April 6, 2015 • 32 mins
The U.S. is, at its heart, a nation of immigrants. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum works to preserve the history of many families who left their home countries to start lives in New York. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today
we're gonna do something a little bit new, at least
new since Tracy and I have been on the podcast.
(00:21):
Past hosts have featured interviews with people with interesting historical
stories to tell, but this is our first go round
on this one. So we mentioned not long ago that
we wanted to cover a few museums and talk about
their history, and today we're sharing the first of a
two parter. It's an interview with Dr Annie Polland of
the Lower east Side Tenement Museum. And this particular subject
(00:42):
came up not long after we had mentioned during a
recording that we wanted to start telling stories about museums
at some point, and so we got really excited about
this amazingly layered history to the Tenement Museum and the
building there, as well as it's incredible mission to preserve
and present the stories of immigrants that in many ways
sort of tell the story of the US as an
(01:04):
immigrant nation. So we're going to hop right into that interview.
So today we have with us Dr Annie Pollen, who
is the senior vice president for Programs and Education at
the Lower east Side Tenement Museum. Did I get all
that correct? Yeah? You get perfect? Uh. And this is
(01:24):
such an incredibly cool museum space with such a really
uh fabulous sort of history of its own, and there
are so many wonderful stories connected to it that we're
just gonna jump right in and kind of get the
full scoop on this really wonderful historical landmark. So first off, Annie,
will you tell us a little bit about yourself and
(01:45):
how you ended up in your position at the Tenement Museum. Sure? Um,
I think what brought me here with what brought me
to New York because I came to New York initially
to study history and that I got my pH d
in history at Columbia University. And while I was there
working on my coursework and my dissertation, I got a
(02:07):
job with a company called Big Onion Walking Tours, which
is a wonderful company that organizes historical walking tours of
many New York neighborhoods. So I started working for that company,
and I gave the first assignment that I had was
to work on the Lower east Side tour, and it
was actually run in conjunction with the Lower east Side
Tournament Museum. So I came and at this point it
(02:30):
was like the late nineties, and I came down to
give a walking tour UM. And I'm actually looking right
now at the window at the corner of where I started,
which was right across the street from the Tonament Museum.
And it was such a wonderful experience to walk through
the city UM, to look at the buildings and be
able to tell their history. And I think that combination
of history, the built environment, and the enthusiasm of the
(02:50):
people on the tour made me realize how important public
history was. So I finished my dissertation and I enjoyed
that research, but knew that what I really wanted to
do is, rather than work in an academic setting, work
in a place where history could come to life, and
in a place where I could kind of share that
history with many more people than I would if I
(03:11):
had stayed in an academic check. The Laur east Side
Tournament Museum, of course, is a perfect place to do
that because the history is so rich, it's so layered,
it works off the built environment, and UM it attracts
so many people from all around the country, in the world,
so it's really the perfect place for me in many ways.
So history is like in your heart, that's your whole background. Yeah, yes, exactly,
(03:34):
love it. Uh. And the museum itself is really the
brainchild of one woman, although many hands have of course
gone into making it sort of the incredible resource it
is today. But could you tell us a little bit
about Ruth Abram and how she came to develop this concept? Well? Sure,
I mean what I'm what I'll probably you is probably
what other people you know would be able to tell
(03:56):
you too. I wasn't here when the museum got started
in ninety eight eight, so what I'm telling you in
some ways is the you know, the founding story that
I've been told. Um. But she really was, really is
a remarkable woman. And she actually in a colleague, Anita Jacobson,
where the two women that we consider the founders of
the museum. Um, they were working together and they were
(04:18):
looking for a tenement to tell the story of immigration,
which in and of itself was an absolutely radical thing
to do, right to say that an old building that
you know, people were abandoning, that should be the site
to study history. You know, when most people are studying
history in huge museums, or they're studying history in a
president's former home or an industrialist former former home. To
(04:40):
say that an old tenement is a site of history,
it was a radical thing. So they had this radical
idea and they were looking for a tenement and and
I think the story goes that they had almost given
up hope because the tenements they found were already rehabbed
or they were um. They had changed so much over time.
And they were looking at that point for storefront to
(05:01):
start telling the story. And they went to this building
to see about renting a storefront, and this was ninety
seven Orchard Streets, And when they asked to use the restroom,
they saw that the restroom was in the hall um
and it was assigned to them that the building hadn't
been updated since the nineteen o one housing law. So
they realized that they had this real time capsule at
place where they could tell many layers and many um
(05:25):
elements of the immigrant story. So that's the kind of
founding story that's been passed down and that we tell
on our tours. But Ruth herself, I think we've trained
in UM was interested in history, and um, what I
can say is her dynamism and her creativity still kind
of I mean, it just is amazing to me to
(05:46):
think of how people could have had the idea to
do this in the nineteen eighties. I just love that
it's a piece of history. It's kind of right in
line with the things we always talk about, which is
sort of the history that you don't hear, you know,
as you said, we sort of tend to think of
studying history and sort of amazing and hallowed halls, and
(06:07):
we history is happening everywhere all the time, to people
of all levels of society. So I sort of love
that idea that it's it's the real history of real people,
and it's not something glamorized. It's not someone that is
famous that you've heard of, but that doesn't make their
stories any less important. Absolutely, I think that's at the
heart of the whole museum and it's mission. Um. One
(06:30):
of the things we do sometimes as ask visitors who come,
you know, what are other historic houses you've been to,
or give me some examples in historic homes, and they'll
inevitably say Monticello, or they'll say the Manson's at Newport
or they'll say Mark Twain's house or Edith Wharton's home,
or basically giving us the names of very famous wealthy
(06:51):
or um political people, UM. And so that this continues
to be a surprise to people in a way that
exactly what you're just saying, that ordinary people shape history
and should be the focus of our attention. That still
is a somewhat of a radical idea in the public story,
even though historians and social historians have been really talking
about this, you know, since the nineteen sixt season, even
(07:14):
before UM, but it's taken. It's still because so much
of what we encounter, let's say, on the History Channel
or things like this, is in some ways a history
that still focuses on military battles or political personages, and
I mean just kind of things that seem out of touch.
