If you've never been to the Lower East Side's Tenement Museum, you're missing out on one of the city's most unique and fascinating historical institutions. Now is the perfect time to get acquainted—The Museum is set to unveil a series of new developments in coming months, including a brand new visitor and education center in a newly acquired tenement down the street from the original museum, and a slew of new exhibits, including a look at the retail stores that 97 Orchard St once housed (coming this fall), and a walkable food tour that’s launching on June 24. We spoke to the Museum's VP of Education, Annie Polland, about the new developments and her favorite spots in the neighborhood.
You've got a lot of really exciting things coming up. Now that you have this whole new building, are you doing all new exhibits to fit the new space? Up to now, these classrooms have been in the basement of 97 Orchard, in the basement of the tenement building. Because we're moving them to another building, we can use that space for exhibits. Our next exhibit is called Shop Life, and it's about a bunch of stores that had been located at 97 Orchard. The first store that visitors will see is a recreated saloon.
There was a German beer hall, or beer saloon rather, between 1864 and 1886, that was run by John and Caroline Schneider, who were immigrants. John had come from Bavaria, Caroline from Prussia. They met in New York and got married and basically when they got married they opened the saloon. That was their business. And so we've done a lot of research on the saloon and have found there were all sorts of meetings there, German political meetings, reform meetings, that would take place in the back hall of the saloon. We're re-creating that space in the very same space it was. Once we moved people out and started doing research on the wall, we found all these different layers of past stores that were there.
Another space we discovered was all the sheet metal, the pressed sheet metal that matched a picture of 97 Orchard from the 1930s, when there was an auction house. Salespeople would gather to auction goods. Peddlers and salespeople would buy their goods there and then go off. Because we had a picture of that interior space and we found the historical fabric beneath it, we decided to unpeel that and create that space to talk about the 1930s.
Break this down a bit—you're doing the saloon first and then turning it into an auction house, or is it all simultaneous?There's two sides of the store. There were two stores in a space, it was like a partition. The northern side where everyone is going to enter and start the tour is going to be the saloon. The whole northern half of the basement is the saloon, the back room behind the saloon where all sorts of political meetings took place or fraternal clubs would meet, and behind that is the Schneider's apartment. In the early years, many of these shopkeepers, whether they had a grocery store, a butcher store, a saloon, would live behind the store. So we're going to recreate the apartment of John and Caroline Schneider.
Then as we move into the south side of the shop, we'll have an empty space that's kind of where we're going to make the point that many, many stores were here over time, not just the saloon. The Germans moved Uptown, Eastern European Jews moved in, and they brought with them their own commercial traditions and communities that inhabited the space over and over and over again. Then when we move to the front of the southern space, that's where we have the 1930s auction house. We're going to do a little tour through history, go back in time and work our way to the present.
There were oven two dozen stores that we were able to trace to 97 Orchard, and we wanted to tell those stories and bring it closer to the present. We're also going to be telling the stories of a kosher butcher shop that was there in 1900, then an underwear store, called Sidney's Undergarments, that was there in the 1960s and the 1970s. We can't recreate those spaces there's not enough space to do that. But it's still very important for us to tell these stories because we got such good information about them.
Artifacts for display in "Shop Life"
I'm going to switch gears a little bit here and talk about the food tour that you have coming up in a few weeks. Who's participating? How is it set up? It ranges because we wanted to do a variety of Lower East Side foods. Our first sample is pretzels, soft pretzels from a restaurant called Loreley, and that's to tie in with the German saloon. So you have the pretzel and then next we go to the Pickle Guys on Essex Street, and we talk about how pickle barrels would have been ubiquitous on the streets a hundred years ago. It was like a subsistence food. You needed people to have refrigerators, you needed to buy fresh vegetables all the time, the process for pickling vegetables made them last longer. Pickles would have been everywhere. Now we've come to a point on the Lower East Side where there's only one pickle store left, and that's the Pickle Guys. We talked about what the pickle meant to the East European Jew. We also talk about food, American-born nutritionists and food experts who actually said pickles made people excitable, and the Jews are already so excitable that they shouldn't eat anymore pickles.
Really?! Pickles? It's great because Adam Steinberg, who's one of my staff members, did all of this research about all this stuff food historians have written about different cultures so it's fun because it's food but it's also kind of serious because you're learning about the kind of history of the food and how it changed over time. The overall theme of the tour is not about how immigrants brought their food with them and wham! now they’re on Essex Street or Orchard Street. What really happened was immigrants brought food traditions with them, but as they interacted with the American or New York scene, the food traditions changed slightly to adapt to materials that were available, and the mingling of different styles and customs, to come up with something new.
