On Sunday, ACC sang at, and participated in, an AIDS walk. However, this was optional, and Terry and Guillermo and I decided to opt out. Instead, we spent most of the day at the Tenement Museum (w).
As you might expect, the Tenement Museum looks at the lives of residents of tenement buildings on the Lower East Side, primarily European immigrants. What makes the museum unique is that it's housed in an actual tenement building, and tells the stories of real people who used to live there. I've wanted to visit ever since I first heard of the museum, primarily because it has a personal connection for me. My mother's grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and my grandmother (and possibly my grandfather, but I don't know for sure) grew up in tenements much like the one that now houses the museum.
The museum tells its stories through guided tours and living history exhibits, in which visitors meet and talk to "residents." There are several tours, and if we'd had enough time - and money - I would have loved to take all of them. As it was, we signed up for three tours. Actually, I only signed up for two tours - by the time I got around to making our reservations, one of the tours we wanted to go on only had two spaces left, and due to fire regulations, there was no way to squeeze in "just one more." Since it was my fault for waiting too long, I volunteered to be the one to miss out.
Before the first tour, we planned to have breakfast at a nearby deli. Unfortunately, when we got there, the waiting list was too long. So we ate at Starbucks, instead. How boring.
To begin with, here are pictures of the building:
I'll describe the tours in reverse order, because it was on the third tour that we learned the most about the building itself. It was built in 1863, and was inhabited until 1935. The ground floor was rented out for commercial use, and the upper floors consisted of 16 apartments, four per floor, each with three small rooms, a parlor, a kitchen and a bedroom - the bathrooms were in the hall, and shared by all the residents on the floor. In 1935, new and more stringent building safety codes were passed - for example, the wooden stairs and rails had to be replaced with stone or metal, to reduce the risk of fire. However, rather than bring the building up to code, the landlord evicted all the tenants and sealed off the upper floors. The buiding just sat there and essentially rotted away, until the museum bought it in 1988.
The third tour was called "Sweatshop Workers." The word "sweatshop" generally conjures up an image of a large room filled with dozens of workers slaving away at sewing machines. But in this case, the sweatshop was simply one apartment, occupied by a family of garment workers. Of course, with no air conditioning, the place really would have been a sweatshop in the sweltering summer months.
This tour took us to two apartments, one of which was empty, and the other was furnished as it might have been when occupied. We were told the story of two families, the Rogarshevskys and the Levins. I don't have many pictures, because we were told that photography was not allowed inside the museum. I snuck a few pictures, anyway - I'm pretty sure our guide was on to me, but she didn't call me on it. Here's a picture of a bed in the Levin apartment, with a child's doll:
...and a picture of a corridor, with a wooden stairway:
The fire extinguisher, of course, is a modern addition.
In the empty apartment, there was a glass case with several artifacts, including this advertisement in Hebrew for English lessons - the headline, our guide informed us, reads "Learn English Fast!"
Just before describing the second tour, I'll throw in this picture. On the way into the building, I looked down from the stairs into the courtyard, and noticed these outhouses, and laundry hanging on the line:
In the second tour, we got to meet one of the residents, Victoria Confino, a 14 year old Greek Jewish immigrant. But before we met her, our tour guide, Rose, sat us down in a classroom and gave us some background information about Victoria and her life and times. Then she explained that we would be going back in time to meet Victoria - but since we couldn't very well knock on her door and tell her we had come from the future to meet her, we needed a cover story. Our story was that we were a family of Italian immigrants who had just arrived. A relative was supposed to meet us, but they never showed up. Rose's story was that she was a well meaning but somewhat condescending do-gooder from the Upper East Side, who came down to the neighborhood to work with immigrant families, teaching them English and basic living skills. She met us on the docks, looking lost, and asked if she could help. When we explained our predicament (in our broken English, of course), she offered to take us to meet someone (Victoria) who could give us some advice, being an immigrant herself.