But what we specialize in here are the ordinary stories
(07:36):
of people who lived here. And actually when you look
at those ordinary stories, they really become extraordinary. So I
think what we're able to do, UM best is be
in a site where people lived and be able to
show that people who would have never thought that anyone
would be thinking about them really did extraordinary things That
kind of brings me to my mask next question, because
(07:57):
since you are actually housed in what was a tenement,
you have kind of an interesting layout and then it's
an apartment building, UM, and you're restoring parts of it
but not all of it. Could you kind of explain
to us how that's laid out and what sort of
the mission is in terms of just the structure, and
how your restoration efforts are kind of spearheaded and project managed. Absolutely.
(08:22):
So the building is five stories with a basement level
as well. So the basement level was initially UH space
for stores, UM, and we've restored that basement level to
show a saloon that was there in the eighteen seventies UM,
actually as early as eighteen sixty four UM. And then
(08:44):
above that you have essentially four sorry, five floors each
with four apartments UM. Then the building was first, so
the running water and the bathrooms were outside in the
rear yard, and we've also recreated that rear yard. UM.
In nineteen o one, the building changed because of a
(09:05):
new law which was incredibly important, and at that point
the landlord had to add two toilets per floor, so
the layouts changed from Florida floor. But they also change
over time but essentially what you have on the second, third, fourth,
and fifth floor are four apartments with two toilets UM
(09:25):
and one hallway. On the first floor you have a
longer hallway. UM. When it was originally built, there were
four apartments. Over time after that nineteen one housing law
and the landlord made changes. The first two of those
apartments were converted into storefronts. So it's tricky because the
building changed over time. But essentially you have a UM
(09:45):
five story building with a basement level. It's about um
ft wide and sixty six feet deep UM and the
whole width of the lots right is built with this building,
so there's very little yard space, and of that of
course influences UM the amount of light that the building received. Well,
(10:06):
in my understanding, I don't have a huge massive grasp
on the nineteen one tenement housing law, but prior to
that they wouldn't have had indoor lighting either correct, absolutely
right right right, so none none that the landlord would
have provided. So when the building was first built there
were very few laws UM governing any kind of requirements
(10:29):
for lighting or for running water and so on, And therefore,
when the building was built in eighteen sixty three, um.
There was no running water, the bathrooms were outside, the
only source of water was outside, and there was no
lighting in the central areas. Individual tenants would bring in
their own form of lighting, UM, but there was nothing
(10:49):
provided by the landlord. And that was fairly typical. So
I can imagine some of those hallway trips to the
bathroom at night were really really dark. Oh yeah, I
mean it's it's almost tired to a mad And one
of the things our educators do so well though, is
make the visitors feel like they're back in time through
their storytelling power and through the details they're able to
do through description. But one of the things we are
(11:11):
able to do when people are assembled in our front
hallway is we have one of the visitors switch off
the light switch. So there goes the electric lighting and
it becomes very dark, even at like ten in the
morning or eleven in the morning when the sun is
shining outside. You see how dark that hallway would be,
and then you can start to appreciate and start to
imagine what that would have been like at midnight or
(11:32):
ten PM, I mean, just how dark the hallway was.
Then when you layer that with the kind of UM,
what people would be doing as they went through the hall.
For example, you'd be having to go outside to get
a bucket of water. So going through a dark hallway,
going up dark and staircases, carrying a bucket of water,
hoping you're not going to run into someone, hoping you're
(11:54):
not going to spill the water. I mean, the kind
of actions in that darkened space are really amazing. When
you're restoring each of the floor. Am I correct that
you're not restoring everything, You're purposely keeping some things as is? Yes, yes, so, um,
(12:19):
most historic houses preserve or restore. Actually, the most historic
houses restore. They're building to look as it would have
in one particular period, one particular you know, period of
extreme historical significance. Let's say the Tournament Museum is different
because the founders decided and the people who work with
(12:41):
them in the very beginning realize that rather than restoring
it just to one moment, they should be able to
take different apartments and take them to different moments. And
so when we restore apartments, we're going to restore them differently, um,
in part due to what time period we're in. So
in a part men for examples that we're restoring to
(13:02):
be the eighteen sixties is not going to have running
water in it, but an apartment that we're going to
restore to the nineteen fifteen would have running water on
it um. So that doing that requires a lot of
research in the actual building, looking at when wall partitions shifted, um,
looking at wallpaper layers, looking at paint layers, and so
we bring in people who specialize in all of these
areas to do analysis of the building um of the
(13:25):
building elements, and that helps inform the decisions we make
with how we're going to restore a particular apartment to
a particular time period. Also included in the kind of
areas and historical record of significance would be what we
term our ruined apartments, And so we actually preserve rooms
to look as they did when Luc and Anita discovered
(13:48):
the building in the nineteen eighties, and the upper floors
hadn't been used at all um so no one had
updated them since the mid nineteen thirties. So we preserve
apartments that look as they did in the ninth in
eighties after no one had lived there for fifty years,
and we call those ruins because that moment of discovering
we feel is important for our visitors to understand, and
(14:08):
that's our kind of home, that's our base. We always
start with an apartment that looks like that before we
recreate them. So there's a way in which UM visitors
who come to our museum not only travel through time
simply by crossing a hallway and walking from one apartment
to another, but they also see a kind of before
and after process in a way that's so cool UM.
(14:29):
And that's ongoing, and that's ongoing. You guys are still
in the process of renovating the whole building, correct, Yeah, well,
we still were always doing research into the building. And
then the other thing that we're really working on is
is preservation and making sure that UM the building is
stable and making sure that we're able to repair things
(14:49):
that need to be repaired. But that requires analysis, and
that requires work, and that requires a work plan, and
it also requires UM money. So everything we do is
a kind of combination of study, a fundraising of UM,
a studying schedule to kind of see when work can
be done, which I imagine as a huge balancing act UM.
(15:10):
Going back, kind of circling back to what we've talked
about at the top of the interview about kind of
the importance of looking at history as it was happening
to regular people. Um, I'm curious just for your take
on what you think is really kind of the the
big important reason that we should preserve immigration history specifically,
and that's I mean, it's such a sort of American
(15:33):
thing to talk about, even though I think people don't
always fully have a big picture sense of what all
kind of took place in the immigration realm. But also
I think it's part of a global human story. It's
pretty important to think about how people have moved from
place to place and made their way. But I'm curious
what your take is on all that. Yeah, I mean
it's a fascinating story. I think that there's an immigration
(15:54):
history is so important because for many people it's very
accessible in this country. So we're not a country where
most you know, in this country, most people have not
been here for twenty generations. We're a country in which
a lot of people can trace their immigration um story.
