.

Series: Other Museums

For every city with a rich immigration history, it seems like there's at least one museum to document it. The Tenement Museum aside, think Ellis Island or Los Angeles' Musem of Tolerance. This week, we'll highlight some lesser-known but equally fascinating ones, from San Francisco's equivalent of Ellis Island to a German museum dedicated to emigration.

Swiss Settlements

Earlier this year, film producer Philipp Kunzli set out to photograph Swiss descendants in small towns across the U.S. Before heading to places with large Swiss populations like New Bern, North Carolina (named after the capital of Switzerland) and Tell City, Indiana (home of the Swiss Fest, one of Indiana's longest-running community fairs) he stopped at the Tenement Museum to learn about life in America's most crowded immigrant center. Follow Kunzli's progress on his blog, and check out samples from his photo gallery below.

Helvetia, West Virgina - an isolated mountain town settled by Swiss immigrants in 1869

Traditional Swiss food is served at Helvetia's Hutte restaurant

Facts & Findings - In the Closet Behind the Wall

Check out this interesting NY Times article about a bunch of artifacts uncovered in an old house upstate:

When Carmen Artache and her husband, Balmes Rosa, bought a 200-year-old house in Bloomville, N.Y., in the Catskills, they set about erasing the many renovations of previous owners. In the process of revealing the original structure, they discovered a closet hidden behind a wall, and a cache of old papers inside.

The papers, more than 200 letters, notices, articles and other documents, belonged to S. B. Champion, the founder and editor of The Bloomville Mirror, a weekly newspaper published from 1851 to 1871. Almost all the documents, which were in a canvas bag, were from the Civil War years, and included everything from a local boy’s Army enlistment paper (Champion notarized it), to a love poem written by a soldier to his Mary back home. Read more.