Lower East Side Tenement Museum

I’ve lived in four apartments in the East Village, all tenement buildings around a hundred years old. Each had its quirks: slanted floors, musty smells, leaky pipes or crumbling walls, and railroad bedrooms in sizes that I’m told are illegal. I was always curious about the past residents of my homes, but I couldn’t imagine whole families crowded in these rooms.

After visiting the Tenement Museum, I can imagine it a little better. Although the Lower East Side was home to millions of immigrants, their traces are fast disappearing from these streets. The Tenement Museum preserves one Orchard Street building just as it used to be so you really feel like you’re stepping into the past.

Usually the museum doesn’t allow photography, but on select evenings they welcome shutterbugs. We wandered through a 1870s German saloon downstairs, and a family sweatshop upstairs, sewing machine waiting in the murky lamplight as if its owner has just stepped out. The top floor had an eerie recreation of an Irish wake, and several rooms were left in the same state of disrepair they had been when the building was condemned. Layers of wallpaper had unpeeled in places, revealing the decorating tastes of generations of tenants.