So someone might come to our museum whose great grandparents immigrated,
(16:15):
are great great grandparents immigrated or grandparent or parents, and
so you know, this is a country. No matter where
you live in this country, we have an intimate connection
to immigration. UM. We have photos of immigrants who came
over who are in our family. So I think that
the immigration story is really accessible to us because we
have immigrant stories in our own families. On another level,
(16:37):
even if you don't have or you don't know of
someone in your family who immigrated, the immigration story is
a saga and a journey, a personal narrative and story
that I think has so much residence. The idea simply
of someone picking up, um, leaving a place where they've
been for most of their life and journeying to a
new place to start all over again, is is really
(17:00):
an exciting narrative that you know, some people play this
out if they've simply moved from one state to another,
and you have a sense of what movement does and
how movement reshapes your life and reshapes the way you think, um,
you know, again moving from state to state or city
to city, so that people can take that experience too
and use it to relate to immigration. So I think
(17:21):
immigration is important because a lot of this experience it
in some way or another. UM. And I also think
that one of the things we find at our museum
is that the immigrant story becomes not just a story
of particular groups of people who come at particular moments
in time, although it is that, and we get into
the details of that, but the immigrant story and the
(17:44):
immigration story is also a lens on what does it
mean to be American. All the people who went to
ninety seven Orchard, whether they were Irish, whether they were Italian,
whether they were German, whether they were East European Jewish,
all of those people and all of those groups once
they got here, had to grapple with what it meant
to be a American. What does it mean to raise
American children? What does it mean to send your kids
to new school? What does it mean um to have
(18:06):
American politics shape your life or the American economy shape
your life. They all had to grapple with that. So
that moment, I think where we can kind of look
at America from the perspective of immigrants gives us a
real insight on what America was at at a particular moment.
So we might be a museum of immigration, but I
think we're also very much a museum of what it
(18:28):
meant to be American. Uh And you mentioned in that
answer the sort of many different backgrounds that people came
from that lived there in the building at various points
in time. Can you give us a picture of what
the neighborhood was really like when this was actually a functioning,
thriving residence, and how it kind of evolved through the
decades between when it opened in the eighteen six season
(18:51):
then when it's shut down kind of abruptly in the
nineteen thirties. M So, just as the building itself changed
over time to meet a series of needs and laws
and and improvements, the neighborhood itself is changing, and so
the building's changes are of course a response to changes
in the neighborhood. More broadly, when the building was first
built in eighteen sixty three, this neighborhood was not known
(19:12):
as the Lower east Side. It was known as Clin
Deutsch Launder, a little Germany, And it was called that
because the neighborhood in the city was a very German
neighborhood and city. So what we now call the Lower
east Side UM, what was then called Clent Deutsche Land
was actually the fifth largest German speaking city UM in
(19:34):
the world right and and New York was the third
largest German speaking city in the world after Berlin and Vienna.
So when ninety seven Orchard was built in eighteen sixty three,
it was in the midst of this kind of thriving,
bustling German neighborhood where you would hear German on the streets,
where you would see German signs, where you could buy
German sausage, and you could buy German lugger beer. At
(19:56):
ninety seven Orchard, at Tonighter's saloon, um could get a
German newspaper. You'd hear German music emanating from the um,
from the saloons, and from the beer gardens that were
in the neighborhood. So it was very much a German neighborhood,
and of course the people who lived at Orchard reflected
that German population. As the decades went on, Um Germans
(20:20):
moved uptown Um, they moved to neighborhood called Yorkville, I think,
moved to Brooklyn, they moved to New Jersey, and new
immigrants survived in the neighborhood UM. And these were immigrants
that weren't that excited about um German sausages or German
luggage beer, because these were East European Jews who are
going to bring their own customs, their own religion, um,
their own food waves to the neighborhood. They also came
(20:41):
in much larger numbers and settled in rapid um rapid
time period in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, so
that this neighborhood is not only a heavily immigrant neighborhood,
but it's the most densely populated neighborhood um in the country,
and some people at the time even argued the world.
So you have an extremely crowded neighborhood, and as more
(21:04):
people are moving in and as time goes by, the
tenement itself becomes much more dilapidated. And so what was
once built as a home to house a family of four,
you know, a tenement apartment maybe have four people, maybe
five people at the most, is now having at least
five or six people in a three square foot space,
(21:25):
but as many as ten or eleven or twelve and
nine hundred, so extremely um crowded conditions. If you walk
down Orchard Street, it would be very crowded. You'd be
contending with other people going every which way on the streets.
There were push kurt peddlers who, um, we're selling their
(21:45):
wears on parts with wheels. Um, they could be selling pickles,
they could be selling fruits, they could be selling old shoes,
they could be selling spectacles. Basically everything you needed could
be had on these push cards, which is very you know,
convenient for the house lives an Orchard Street. That it
was very inconvenient if you were on your way to
work or on your way to school and you were late,
(22:07):
just because the streets were distilled with people. So the
like when you see a movie set where they've called
central casting to like throw a bunch of people into
a quote period piece, it sounds almost that's what I mean.
I feel like that's like the consummate crowd in a way,
like that's the And they did that, you know, they
(22:29):
come what was the name of the show, I can't
remember there was. They actually set up a film set
here and it was incredible because they made Orchard Street
look as it would have I think, you know, in
the or undreds, and they had the people in costumes.
So it was this really kind of interesting thing where we,
you know, who tried to recreate the time in our
(22:49):
apartment or in our ten of building in our museum.
