My husband and I took the “Piecing It Together” tour on January 12, 2006. We stopped by the museum in the morning and bought our tickets for the 3:20 PM tour that day. In retrospect, we should have bought tickets for one of the morning tours and hung out in the Lower East Side until it began. But, well, we didn’t. We went to Brooklyn for some shopping and coffee, and then had to high-tail it back to the Lower East Side to make the tour. Long story short, we missed the first fifteen minutes. Our tour guide was not altogether pleased, but fortunately we had caught the tour just before they went inside the tenement.

Each tour is one hour, and in that time the guide shows you 2 apartments. There are currently 2 different tours - “Hard Times” and “Piecing It Together.” The latter is specifically about families who worked in the garment industry. Standing in the tenement apartment and hearing about all the various work and life activities that happened in the three very small rooms is quite humbling. There’s an amazing amount of detail in each room - you’ll want to look at everything from the old sewing machines to the layers of old wallpaper. Our guide, Nadine, was very friendly and informative. I could tell they ran on a tight schedule at the museum, though, because she didn’t seem to have time to answer a lot of questions at the end of the tour.

I started feeling a little faint in the second apartment. And then that feeling increased to “reaaallly faint.” The day was warmer than average for Manhattan in January, and I was wearing a coat and a sweater—plus, I was feeling very closed in among the tenement’s tiny rooms and low ceilings. I had to sit outside for a minute after the tour was over. Our tour guide went out of her way to show me to the staff bathroom on the first floor of the tenement.

Tips for going here: get there on time, explore the gift shop, wear proper clothing, and get enough fresh air before stepping into the tenement. If you do all that, it’ll be well worth your $15.