[bright music] - Welcome, I'm glad you're here.

- [Narrator] It's a museum that shares the stories of the immigrants, migrants, and refugees who called New York City home.

- You can study so many different kinds of people who came to help build the city and the nation.

- Many people have come to the city to create a new life.

You can really grapple with that history and the way in which it's unfolded.

- [Narrator] Where history is brought to life and made visible inside the tenements in which these people lived.

- I had never seen living history done in a way that opened such emotional doors.

- So food was a big part of the culture here.

- To be in the actual space where people lived, you really do feel this connection to generations.

- It's a humanistic experience that one has when one steps into the building.

- [Narrator] And meaningful connections are made between past and present.

- For so many people, they realize that these families are not so different from their own families.

- The museum is all about connecting all of us so we can see, we do actually have more similarities than differences.

- [Narrator] It's a forward-thinking institution that creates conversation and expands understanding.

- It invites people to think, and it invites people to say what they feel and believe.

- It's constantly changing, and it's just growing and growing, and it's just a very, very exciting place.

- [Narrator] Step back in time at the Tenement Museum, a Treasure of New York.

Funding for this program is provided by the New York State Education Department.

[vibrant music] On the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

- Welcome, half-circle right here.

- [Narrator] An enthusiastic group is about to enter what might seem like just an ordinary building, but on the other side of this brick facade is a most extraordinary museum.

- This building was built in 1863.

This is one of the oldest tenements in America.

- It's this time capsule, really a moment to step back in time and to think about what this group of people in this setting did and how that laid the foundation for so much that's part of New York.

- It is unique in telling what is arguably, you know, New York's most kind of characteristic story, and that is the experience of having to uproot yourself and create a new life, create a new home, forge a new identity, find a new community.

- [Narrator] The Tenement Museum is a distinguished institution that preserves the history of immigration and migration.

Visitors embark on a transformative experience, learning about the grit and perseverance of these working-class residents.

- The Tenement Museum awakens you to your own family's history, it awakens you to your community's history, it awakens you to your country's history, and I think that it creates a sense of comfort that enables us to tell a shared story together.

- And you can see him in his Air Force uniform.

He's called up for service in Vietnam.

He enlists in the Air Force, and so he gets his letter just a few weeks later.

So I'm gonna pass these around.

- Being able to be in the homes where people lived their lives helps us understand our own importance to the places that we live and how our own stories are valuable.

- [Narrator] The story of the Tenement Museum is the story of America, of overcoming hardship and adversity in the pursuit of a better life.

And it's a story that for many began over a century ago here in New York City, the golden door to opportunity and freedom.

- There's always been an allure about New York City because of the money, because of the people, because of the opportunity, and because of the diversity, where you can reinvent yourself several different times in one little city.

- So you have so many German speakers here who are coming to make new lives for their families.

At the same time, you have Irish newcomers.

You also have Black migrants coming from different parts of the United States.

As the decades go by, in the 19th century, Eastern European Jews and Italians start to replace the Germans and the Irish.

For many people, regardless of where they came from, New York was an invitation to come and to be able to make a living for you and your family.

- [Narrator] Setting foot in an unfamiliar city, these newcomers sought out community, connection, and commonality.

For many, that sense of belonging would be found on the Lower East Side.

As a richly textured neighborhood with an ever-evolving cultural epicenter, it was brimming with opportunities.

- This neighborhood had a lot of benefits for newly arriving New Yorkers.

You can come to a place where people speak your language, where you, you know, are more able to find familiar food, and so you sort of see how the neighborhood grows.

- Once a few people come, they often write home, and word gets back and more people follow.

There were a lot of industries here.

The Lower East Side was known for textiles, clothing manufacturers, et cetera.

- If I were to pick one word to describe the dynamic on the Lower East Side, that would be that of a kaleidoscope.

Just the shifting, the movement, the coming one way and going another way.

- People arguing, people laughing on the streets.

Horses everywhere.

- You see that dynamism.

You see the movement on the fire escapes.

You see action on the streets.

You see people selling things and people buying things.

- And hearing languages too, of course, many different languages.

- And kids kind of darting their way through the crowded streets.

- It's busy, it's noisy, it's dirty, it's beautiful.

- [Narrator] This densely populated neighborhood had experienced an ongoing need for housing.

Many would find themselves living in low-rise buildings called tenements.