We're able to see what the stream might have looked
like with all the actors. But even then I still
think there would have been more people on the streets
than they were able to I should also add that
in nineteen hundred, when you would have all these peathers
on the streets were so densely populated. Um, the signs
would now would no longer be in German, but they
(23:11):
would be in Yiddish and English. And the language you'd
hear on the streets would be Yiddish and maybe a
little Italian, and you'd hear English, although the English would
often be heavily accented. So then post nineteen hundred it's shifted,
(23:36):
I presume some more for a few decades. And then
can you tell us about kind of the lead ups
to its suddenly ending as an apartment building? Sure? Absolutely so,
Um in the nineteen even as early as the nineteen hundreds,
especially when the subway was built in nineteeno four and
some of the bridges were opening, the Lillias for Bridge
(23:58):
in nineteen o three and then Manhattan Bridge, and I
to know eight um lower East Siders were anxious to
get out of the Lowry Side because of the conditions
that I described, because of the crowded conditions, So people
were leaving, but they were always being replaced by new
waves of immigrants. And by the nineteen teens you start
to have UM more Italians moving into UM what we
(24:19):
call the Lower Side, into Orchard streets. So nineteen nineteen
twenty our building becomes more Italian. But in nineteen twenty
four you have a major change because a law is
passed UM, a federal law that for the first time
is using UM national quotas UM and makes very difficult
(24:41):
to get into the country. Immigrants can no longer get
into the country. It's very hard to get into the
country if you're coming from southern Europe, or you're coming
from Eastern Europe, if you're coming from Asia, you can't
come in at all. So we kind of in nine
this country closes its gates UM and it becomes difficult
to get here. And that has huge consequences UM and
(25:01):
huge you know, ramifications for the country and obviously for
those who would have wanted to come. But what it
means for the Lower East Side is that for the
first time you have a decrease in population. Between nineteen
twenty and nineteen thirty UM, I think the population decreases
UM by UM. I think in nineteen twenty you have
(25:25):
three hundred and sixty thousand people living here, and by
the end of the decade you have UM a hundred
and sixty thousand, so a huge decrease in population. And
then you by nineteen thirty five, by ninety four, nineteen
thirty five, our landlord, we know, only has seven tenants
(25:46):
out of the twenty apartments that he could be letting out,
and so UM in nineteen UM N nine and then
in nineteen thirty four laws are passed that require UM
staircases to be UM fireproof, and the staircases on the
hallways at ninety seven Orchard are made of wood, and
they still are made of wood, because the landlord at
(26:08):
that time decided it's not worth investing in the building
in this way to bring it up to code. It's
easier to evict the residents who are still here and
just used the space as as a store. The first
than the second floor of store spaces UM and so
in he evicted the residence. And so then at that
(26:30):
point was the exception of one woman, Fanny Um Rosenthal
Fanny Rogosovski, who americanized as her name to Rosenthal She's
left in the building for a few more years of
the caretaker, but for all intents and purposes in um
the building is emptied of its residence. And so what's
really interesting to me is that it stayed that way
(26:51):
for for fifty years, still being rented out as a storefront.
But no one was touching any of those other floors. Wow.
I mean it is surprising in a way, right, but
in to put your to put ourselves in the mind
frames of people who would be living here in the
nineteen thirties, who would want to live in a tournament forties?
(27:15):
Why would you want to live in a tournament. You
can get better housing now in Brooklyn or in the
Bronx or in Queens, So why stay on the Lower
east Side unless you really really have to. So there
isn't as much to demand for housing, hence there's less
rent and so that's why the landlords aren't investing in
the spaces. And they made a time capsule accidentally exactly,
(27:37):
maybe it was all on purpose, if we could go
back in time, maybe the landlord was thinking, you know,
if I feel this up, it'll be ripe for a
museum in fifty years. Exactly. I've picturing the the sort
of Mr Burns hand class being ahead bed in fifty years. So,
(28:02):
now that we've gotten to the point in the story
where the tenement closed and left kind of a time
capsule for people to come back to you later, we're
gonna cliffhang you just a little bit. In the next episode.
We'll talk about some of the specific residents who lived
in the tenement while it was still a residence. And
we'll also talk about some of the programs and ongoing
work that the museum is doing today. And I think
(28:22):
Holly has some listener mail for us as well. I do. Uh.
This is from our listener Andrew, and he says, hello,
may Dam. The entire family loves the podcast. He has
two kids that that are ages seven and ten. Uh,
and then two adult kids which him and his wife,
I presume, he says. I recall many many years ago
reading about how miss Brumbach, who was that was the
(28:46):
original name of Katie Sandwina before she took her stage name,
how Miss Brumbach had defeated Sandow. If you recall from
that episode, she challenged Eugene Sandow to a lifting contest
and it was really quite uh preposterous on the surface,
but in fact she beat him and uh Andrew goes On.
(29:07):
The writer of the article speculated that Miss Brumbach and
her father knew exactly what they were doing when they
slowly increased the weight and did multiple lifts in rapid succession.
Ms Brumbach was in tip top physical shape. She was
not only strong, she also had amazing stamina. Sandow became
fatigued and he was not able to lift the three
pound weight. Sorry, I don't recall the source. It was
(29:29):
many years back when we had when we had deep
discussions of such things in the dorm hallway or did
I dream it? Uh, that's an interesting thing that I
hadn't thought about, sort of the strategy of that lifting
contest and how she was for any listeners that either
missed it or just need a quick refresh. They were
lifting in slowly incrementally increasing weights. So if she had
(29:52):
been working on her stamina the entire time, she probably
wasn't getting worn out from all of these lifts the
successive lifts, where as if stand Now had been working
strictly on strength and less on muscle stamina, he may
have worn himself out a little earlier in the competition.
Pretty fascinating stuff. Uh. If you would like to write
to us and share your knowledge, whether it's imagined in
(30:14):
a dorm hallway or the real deal. Uh, that could
be a real deal, but he's not positive that Andy,
you can write to us at History Podcast at house
to works dot com. You can also connect with us
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at mist in History, at misston History dot tumbler dot com,
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(30:35):
you can visit us at spreadshirt at mist in History
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If you want to follow up and do some of
your own research about the Tenement Museum, you can find
them at www dot tenement dot org and on Twitter
at Tenement Museum. If you want to do a little
bit of research on uh, the topic that we talked
about today, you can go to our parents site how
(30:55):
stuff Works. Type in the word immigration in the search
bar and you will get how Immigration Work as one
of the articles. It will give you some additional information
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You should also visit us at our home on the
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will find show notes, uh, an archive of all of
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(31:18):
you do visit us at MS in history dot com
and our parent company, how stuff Works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics because it
how stuff works dot Com. M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today
we're gonna do something a little bit new, at least
new since Tracy and I have been on the podcast.
