New York City's Lower East Side Tenement Museum uses a novel approach to expose visitors to the living conditions of people who struggled as immigrants in lower Manhattan. Housed in a restored tenement building that escaped modernization for decades, the museum offers tours designed to promote discussion and education about the immigrant experience.

The tenement apartment building at 97 Orchard Street was built in 1863 and over a span of 70 years it housed nearly 7,000 people.


The five-story structure survived, intact and virtually unchanged, as it was essentially vacant from the 1930s until it was purchased to be transformed into a museum in the 1980s.

The conditions found in 19th century tenements seem remote today, and probably bring to mind the stark black-and-white photographs taken by Jacob Riis in New York City in the 1890s. So it's remarkable to be able to step into a vintage tenement building today and learn about actual residents who lived in its apartments during particular eras.

The museum's tours are not simply about looking at the restored living spaces. They're really about making people think. So while visitors are brought into the actual apartment where a family lived, it's not the traditional museum experience. The tour guides are called educators, and they don't point out artifacts so much as inspire and lead discussions.

The Irish Outsiders Tour

On the weekday I visited in October 2014, I took the tour titled "Irish Outsiders." After picking up tickets in the museum's shop (which is well worth a visit on its own), a friend and I joined a tour group of about a dozen people.

We met a young woman named Katie who would be our educator on the tour, and we all quickly introduced ourselves and said from where we were visiting. And then we began learning about the Moore family, residents of 97 Orchard Street in the late 1860s.

After a short stroll around the corner to the rear of the tenement building, the tour began in a small backyard area which, in the 19th century, held privies and a water tap. While the building was fortunate to have a pipe delivering clean water from New York's Croton Reservoir, there was no plumbing inside the building. So besides visiting the backyard privy, residents also had to lug buckets of water for household use up several flights of stairs.

A steel pail filled with stones was passed around the tour group. It weighs what a bucket of water would weigh, and holding it gives visitors some sense of the hardship of retrieving water many times a day. (Don't be alarmed. Visitors are invited to lift the weighted bucket, but it's not mandatory.)

Katie spoke a bit about the Irish experience on the Lower East Side in the mid-1800s. The immediate neighborhood of 97 Orchard Street was known as Kleindeutschland, or "Little Germany," and Irish residents would have been viewed as outsiders.

While we stood beneath a clothesline, in the space where women living in the tenement building would have done laundry, an illustration from Harper's Weekly depicting a tenement laundry day was passed around. Katie noted that an Irish woman had been depicted as looking different than the others in the magazine illustration. Indeed, the woman possessed the crude ape-like features cartoonists such as Thomas Nast typically used to depict Irish immigrants.

The Moore's Apartment

After climbing a few flights of stairs (on a modern staircase built onto the back of the building) we first entered one of the building's unrestored apartments. The apartment is essentially as it was found when the building was purchased. Visitors can see numerous layers of paint and wallpaper applied by residents back to the 1800s.

After our group took seats beside the time-damaged walls, Katie spoke about how the Moore family is known to have moved to Orchard Street after living in the rough neighborhood of the Five Points.

We walked down the tenement hallway and into the restored apartment where the Moore family lived in the late 1860s. As soon as I entered, I looked into the living room and noted something typically found in Irish-American households of the period: a lithographic portrait of the great Irish patriot Daniel O'Connell displayed in a prominent place.

While in the Moore's apartment, Katie told us about the family's experience during the time they lived in the building. The museum staff has done considerable research about the family, and public records, including the death and burial records of a young child, give strong clues about the family's life.

The tour group engaged in some discussion about the immigrant experience. And Katie read a brief passage quoting George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall political leader. Before the session ended, the discussion in the tour group turned briefly to Boss Tweed and the importance of local politics on the Lower East Side in the late 19th century.

The Irish Outsiders tour takes about an hour. And those who love history, especially the history of New York City, will appreciate how the atmosphere of a vintage tenement building inspires learning and discussion.

Other Tours

In addition to the Irish Outsiders tour, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum offers other tours which focus on German, Jewish, and Italian families who lived at 97 Orchard Street. It's advisable to buy tour tickets in advance, as they tend to sell out. (The museum is only accessible through the building tours.)

The museum also offers walking tours of the immediate neighborhood. The walking tours can accommodate larger groups, and, while popular, tend not to sell out as quickly. And it's possible to combine a building tour with a walking tour.

The tour schedules vary, so it's best to check with the Tenement Museum's web site for details.

To welcome more visitors to the museum, an expansion into a nearby building at 103 Orchard Street is planned, with construction to begin in 2016. The new space will not only deal with the museum's growing popularity, it will also enable it to tell stories of the immigrant experience from later eras.

The museum's activities can be followed via a lively Twitter account. And to see photos taken at 97 Orchard Street and the surrounding neighborhood, follow the museum on Instagram.