I'm trying to think of a good mixture of foods...We have pickles, bialys, Essex Street Market, and there visitors sample queso blanco, a Caribbean kind of cheese, Dominican, and it comes from a Dominican shop in the Market. And then they also have cheddar cheese from Saxelby Cheesemongers, which is a newer business. And so, it's about how food becomes different things in different places. And how the market as a whole becomes a place for many different immigrant groups to find the foods that they had in their countries. Then we go to Castillo del Jaguaf, which is a Domincan diner on Rivington Street that's been there for almost 30 years, family-owned. He talks about how Dominican people go there but also people in the neighborhood go there and love the food and how New York is about trying different cultural foods. Economy Candy is next, and it's perfect, because he has people look at the windows of Economy Candy, filled with different candy wrappers. So we talk about all these different candies and how kids, regardless of where you're from, regardless of immigrant background, see candy as this American thing.
Tour guide Adam Steinberg outside of Economy Candy
Let me ask you a non-food question. You obviously spend a lot of time dealing with the history of the Lower East Side, but I'm curious of your impression of what the Lower East Side is like today. There are many things that are similar in the sense that you have immigrants coming here, bringing their culture and adapting to new ones, and we see the product of that with different foods that are created. On the other hand, on the Lower East Side specifically, what you also have today is gentrification which makes it harder for as many immigrant groups to settle in this neighborhood as they once did. If a hundred years ago the Lower East Side was a primary destination point for Russian Jews or Italians, today many immigrants are bypassing Manhattan entirely and going to Queens or going to Brooklyn.
When we have older visitors, when we go on our building tours, even though our tours are of an historic apartment from 97 Orchard...We talk about the people who lived in 97 Orchard and because 97 Orchard closed in 1935, we're only able to talk about Italians, Russians, Jews, Irish, and so on. We always bring the present into the tour. We always want to say, Look out the window. What we're seeing, there's a lot of similarities. What does it mean that the Lower East Side is a place some immigrants can't afford to live, if this has been a historic iconic immigrant neighborhood, what does it mean if immigrants are entirely bypassing Manhattan and going to other places? Of course, people come up with all different kinds of things.
I think a lot of visitors come expecting just the historic experience, and we test that and pull them. We really want them to understand how the tenement museum isn't a dollhouse—oh, that's cute, how people in the past lived. Instead we engage them emotionally with how immigrants in the past live as a way to consider how people consider New York today in America.
What are some of your personal favorite spots in the neighborhood? First, The Educational Alliance—this building opened in 1891 to serve the community, offering English classes, citizenship courses, gym classes, a rooftop garden, library, and more. Records show that 37,000 people used the building each week in the first decade of the twentieth century. Within a decade they had to replace the marble stairs. The Educational Alliance still runs today—offering day care, art classes, and a gym for the community. During the summer I take my daughter there to catch the bus to her summer camp, and I always marvel at how this gorgeous building continues to offer so much to the Lower East Side and New York.
Also the Eldridge Street Synagogue—it’s a National Historic Landmark, the first synagogue built by East European Jews in America. Thanks to the work of the Museum at Eldridge Street, the building has been restored to look as it did at the turn of the twentieth century. It is absolutely breathtaking—the sanctuary’s paint patterns and stained glass windows are gorgeous, but my favorite aspect of the building are the grooves in the floor, left there by the shuffling of immigrants’ feet over time. The Museum offers excellent tours of the congregation’s history and the synagogue’s architecture.
And Panade—it’s this bakery on Eldridge Street run by Yvetto Ho, a former public school teacher. You think you are going for the amazing cream puffs, muffins, and sandwiches, but an even more attractive element is the community that Yvette has cultivated at her store. Yvette’s reall brings together Lower East Siders—Chinese building workers, neighborhood teachers, art gallery attendees, her former public school students, all sorts of people that represent the neighborhood today.
Can you think of any other neighborhoods that could use a neighborhood-specific museum? Or is the Tenement Museum uniquely positioned to be the only one? Actually, I feel like any neighborhood, and in fact, any building could benefit from a Tenement Museum-style approach. What the Tenement Museum shows is that the history of ordinary buildings and ordinary people is extraordinary. Under this premise, any well-researched building offers fascinating stories and links to historical events. I’d love to create a curriculum that would allow any teacher to help his or her students research a neighborhood building, using census records, building records, and oral histories so that they can understand their neighborhood’s past. You just need to start to imagine daily life from the perspective of a person: that’s what brings history, and the city, to life.