(00:21):
Past hosts have featured interviews with people with interesting historical
stories to tell, but this is our first go round
on this one. So we mentioned not long ago that
we wanted to cover a few museums and talk about
their history, and today we're sharing the first of a
two parter. It's an interview with Dr Annie Polland of
the Lower east Side Tenement Museum. And this particular subject
(00:42):
came up not long after we had mentioned during a
recording that we wanted to start telling stories about museums
at some point, and so we got really excited about
this amazingly layered history to the Tenement Museum and the
building there, as well as it's incredible mission to preserve
and present the stories of immigrants that in many ways
sort of tell the story of the US as an
(01:04):
immigrant nation. So we're going to hop right into that interview.
So today we have with us Dr Annie Pollen, who
is the senior vice president for Programs and Education at
the Lower east Side Tenement Museum. Did I get all
that correct? Yeah? You get perfect? Uh. And this is
(01:24):
such an incredibly cool museum space with such a really
uh fabulous sort of history of its own, and there
are so many wonderful stories connected to it that we're
just gonna jump right in and kind of get the
full scoop on this really wonderful historical landmark. So first off, Annie,
will you tell us a little bit about yourself and
(01:45):
how you ended up in your position at the Tenement Museum. Sure? Um,
I think what brought me here with what brought me
to New York because I came to New York initially
to study history and that I got my pH d
in history at Columbia University. And while I was there
working on my coursework and my dissertation, I got a
(02:07):
job with a company called Big Onion Walking Tours, which
is a wonderful company that organizes historical walking tours of
many New York neighborhoods. So I started working for that company,
and I gave the first assignment that I had was
to work on the Lower east Side tour, and it
was actually run in conjunction with the Lower east Side
Tournament Museum. So I came and at this point it
(02:30):
was like the late nineties, and I came down to
give a walking tour UM. And I'm actually looking right
now at the window at the corner of where I started,
which was right across the street from the Tonament Museum.
And it was such a wonderful experience to walk through
the city UM, to look at the buildings and be
able to tell their history. And I think that combination
of history, the built environment, and the enthusiasm of the
(02:50):
people on the tour made me realize how important public
history was. So I finished my dissertation and I enjoyed
that research, but knew that what I really wanted to
do is, rather than work in an academic setting, work
in a place where history could come to life, and
in a place where I could kind of share that
history with many more people than I would if I
(03:11):
had stayed in an academic check. The Laur east Side
Tournament Museum, of course, is a perfect place to do
that because the history is so rich, it's so layered,
it works off the built environment, and UM it attracts
so many people from all around the country, in the world,
so it's really the perfect place for me in many ways.
So history is like in your heart, that's your whole background. Yeah, yes, exactly,
(03:34):
love it. Uh. And the museum itself is really the
brainchild of one woman, although many hands have of course
gone into making it sort of the incredible resource it
is today. But could you tell us a little bit
about Ruth Abram and how she came to develop this concept? Well? Sure,
I mean what I'm what I'll probably you is probably
what other people you know would be able to tell
(03:56):
you too. I wasn't here when the museum got started
in ninety eight eight, so what I'm telling you in
some ways is the you know, the founding story that
I've been told. Um. But she really was, really is
a remarkable woman. And she actually in a colleague, Anita Jacobson,
where the two women that we consider the founders of
the museum. Um, they were working together and they were
(04:18):
looking for a tenement to tell the story of immigration,
which in and of itself was an absolutely radical thing
to do, right to say that an old building that
you know, people were abandoning, that should be the site
to study history. You know, when most people are studying
history in huge museums, or they're studying history in a
president's former home or an industrialist former former home. To
(04:40):
say that an old tenement is a site of history,
it was a radical thing. So they had this radical
idea and they were looking for a tenement and and
I think the story goes that they had almost given
up hope because the tenements they found were already rehabbed
or they were um. They had changed so much over time.
And they were looking at that point for storefront to
(05:01):
start telling the story. And they went to this building
to see about renting a storefront, and this was ninety
seven Orchard Streets, And when they asked to use the restroom,
they saw that the restroom was in the hall um
and it was assigned to them that the building hadn't
been updated since the nineteen o one housing law. So
they realized that they had this real time capsule at
place where they could tell many layers and many um
(05:25):
elements of the immigrant story. So that's the kind of
founding story that's been passed down and that we tell
on our tours. But Ruth herself, I think we've trained
in UM was interested in history, and um, what I
can say is her dynamism and her creativity still kind
of I mean, it just is amazing to me to
(05:46):
think of how people could have had the idea to
do this in the nineteen eighties. I just love that
it's a piece of history. It's kind of right in
line with the things we always talk about, which is
sort of the history that you don't hear, you know,
as you said, we sort of tend to think of
studying history and sort of amazing and hallowed halls, and
(06:07):
we history is happening everywhere all the time, to people
of all levels of society. So I sort of love
that idea that it's it's the real history of real people,
and it's not something glamorized. It's not someone that is
famous that you've heard of, but that doesn't make their
stories any less important. Absolutely, I think that's at the
heart of the whole museum and it's mission. Um. One
(06:30):
of the things we do sometimes as ask visitors who come,
you know, what are other historic houses you've been to,
or give me some examples in historic homes, and they'll
inevitably say Monticello, or they'll say the Manson's at Newport
or they'll say Mark Twain's house or Edith Wharton's home,
or basically giving us the names of very famous wealthy
(06:51):
or um political people, UM. And so that this continues
to be a surprise to people in a way that
exactly what you're just saying, that ordinary people shape history
and should be the focus of our attention. That still
is a somewhat of a radical idea in the public story,
even though historians and social historians have been really talking
about this, you know, since the nineteen sixt season, even
(07:14):
before UM, but it's taken. It's still because so much
of what we encounter, let's say, on the History Channel
or things like this, is in some ways a history
that still focuses on military battles or political personages, and
I mean just kind of things that seem out of touch.
But what we specialize in here are the ordinary stories
(07:36):
of people who lived here. And actually when you look
at those ordinary stories, they really become extraordinary. So I
think what we're able to do, UM best is be
in a site where people lived and be able to
show that people who would have never thought that anyone
would be thinking about them really did extraordinary things That
kind of brings me to my mask next question, because
(07:57):
since you are actually housed in what was a tenement,
you have kind of an interesting layout and then it's
an apartment building, UM, and you're restoring parts of it
but not all of it. Could you kind of explain
to us how that's laid out and what sort of
the mission is in terms of just the structure, and
how your restoration efforts are kind of spearheaded and project managed. Absolutely.