These structures contained a series of small apartments, typically made up of three rooms.

It wasn't uncommon to find a family of 10 living in them.

- Many of these people who came did not have a lot of money.

So they were looking for inexpensive places in which to live, and tenements served that need.

- Tenement has taken on a variety of kind of meanings and connotations that have adhered to it throughout its history in terms of overcrowding, lack of the kinds of facilities or amenities many of us have come to expect.

- [Narrator] By the turn of the century, however, these structures were the leading form of housing in the city, and this is where residents put down roots.

- This was home.

People put wallpaper on the walls to brighten it up.

If there was a stain on the wallpaper, well, they hung a picture to hide it.

- You can imagine these tenement apartments being spaces of play, spaces of, you know, friendship, of love.

I mean, really from the very beginning of New York being New York, there's really no understanding of this place without people who have come here from other places, who picked up trash, you know, served meals, cooked food, washed clothes, laid bricks, right?

All of these jobs that need doing for this city to exist.

- [Narrator] In the 1980s, friends Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson endeavored to create a museum to honor the legacy of these newcomers.

- The vision was really to promote tolerance and to create programs that would help people understand the differences that we all have as people and to learn to accept them.

- How could we be one nation and at the same time enjoy, appreciate, and certainly not be afraid of the differences we bring to the table?

And I began to think what really would encapsulate that question, and the answer was immigration.

Because we all come from somewhere.

- [Narrator] To fulfill their vision, they needed to find a building which had links to that past and could revive the compelling history of these newly settled residents.

- We began looking for a tenement building because that would be a symbol of where they were.

I wanted to create something that made people feel they had come home, home to visit their ancestors.

I had had no museum experience whatsoever, so I was bound by no rules whatsoever.

[jaunty music] - I was walking on Orchard Street, and I saw a For Rent sign, and it was a tenement.

And I walked into the hallway, and I got goosebumps because I realized we found the building that we could use for our museum.

- And one day I got a call from Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson.

Would I come down and take a look at the building?

And when I went down and I met with them, it literally changed my life.

You could see that so much of the fabric of the building was still there, the wallpapers, the linoleums, the sinks.

You know, all kinds of items from the time it had been a vibrant residential building were still intact.

It just reconceptualized everything that I thought about what was important in the architecture, that these average everyday buildings really are the buildings that tell the story of New York.

- [Narrator] This five-story tenement building located at 97 Orchard Street had been closed as a residence since 1935.

But its former life was clearly evident.

Its rooms and halls revealed a remarkable record of the past.

- It was as though people walked out and just left everything there.

There were love letters that we found.

There was furniture, little American flags, perfume bottles.

It felt as though the building had reached out to us and that, you know, that it wanted to tell its story.

- [Narrator] In its 72-year existence, 97 Orchard Street was home to an estimated 7,000 people.

- Eventually we'll be restoring the apartment.

We'll be putting wallpaper on the walls that would be appropriate for 1880.

- [Narrator] And now, it would serve as a time capsule, with its apartments restored and the stories of the families who lived there forever preserved.

In 1988, the Tenement Museum was founded.

- It's the home of working-class poor people, and that's what never had been preserved before.

- Yeah, it was the first time that it had ever been done, but also the sense of belonging in this building.

- The sense of needing each other, I think that's an important thing, and we still need each other.

We just often don't know it.

- [Narrator] Ruth and Anita took a risk the lives of these former tenants would be of interest to a present-day audience, and it paid off.

- The Tenement Museum in some ways started as the kind of Little Museum That Could and has really grown to, you know, a place that touches and reaches thousands of people.

- [Narrator] On guided apartment tours, museum-goers step back in time and explore the very spaces that new arrivals would call home.

[Mrs. Wong speaking in foreign language] - [Narrator] Through primary sources like oral histories, documents, and artifacts, we learn about the struggles and joys of living in and navigating a new city.

- What are your challenges if you're in Ramonita's shoes at that point?

- Language.

- Language, yep.

She's a native Spanish speaker.

We do not have bilingual support here.

- Our museum is not a museum of galleries, where you walk around and look at texts on walls.

Our museum is one where you step into a recreated apartment of a family and get that story directly from a Tenement Museum educator, who will invite you into the story as well.

- So everybody in the building is Jewish, but they are different kind of Jewish, from Russia, Austria.

