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Jennie Levine left no books, artworks or music for posterity, and few know much about her today. But her life and preserved lodgings have become part of a distinctive New York house museum that showcases the conditions of thousands who fled domestic and international turmoil from the mid 19th century.
The Tenement Museum in the city’s Lower East Side does not idolise a single well-known cultural figure. Instead, it pays quiet homage to the struggles of many ordinary people — Jews fleeing oppression, Italian, Irish and Chinese immigrants escaping poverty, African Americans seeking a freer life — who laboured anonymously to improve their futures.
Like its inhabitants, 97 Orchard Street blends in rather than standing out from its neighbours with a red-brick facade, giddying external metal fire escape and main entrance up a steep stoop. Yet inside, the freshly renovated and expanded complex offers a glimpse into past urban lives, primarily through group tours of the building and the streets nearby.
Constructed in 1863, the tenement housed four families on each floor and was typical of the crowded residences in one of the world’s most densely populated urban areas. This district of New York at one time met much of the US demand for clothes through a network of low-paid subcontracted piecework in tiny apartments that doubled as workshops.
An estimated 7,000 residents lived in the building over 70 years, with the downstairs spaces rented at various times by retailers including a clothier, a kosher butcher and a beer saloon. Each city block had multiple such stores serving local residents seeking space to socialise and eat, given the lack of space in their own lodgings.
Levine, her husband and five children, who fled antisemitism and economic hardship in what is today Poland, squeezed into an apartment of three small rooms they likely also shared with boarders. Their tiny bedroom, kitchen and parlour — the only room with external-facing windows — is on view in reconstructed form.
Housing regulations from 1879 meant they and the other families on their floor had a shared toilet in the hallway, but long overdue fire regulations in 1935 pushed the landlord to stop renting to families rather than carry out further renovations. That helped preserve the building largely intact, conserving the tenement flats, until its reopening as a museum in 1988.
While renovations over the past year ahead of its recent reopening have helped ensure stability and safety, specialist preservation architects have kept other shared parts and flats empty, with their cracked plasterwork, pressed metal ceilings and up to 24 layers of wallpaper left evocatively intact.
Other rooms on view bear witness to the waves of different immigrants in the district over the decades, including the recreated 1880s apartment of the Gumpertz family, whose primary breadwinner disappeared during the Panic, the 1873 financial crisis; and those of the Epstein and Saez Velez families from the 1950s and 1960s, who were Jewish Holocaust survivors and Puerto Rican migrants.
Today’s lower-income immigrants are now mostly priced out of the decidedly upscale Lower East Side, but the Tenement Museum helps keep a powerful connection to the past and to the area’s potential for social mobility.
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