(08:22):
So the building is five stories with a basement level
as well. So the basement level was initially UH space
for stores, UM, and we've restored that basement level to
show a saloon that was there in the eighteen seventies UM,
actually as early as eighteen sixty four UM. And then
(08:44):
above that you have essentially four sorry, five floors each
with four apartments UM. Then the building was first, so
the running water and the bathrooms were outside in the
rear yard, and we've also recreated that rear yard. UM.
In nineteen o one, the building changed because of a
(09:05):
new law which was incredibly important, and at that point
the landlord had to add two toilets per floor, so
the layouts changed from Florida floor. But they also change
over time but essentially what you have on the second, third, fourth,
and fifth floor are four apartments with two toilets UM
(09:25):
and one hallway. On the first floor you have a
longer hallway. UM. When it was originally built, there were
four apartments. Over time after that nineteen one housing law
and the landlord made changes. The first two of those
apartments were converted into storefronts. So it's tricky because the
building changed over time. But essentially you have a UM
(09:45):
five story building with a basement level. It's about um
ft wide and sixty six feet deep UM and the
whole width of the lots right is built with this building,
so there's very little yard space, and of that of
course influences UM the amount of light that the building received. Well,
(10:06):
in my understanding, I don't have a huge massive grasp
on the nineteen one tenement housing law, but prior to
that they wouldn't have had indoor lighting either correct, absolutely
right right right, so none none that the landlord would
have provided. So when the building was first built there
were very few laws UM governing any kind of requirements
(10:29):
for lighting or for running water and so on, And therefore,
when the building was built in eighteen sixty three, um.
There was no running water, the bathrooms were outside, the
only source of water was outside, and there was no
lighting in the central areas. Individual tenants would bring in
their own form of lighting, UM, but there was nothing
(10:49):
provided by the landlord. And that was fairly typical. So
I can imagine some of those hallway trips to the
bathroom at night were really really dark. Oh yeah, I
mean it's it's almost tired to a mad And one
of the things our educators do so well though, is
make the visitors feel like they're back in time through
their storytelling power and through the details they're able to
do through description. But one of the things we are
(11:11):
able to do when people are assembled in our front
hallway is we have one of the visitors switch off
the light switch. So there goes the electric lighting and
it becomes very dark, even at like ten in the
morning or eleven in the morning when the sun is
shining outside. You see how dark that hallway would be,
and then you can start to appreciate and start to
imagine what that would have been like at midnight or
(11:32):
ten PM, I mean, just how dark the hallway was.
Then when you layer that with the kind of UM,
what people would be doing as they went through the hall.
For example, you'd be having to go outside to get
a bucket of water. So going through a dark hallway,
going up dark and staircases, carrying a bucket of water,
hoping you're not going to run into someone, hoping you're
(11:54):
not going to spill the water. I mean, the kind
of actions in that darkened space are really amazing. When
you're restoring each of the floor. Am I correct that
you're not restoring everything, You're purposely keeping some things as is? Yes, yes, so, um,
(12:19):
most historic houses preserve or restore. Actually, the most historic
houses restore. They're building to look as it would have
in one particular period, one particular you know, period of
extreme historical significance. Let's say the Tournament Museum is different
because the founders decided and the people who work with
(12:41):
them in the very beginning realize that rather than restoring
it just to one moment, they should be able to
take different apartments and take them to different moments. And
so when we restore apartments, we're going to restore them differently, um,
in part due to what time period we're in. So
in a part men for examples that we're restoring to
(13:02):
be the eighteen sixties is not going to have running
water in it, but an apartment that we're going to
restore to the nineteen fifteen would have running water on
it um. So that doing that requires a lot of
research in the actual building, looking at when wall partitions shifted, um,
looking at wallpaper layers, looking at paint layers, and so
we bring in people who specialize in all of these
areas to do analysis of the building um of the
(13:25):
building elements, and that helps inform the decisions we make
with how we're going to restore a particular apartment to
a particular time period. Also included in the kind of
areas and historical record of significance would be what we
term our ruined apartments, And so we actually preserve rooms
to look as they did when Luc and Anita discovered
(13:48):
the building in the nineteen eighties, and the upper floors
hadn't been used at all um so no one had
updated them since the mid nineteen thirties. So we preserve
apartments that look as they did in the ninth in
eighties after no one had lived there for fifty years,
and we call those ruins because that moment of discovering
we feel is important for our visitors to understand, and
(14:08):
that's our kind of home, that's our base. We always
start with an apartment that looks like that before we
recreate them. So there's a way in which UM visitors
who come to our museum not only travel through time
simply by crossing a hallway and walking from one apartment
to another, but they also see a kind of before
and after process in a way that's so cool UM.
(14:29):
And that's ongoing, and that's ongoing. You guys are still
in the process of renovating the whole building, correct, Yeah, well,
we still were always doing research into the building. And
then the other thing that we're really working on is
is preservation and making sure that UM the building is
stable and making sure that we're able to repair things
(14:49):
that need to be repaired. But that requires analysis, and
that requires work, and that requires a work plan, and
it also requires UM money. So everything we do is
a kind of combination of study, a fundraising of UM,
a studying schedule to kind of see when work can
be done, which I imagine as a huge balancing act UM.
(15:10):
Going back, kind of circling back to what we've talked
about at the top of the interview about kind of
the importance of looking at history as it was happening
to regular people. Um, I'm curious just for your take
on what you think is really kind of the the
big important reason that we should preserve immigration history specifically,
and that's I mean, it's such a sort of American
(15:33):
thing to talk about, even though I think people don't
always fully have a big picture sense of what all
kind of took place in the immigration realm. But also
I think it's part of a global human story. It's
pretty important to think about how people have moved from
place to place and made their way. But I'm curious
what your take is on all that. Yeah, I mean
it's a fascinating story. I think that there's an immigration
(15:54):
history is so important because for many people it's very
accessible in this country. So we're not a country where
most you know, in this country, most people have not
been here for twenty generations. We're a country in which
a lot of people can trace their immigration um story.
