When we were in NYC recently we took a couple hours to go visit the Tenement Museum. We can’t recommend it highly enough. It is a A Museum that tells the stories of immigrants who lived in 97 Orchard Street, a tenement built in 1863 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Over the years from 1863 through the 1930’s, over 3000 immigrants lived in this building. For the first decades all they had were pit toilets in the backyard. In the 1930’s the upper floors were boarded off and frozen in time, not to be reopened until the 1980’s, when archeologists began reconstructing the history of the building and its many occupants. Today you can take tours of the building that help you understand and relive the way immigrants lived in a dense, urban NYC setting.
{ 0 comments }
