Tenement Museum

An estimated fifteen thousand people from over twenty nations lived in this building between eighteen sixty-three and two thousand. It is a five-storey tenement at ninety-seven Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, and the apartments inside have been preserved exactly as they were found.

The building was contracted by Prussian-born immigrant Lukas Glockner in eighteen sixty-three. It originally contained twenty-two apartments and a basement saloon. A family of ten would share three hundred and twenty-five square feet. There was no indoor plumbing until eighteen ninety-five. The toilets were in the backyard.

The Tenement Museum was founded in nineteen eighty-eight by historian Ruth Abram and social activist Anita Jacobson. Instead of recreating history, they preserved the actual layers of wallpaper, the kitchen layouts, the sewing machines left behind. Each apartment tells the story of a real family — German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Puerto Rican — who lived in the building at different periods.

The Lower East Side itself has been called "Little Germany," "the world's largest Jewish city," and home to the largest Puerto Rican community in the mainland United States, depending on the decade. Every wave of immigrants to New York came through this neighbourhood, and most of them worked in the garment industry that surrounded this building.