Lower East Side Tenement Museum

I found myself comparing this place to the apartment my friend lives in with his family in Inwood, some things haven’t changed much for recent immigrants (and if you compare it to refugee detention centres they have gotten worse), though some have improved. Food is relatively cheaper, but accommodation is relatively insanely more expensive, there are now 7 people in the space you would have had 11 then, or people like me have 2 people now, they have a tv, computer and playstation instead of radios, but it’s still the same thankless struggle to get by.

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.

..the transit strike made me walk to work yesterday, which was a gift! an hour and a half of fresh air before starting a nine hour shift was a great way to wind up, and the walk took me by the museum – a good reminder. They’re closed and setting up a new installation but now their goings on are now in my radar..

The museum runs a wonderful program in which you can go into one of the tenements, touch the objects, sit on the furniture, and speak with an actor who gives the point of view of someone living there. Ours even fooled some of the kids into thinking she really lived there!

You have to have reservations and you have to take the subway down to the Lower East Side, but this is a wonderful place – stories and apartments from the last couple of centuries of life in NYC and as an immigrant. Good gift shop & cool places to explore in the surrounding neighborhood.