Lower East Side Tenement Museum

At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, we tell stories of the residents of 97 Orchard Street.  Built on Manhattan's Lower East Side, this tenement apartment building was home to nearly 7,000 working-class immigrants from 1863-1935.

It represents one of the city's oldest multi-family dwellings, a place of first residence for thousands of ordinary people making new lives in America.  A historian and social activist, museum founder Ruth Abram, wanted to build an institution that honored our nation's immigrants.

New York's humble tenements were the perfect place for her museum, but the search for a suitable one proved frustrating.  By 1988, Abram and cofounder Anita Jacobson were nearly ready to give up.

The building's initial appeal was an available storefront.  Jacobsen and Abram considered renting the space as an office that would be a starting point to run tours of the Lower East Side.  While inspecting the storefront, Jacobsen went to the hallway to survey the bathrooms.  Shuttered for more than 50 years, 97 Orchard's apartments were in ruin.  It would take time to transform the tenement into a museum.

Undaunted, researchers scavenged through 97 Orchard and combed through archives, compiling evidence about tenants and tenement life.  After several years of research, the museum began the difficult task of restoring apartments that had been left vacant for so long.

A Time Capsule
In 1992, the museum opened its first restored apartment, the 1878 home of the German-Jewish Gumpertz family.  Two years later, 97 Orchard Street was designated a National Trust Historic Site.

Over the last 21 years, the Tenement Museum has blossomed from an idea into a thriving institution.  We've carefully restored six apartments, including the homes of Eastern European, Italian, Turkish and Irish immigrants.  We will continue to grow.

In 2007, the museum purchased 103 Orchard Street, which will serve as a flagship building for our visitors center, exhibitions and classrooms.  In recognizing the importance of this seemingly ordinary building, the Tenement Museum has reimagined the role that museums can play in our lives.

Jacobson saw sheet-metal ceilings, turn-of-the-century toilets and an aging wood banister.  “It was as though people had just picked up and left,” she recalled.  "It was a little time capsule . . . I called Ruth and said, ‘We have got to have this building.’ It was perfect."

Jacobsen had stepped inside one of the oldest tenements in the neighborhood, a time capsule that could transport visitors to the days when immigrants crowded the Lower East Side.  The search was over when they stumbled upon the tenement at 97 Orchard Street.