So someone might come to our museum whose great grandparents immigrated,
(16:15):
are great great grandparents immigrated or grandparent or parents, and
so you know, this is a country. No matter where
you live in this country, we have an intimate connection
to immigration. UM. We have photos of immigrants who came
over who are in our family. So I think that
the immigration story is really accessible to us because we
have immigrant stories in our own families. On another level,
(16:37):
even if you don't have or you don't know of
someone in your family who immigrated, the immigration story is
a saga and a journey, a personal narrative and story
that I think has so much residence. The idea simply
of someone picking up, um, leaving a place where they've
been for most of their life and journeying to a
new place to start all over again, is is really
(17:00):
an exciting narrative that you know, some people play this
out if they've simply moved from one state to another,
and you have a sense of what movement does and
how movement reshapes your life and reshapes the way you think, um,
you know, again moving from state to state or city
to city, so that people can take that experience too
and use it to relate to immigration. So I think
(17:21):
immigration is important because a lot of this experience it
in some way or another. UM. And I also think
that one of the things we find at our museum
is that the immigrant story becomes not just a story
of particular groups of people who come at particular moments
in time, although it is that, and we get into
the details of that, but the immigrant story and the
(17:44):
immigration story is also a lens on what does it
mean to be American. All the people who went to
ninety seven Orchard, whether they were Irish, whether they were Italian,
whether they were German, whether they were East European Jewish,
all of those people and all of those groups once
they got here, had to grapple with what it meant
to be a American. What does it mean to raise
American children? What does it mean to send your kids
to new school? What does it mean um to have
(18:06):
American politics shape your life or the American economy shape
your life. They all had to grapple with that. So
that moment, I think where we can kind of look
at America from the perspective of immigrants gives us a
real insight on what America was at at a particular moment.
So we might be a museum of immigration, but I
think we're also very much a museum of what it
(18:28):
meant to be American. Uh And you mentioned in that
answer the sort of many different backgrounds that people came
from that lived there in the building at various points
in time. Can you give us a picture of what
the neighborhood was really like when this was actually a functioning,
thriving residence, and how it kind of evolved through the
decades between when it opened in the eighteen six season
(18:51):
then when it's shut down kind of abruptly in the
nineteen thirties. M So, just as the building itself changed
over time to meet a series of needs and laws
and and improvements, the neighborhood itself is changing, and so
the building's changes are of course a response to changes
in the neighborhood. More broadly, when the building was first
built in eighteen sixty three, this neighborhood was not known
(19:12):
as the Lower east Side. It was known as Clin
Deutsch Launder, a little Germany, And it was called that
because the neighborhood in the city was a very German
neighborhood and city. So what we now call the Lower
east Side UM, what was then called Clent Deutsche Land
was actually the fifth largest German speaking city UM in
(19:34):
the world right and and New York was the third
largest German speaking city in the world after Berlin and Vienna.
So when ninety seven Orchard was built in eighteen sixty three,
it was in the midst of this kind of thriving,
bustling German neighborhood where you would hear German on the streets,
where you would see German signs, where you could buy
German sausage, and you could buy German lugger beer. At
(19:56):
ninety seven Orchard, at Tonighter's saloon, um could get a
German newspaper. You'd hear German music emanating from the um,
from the saloons, and from the beer gardens that were
in the neighborhood. So it was very much a German neighborhood,
and of course the people who lived at Orchard reflected
that German population. As the decades went on, Um Germans
(20:20):
moved uptown Um, they moved to neighborhood called Yorkville, I think,
moved to Brooklyn, they moved to New Jersey, and new
immigrants survived in the neighborhood UM. And these were immigrants
that weren't that excited about um German sausages or German
luggage beer, because these were East European Jews who are
going to bring their own customs, their own religion, um,
their own food waves to the neighborhood. They also came
(20:41):
in much larger numbers and settled in rapid um rapid
time period in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, so
that this neighborhood is not only a heavily immigrant neighborhood,
but it's the most densely populated neighborhood um in the country,
and some people at the time even argued the world.
So you have an extremely crowded neighborhood, and as more
(21:04):
people are moving in and as time goes by, the
tenement itself becomes much more dilapidated. And so what was
once built as a home to house a family of four,
you know, a tenement apartment maybe have four people, maybe
five people at the most, is now having at least
five or six people in a three square foot space,
(21:25):
but as many as ten or eleven or twelve and
nine hundred, so extremely um crowded conditions. If you walk
down Orchard Street, it would be very crowded. You'd be
contending with other people going every which way on the streets.
There were push kurt peddlers who, um, we're selling their
(21:45):
wears on parts with wheels. Um, they could be selling pickles,
they could be selling fruits, they could be selling old shoes,
they could be selling spectacles. Basically everything you needed could
be had on these push cards, which is very you know,
convenient for the house lives an Orchard Street. That it
was very inconvenient if you were on your way to
work or on your way to school and you were late,
(22:07):
just because the streets were distilled with people. So the
like when you see a movie set where they've called
central casting to like throw a bunch of people into
a quote period piece, it sounds almost that's what I mean.
I feel like that's like the consummate crowd in a way,
like that's the And they did that, you know, they
(22:29):
come what was the name of the show, I can't
remember there was. They actually set up a film set
here and it was incredible because they made Orchard Street
look as it would have I think, you know, in
the or undreds, and they had the people in costumes.
So it was this really kind of interesting thing where we,
you know, who tried to recreate the time in our
(22:49):
apartment or in our ten of building in our museum.
