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Immigration Vacation: The Tenement Museum

Posted July 5, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

The Tenement Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is the sort of a gem that every New Yorker ought to visit. Housed in an original New York tenement, built back in 1863, it sits in what was once the city’s “Little Germany” and later the heart of Jewish New York.

The museum tells the stories of a few of the 7,000 people who lived in the four story walk-up during the seventy years it was housing the immigrant poor. Unlike most “house museums” the tours do not try to take you everywhere in the building. Most are restricted to just a couple of tiny apartments. The showpieces are not the meager possessions of those who once lived here, but their life stories. When you visit the museum you pick a tour which focuses on one family’s stay at the building and you follow it.

I had visited the museum before and been moved by the stories of Italian and Jewish families who had lived here at the beginning of the 20th century, but I was drawn back by a new tour being offered that looked at an Irish family, the Moores, who lived in the building right after the Civil War. Now my own grandfather, Joe Brady, was born to an Irish family on the Lower East Side in 1892. He worked to help support his family at the Fulton Fish Market and was proud to have known as friends Jew and German alike in his old neighborhood. I thought this tour would give my sister, her daughter, and my son some insights into the world old Joe lived in.

And what a world it was. Hard work, low pay, and an ethnic pecking order that placed Irish on the bottom in the 1860s. Our guide, Daryl, gave an excellent vision of a family racked by disease that saw its chance at an escape from poverty too often overtaken by early and needless death.

While the museum has tours suitable for children, the “Irish” tour is not for anyone under 12. Several of us had to hold back tears during the hour-long unfolding of the Moores’ lives. This was no story of simple uplift, but of a family frequently beaten down by uncontrollable circumstance. Daryl brought home to us the tragedy of Bridget Moore, a teenage bride who came to America without family or friend and had to learn to be a mother without the folk knowledge that would have been a resource for her back in Ireland. How do you learn how to feed and care for a crying infant when there are no elders around, and you yourself are malnourished and sick?

When you visit the Tenement Museum, you are struck by how closely the experiences of immigrants today follow those of earlier generations. I like to remind my volunteers at CARECEN that when they help today’s immigrants they are paying tribute to their own immigrant forebears.

If you go to the Tenement Museum, make sure to make a reservation at least a few days in advance, because tickets sell out. The price is steep, about $15 on average, but all four of us in our party agreed it was worth every penny. We went on a Saturday and a lot of the Jewish-owned stores were closed, but it is only three blocks to Chinatown for lunch or dinner. This museum and its environs have so much to teach adult and child alike, so go!

Map of Tenement Museum:

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Read about the disaster that shook the Lower East Side.


For more Immigration Vacation blog posts, click here.


Image courtesy of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum group on Flickr.

More Immigration Vacations:

Lowell National Historic Site

Lackawana Coal Mine and Steamtown

Old Croton Aqueduct

Irish Hunger Memorial

The Tenement Museum

Tags : german immigrants, immigration history, immigration vacation, irish immigrants, jewish immigrants, lower east side

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