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Lower East Side Tenement Museum

91 Orchard Street
New York, NY
10002

Tel: +1-212-431-0233
Fax: +1-212-431-0402

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How is it Remembered?

The heart of The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is its landmark tenement building located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Between 1863 and 1935, 97 Orchard Street was home to 7,000 people from over 20 nations. The Museum honors these working families by telling their stories - their trials and triumphs - of building lives in a new country.

Visitors step into carefully restored apartments, and “meet” former residents of 97 Orchard Street. Two of the families were caught in national economic crises: in the midst of the Panic of 1873, Natalie Gumpertz’s husband disappeared, forcing her to open a dressmaking shop to support her three daughters. The Baldizzis, illegal immigrants from Sicily faced the stigma of receiving Home Relief during the Great Depression.

Others were involved in the needle trades, an ongoing source of opportunity and despair for immigrants. Harris Levine, a Polish immigrant, established a small sweatshop in his apartment; Abraham Confino, who emigrated from Greece with his family after their house burned down, opened an undergarment shop; and the Rogarshevskys worked in garment factories. The patriarch of the Rogarshevsky family died of tuberculosis, often referred to as “the Jewish disease” or the “tailor’s disease”.

Today, 36 percent of the neighborhood’s residents are foreign-born and 60 percent speak a language other than English at home. The Museum, through the lens of history, makes visitors aware that many immigrants today face many of the same challenges as the generations that lived at 97 Orchard Street in the past.