So, with our cover story established, we all squeezed into the small parlor of Victoria's apartment:
...and spent about half an hour talking with her. In our role as newly arrived and bewildered immigrants, we asked questions, and she gave advice, telling us about life in America, and about her family. She also passed around family pictures and household items. She told us that nine people lived in that little apartment - her parents, herself and six brothers and sisters. Her parents slept in the bedroom, Victoria slept in the kitchen on the floor, and everyone else slept in the parlor, on couches or on the floor. Here's a picture of the parents' bedroom:
I was quite impressed with the actress playing the part. She never broke character, never gave any hint that she was a twenty-first century actress playing a role. It was obvious that much of her talk was scripted, but she also ad libbed well - when she saw Terry's and Guillermo's dogs, she exclaimed "How you get the dogs through Ellis Island?" We had no answer for that, but fortunately, she didn't press the issue.
Which brings us to the first tour, the one I missed. That was another "meet the residents" tour, and I'll step aside here and let Terry describe that one. Take it away, Terry!
Per Grinnell´s request, I am fillling in the description of the tour that he misssed at the Tenement Musuem, which was incredible, as all of the tours were. As Grinnell already shared, I highly recommend a trip to the musuem while you are in New York.
The aparments we visited belonged to three families. In each case, the women were at home while their husbands had either gone to work, or had taken tthe children to church or to another event. We were, in this particular case, newspaper reporters.
The first family we visited was an Italian one from 1935, soon to be evicted due to the explanation given earlier, that of the landlord´s inability (Grinnell interjects: or reluctance) to modernize the building. We learned of the family´s life, what they planned to do once they moved from the apartment, etc.
We then went back in time to 1868, to visit Bridget Moore, an Irish immgrant with three young girls. She shared how muuh she missed her mother, and how much she wished she could speak to her (wait about a hundred years, Bridget). Guillermo and I used the Aira glasses for descriptions, which Grinnell explains later. (Grinnell interjects: see the May 21 page)
We then visited the Levin home, the scene of the sweatshop tour described above, where we talked about the workers, the High Holy day that was coming up, and what would be prepared.
I realize that this is a rather sketchy description, but worth the effort. We learned what happeened to the families, which was also fascinnating, and very sad in some cases as well. We were allowed to touch letters from the Irish woman´s mother, as well as other items in the house, such as a rag doll, and part of a rag rug which acquired the trousers of the husband.
Thanks, Terry. I wonder if any descendants of the original families have visited the museum.
While Terry and Guillermo were on the tour, I took a walk, and ended up walking on The Bowery. That's a street. There's a popular song from 1891 called "The Bowery," which tells the story of a hick from the sticks who comes to the big city and has many misadventures on The Bowery, which apparently was a rather sleazy part of town at that time. Today it's just an ordinary commercial street. Anyway, I sang the song at an open mike performance a year or two ago, so I was delighted to find myself on the actual street (here's a link to the lyrics). I passed a storefront window which displayed these three posters describing Bowery history. I took pictures, and here they are:
After the last tour, we went back to the apartment for a while, and then went out for dinner. One thing about New York - love it or hate it, they have the widest variety of ethnic restaurants of any place I've ever seen. We went to two restaurants that evening. First, we went to a Uruguayan restaurant for appetizers. The food was good, but unfortuately, there was a group of four or five people at a nearby table carrying on an extremely loud conversation about the royal wedding (which had happened just that weekend). Even more unfortunately, the loud conversation soon devolved into a loud argument about... well, we never did figure out what it was about. Anyway, after we escaped from that scene, we went to a Dominican restaurant for dinner. Much better - good food, large portions, and no noisy neighbors.
On the Lyft ride back to the apartment, we got into a conversation with the driver. It turned out he was a musician, and we told him all about our choir. So he went to his iPhone and found one of our YouTube videos and played it, and also played us some of his music.
After we got back to the aparment, I walked across the street to one of the music clubs, a place called Terra Blues, and spent some time listening to a blues singer/guitarist whose name unfortunately escapes me.