Long story short (although I am going to tell you the long story anyway), it might have been the best day of my life. It was like what some kid (albeit a nerdy one) would've described if you asked them to tell you their idea of a perfect day. "I would go to a museum, and a beach, and a concert, and a bowling alley, and..." And you'd probably be tempted to crush his or her little dreams by saying that there is impossible, because there is no place where you can do all of that. But you'd be wrong. That place is New York.
I started off at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a site I've been scheming to visit since approximately fifth grade and the release of this book. The set-up of this one is kind of weird: 97 Orchard Street is a restored tenement house in a historically Italian and Jewish neighborhood that at one time was the most crowded neighborhood in the world. It was inhabited from about the 1880s through the Depression, when new housing regulations the landlord couldn't afford caused him to evict everyone and shut the place down. They've restored various apartments to reflect different time periods and families and to offer a personal and affecting window into the lives of poor immigrants at the turn of the century. It's only open for guided tours, and unfortunately you can only go on one for the price of admission (an unusually steep $15) instead of lurking around all day and taking them all, like I was hoping.
I signed up for an hour tour called "Piecing it together" that focused on a (real) family of Jewish Poles that lived in the tenement in the early 1900s. The husband was a tailor and ran his own small shop with two or three employees out of the front room of the apartment. The only other rooms were a tiny kitchen and a bedroom that was just big enough for the double bed. The husband, wife, and three or four children lived here, although it was pretty difficult to see how. Cramped, no electricity, no air conditioning or running water, no indoor plumbing -- and they lived here for 13 years. The only lighting was gaslight (which also gave off heat), and the stove had to be burning to keep the pressing irons hot during the work day. It was pretty uncomfortable on an early July day in a t-shirt and shorts -- I couldn't imagine working here ten hours a day in a long dress.
The tour was run by an intern (I looked at this place but had missed the deadline -- maybe someday) and was really well done, I thought. A big point, aside from the sheer number of people that passed through this building (around 7,000 in 50 or so years) and the incredible things found during the restoration (30+ layers of paint and wallpaper in some places) was the acculturation of immigrants to America, even if it was involuntary. For example, millions of Jewish immigrants had to regularly violate their religious laws by working on the Sabbath, because the American work week ran from Monday through Saturday (this was decades before the five week and eons removed from the forty hour work week. Workers as late as the 1910s were still striking to get their week down to just over fifty hours).
This museum was kind of similar to, or maybe presented a sequel to, Ellis Island. Whereas EI's story kind of leaves off once a person was passed through to the U.S., the TM tells and shows you what happened next, which was, more often than not, kind of awful, even by 19th century standards. Anytime you've got three kids sleeping in the parlor with their heads on the sofa and their feet on chairs, or a pregnant woman hauling water up three flights of stairs, you've got an uncomfortable situation.
The story of this family was not too depressing, rhough. The sewing operation eventually prospered and the family moved to a bigger apartment after 97 Orchard.
Continued later when I'm not so tired and worn out from the appearance of actual summer (high 90s -- now they can complain).
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