Tenement Museum on Orchard Street

A tenement where thousands of immigrants lived, and whose apartments then stayed sealed for more than half a century

Local name: Tenement Museum, 97 Orchard Street

Collection: The Lower East Side and Chinatown · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The story

Before you is the tenement at 97 Orchard Street. Buildings like this were called tenements, and in 1900 Manhattan had forty-three thousand of them. This one was built in 1863 and 1864 by Lucas Glockner, a German immigrant, who lived here with his family. Each floor has four apartments. An apartment is three tiny rooms, about 325 square feet in all. Of the building’s sixty rooms, forty had no window to the outside. For the first decades there were no toilets in the building at all, only privies in the yard. Around 1905, under a new housing law, two toilets were put in on each floor. Each was shared by twenty people on average. There was never a bathtub or a shower here: people washed at the public baths. Many families also took in lodgers, and on Orchard Street clothing was often sewn right in the apartments. Over some seventy years, between seven and ten thousand people from more than twenty countries lived here: first Germans, then Jews from Eastern Europe, and in the last years Italians. In 1935 the landlord evicted the tenants and boarded up the upper floors. Shops kept working downstairs, while the apartments above stayed sealed for more than half a century, with their wallpaper, pipes and lamps from that time. In 1988 the building was found by Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson, who were looking for a home for a museum. Today it is the Tenement Museum: guides lead tours through the apartments and tell the stories of the families who lived here.

Visiting

97 Orchard Street, Lower East Side; the museum’s ticket desk and shop are at 103 Orchard Street. The apartments can be seen only on a guided tour with a ticket, so book ahead; there are also neighborhood walking tours. The facade can be seen from the street at any time. Not every tour is wheelchair accessible.