We're able to see what the stream might have looked
like with all the actors. But even then I still
think there would have been more people on the streets
than they were able to I should also add that
in nineteen hundred, when you would have all these peathers
on the streets were so densely populated. Um, the signs
would now would no longer be in German, but they
(23:11):
would be in Yiddish and English. And the language you'd
hear on the streets would be Yiddish and maybe a
little Italian, and you'd hear English, although the English would
often be heavily accented. So then post nineteen hundred it's shifted,
(23:36):
I presume some more for a few decades. And then
can you tell us about kind of the lead ups
to its suddenly ending as an apartment building? Sure? Absolutely so,
Um in the nineteen even as early as the nineteen hundreds,
especially when the subway was built in nineteeno four and
some of the bridges were opening, the Lillias for Bridge
(23:58):
in nineteen o three and then Manhattan Bridge, and I
to know eight um lower East Siders were anxious to
get out of the Lowry Side because of the conditions
that I described, because of the crowded conditions, So people
were leaving, but they were always being replaced by new
waves of immigrants. And by the nineteen teens you start
to have UM more Italians moving into UM what we
(24:19):
call the Lower Side, into Orchard streets. So nineteen nineteen
twenty our building becomes more Italian. But in nineteen twenty
four you have a major change because a law is
passed UM, a federal law that for the first time
is using UM national quotas UM and makes very difficult
(24:41):
to get into the country. Immigrants can no longer get
into the country. It's very hard to get into the
country if you're coming from southern Europe, or you're coming
from Eastern Europe, if you're coming from Asia, you can't
come in at all. So we kind of in nine
this country closes its gates UM and it becomes difficult
to get here. And that has huge consequences UM and
(25:01):
huge you know, ramifications for the country and obviously for
those who would have wanted to come. But what it
means for the Lower East Side is that for the
first time you have a decrease in population. Between nineteen
twenty and nineteen thirty UM, I think the population decreases
UM by UM. I think in nineteen twenty you have
(25:25):
three hundred and sixty thousand people living here, and by
the end of the decade you have UM a hundred
and sixty thousand, so a huge decrease in population. And
then you by nineteen thirty five, by ninety four, nineteen
thirty five, our landlord, we know, only has seven tenants
(25:46):
out of the twenty apartments that he could be letting out,
and so UM in nineteen UM N nine and then
in nineteen thirty four laws are passed that require UM
staircases to be UM fireproof, and the staircases on the
hallways at ninety seven Orchard are made of wood, and
they still are made of wood, because the landlord at
(26:08):
that time decided it's not worth investing in the building
in this way to bring it up to code. It's
easier to evict the residents who are still here and
just used the space as as a store. The first
than the second floor of store spaces UM and so
in he evicted the residence. And so then at that
(26:30):
point was the exception of one woman, Fanny Um Rosenthal
Fanny Rogosovski, who americanized as her name to Rosenthal She's
left in the building for a few more years of
the caretaker, but for all intents and purposes in um
the building is emptied of its residence. And so what's
really interesting to me is that it stayed that way
(26:51):
for for fifty years, still being rented out as a storefront.
But no one was touching any of those other floors. Wow.
I mean it is surprising in a way, right, but
in to put your to put ourselves in the mind
frames of people who would be living here in the
nineteen thirties, who would want to live in a tournament forties?
(27:15):
Why would you want to live in a tournament. You
can get better housing now in Brooklyn or in the
Bronx or in Queens, So why stay on the Lower
east Side unless you really really have to. So there
isn't as much to demand for housing, hence there's less
rent and so that's why the landlords aren't investing in
the spaces. And they made a time capsule accidentally exactly,
(27:37):
maybe it was all on purpose, if we could go
back in time, maybe the landlord was thinking, you know,
if I feel this up, it'll be ripe for a
museum in fifty years. Exactly. I've picturing the the sort
of Mr Burns hand class being ahead bed in fifty years. So,
(28:02):
now that we've gotten to the point in the story
where the tenement closed and left kind of a time
capsule for people to come back to you later, we're
gonna cliffhang you just a little bit. In the next episode.
We'll talk about some of the specific residents who lived
in the tenement while it was still a residence. And
we'll also talk about some of the programs and ongoing
work that the museum is doing today. And I think
(28:22):
Holly has some listener mail for us as well. I do. Uh.
This is from our listener Andrew, and he says, hello,
may Dam. The entire family loves the podcast. He has
two kids that that are ages seven and ten. Uh,
and then two adult kids which him and his wife,
I presume, he says. I recall many many years ago
reading about how miss Brumbach, who was that was the
(28:46):
original name of Katie Sandwina before she took her stage name,
how Miss Brumbach had defeated Sandow. If you recall from
that episode, she challenged Eugene Sandow to a lifting contest
and it was really quite uh preposterous on the surface,
but in fact she beat him and uh Andrew goes On.
(29:07):
The writer of the article speculated that Miss Brumbach and
her father knew exactly what they were doing when they
slowly increased the weight and did multiple lifts in rapid succession.
Ms Brumbach was in tip top physical shape. She was
not only strong, she also had amazing stamina. Sandow became
fatigued and he was not able to lift the three
pound weight. Sorry, I don't recall the source. It was
(29:29):
many years back when we had when we had deep
discussions of such things in the dorm hallway or did
I dream it? Uh, that's an interesting thing that I
hadn't thought about, sort of the strategy of that lifting
contest and how she was for any listeners that either
missed it or just need a quick refresh. They were
lifting in slowly incrementally increasing weights. So if she had
(29:52):
been working on her stamina the entire time, she probably
wasn't getting worn out from all of these lifts the
successive lifts, where as if stand Now had been working
strictly on strength and less on muscle stamina, he may
have worn himself out a little earlier in the competition.
Pretty fascinating stuff. Uh. If you would like to write
to us and share your knowledge, whether it's imagined in
(30:14):
a dorm hallway or the real deal. Uh, that could
be a real deal, but he's not positive that Andy,
you can write to us at History Podcast at house
to works dot com. You can also connect with us
on Facebook dot com slash mist in History, on Twitter
at mist in History, at misston History dot tumbler dot com,
on pinterest dot com slash mist in History, and UH
(30:35):
you can visit us at spreadshirt at mist in History
dot spreadshirt dot com. If you'd like to purchase ditties.
If you want to follow up and do some of
your own research about the Tenement Museum, you can find
them at www dot tenement dot org and on Twitter
at Tenement Museum. If you want to do a little
bit of research on uh, the topic that we talked
about today, you can go to our parents site how
(30:55):
stuff Works. Type in the word immigration in the search
bar and you will get how Immigration Work as one
of the articles. It will give you some additional information
on immigration, not just in the US, but throughout the world.
You should also visit us at our home on the
web which is missed in history dot com, where you
will find show notes, uh, an archive of all of
our episodes, and the occasional blog post. And we hope
(31:18):
you do visit us at MS in history dot com
and our parent company, how stuff Works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics because it
how stuff works dot Com. M
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