- There are these stories that are being told that reflect all the different kinds of people that have lived in the tenement over time.

- So the Baldizzi family is living here, Adolfo and Rosaria Baldizzi.

Italians are coming in, Southern Italians in the late 1880s.

Their numbers just keep increasing each decade until, you know, we've got a really large number in this neighborhood by the 1920s.

We as a museum are really deeply, deeply committed to talking about the deeply complex lives of what many people consider ordinary people and bringing those voices to life and recognizing that those voices are not so ordinary and that all lives are complicated.

All lives have deep meaning.

[lively music] - [Narrator] By being invited into these homes, visitors can truly empathize with those who once lived there and appreciate the commonalities of the human experience.

- To be in the actual space where people lived, to look at the items that they touched, you really do feel this connection to generations that came before you, and you really understand how you're stepping into and taking the history forward a bit.

- They are stories that anyone can connect to, their mothers, their fathers, their sons and daughters, their siblings.

They love, they witness death, they witness birth, and they work to improve the lives of themselves and their families.

- [Narrator] A wide variety of tours introduce us to families of different backgrounds, like Harris and Jennie Levine, immigrants from Poland, who moved in around 1892 and ran a garment shop out of their apartment.

- Harris and Jennie Levine set up a home, and they set up a place to work.

They were observant Jews, and they wanted to stay closed on the Sabbath.

So we can imagine Jennie on a Friday afternoon, standing at the doorway, and she cannot wait until the workers go home.

Because then she can reclaim the space.

She can clean it.

She's been doing all the cooking and the shopping to create the Sabbath meal, and through that, bring a little bit of the old country into the new country.

- [Narrator] Down a flight of stairs is the home of Adolfo and Rosaria Baldizzi, immigrants from Italy who lived here during the Great Depression with two children, Johnny and Josephine.

- Josephine Baldizzi brought with her a lot of wonderful stories, and one of the stories was that her mother was incredibly clean, and they used to call her Shine 'Em Up Sadie.

- [Narrator] Ever-invested in sharing the past, the museum acquired another historic tenement building in 2007, just a few doors down at 103 Orchard Street.

[uplifting music] - We've grown kind of, you know, both physically in that regard and I think interpretively in terms of the breadth of our storytelling.

You know, trying to kind of understand what it was like to live not only in these buildings, but, by extension, in the neighborhood and in the city in different periods throughout its history, whether that's in the 1870s or in the 1970s.

- [Narrator] 103 Orchard Street features a more recent set of newcomers who arrived here after World War II, like the Saez Velez family, who migrated from Puerto Rico in the 1950s.

- There's something about that family that always touched me, and it's a lot about food and the kitchen.

And so much of every single culture is about eating and bringing people together through food.

But there's something about the living room and the kitchen together that just makes sense to me, and it feels like home.

- [Narrator] That feeling of home defines a visit to the Tenement Museum, and for the immigrants, migrants, and refugees who lived here, home wasn't limited to inside their apartment.

- Everyone at whatever age you are, you're finding and forming much of your American life actually outside of the tenements themselves just because of the crowdedness of them.

The streets literally offer a streetscape, a stage, a setting to imagine life on the Lower East Side at different moments in time.

- [Narrator] The museum offers neighborhood walking tours where visitors can rediscover the Lower East Side.

- As you walk around today, you can get a feel for what the character must have been like.

The physical fabric of the Lower East Side on many streets is still there, and it tells us, A, something about the past, but also how these buildings can adapt.

- You're there, you're on that corner that millions of people have walked down over many, many, many, many years and centuries even.

It's a way to really be deeply human about these stories.

It's a way to make these deeper connections.

- [Narrator] The Tenement Museum nurtures these connections as well through educational programming.

- When students come on a tour at the Tenement Museum, they are invited not only to become historians themselves, but to also consider what it might have been like to be someone their age in a different time period.

They can see how generations of young people in the past worked for a better society for others and, you know, how the stories of people like them are important.

- [Narrator] For those students who might not be able to come in person, they can time travel during a virtual field trip.

- To be able to connect, you know, teenagers in rural Oregon to the lives of tenement dwellers and to see the connections that they themselves were forming, that's kind of amazing.

- [Narrator] The museum also created a national project called Your Story, Our Story, which invites people of all ages to share an object or tradition that is valuable to their identity.

- Because it's an online database, kids from all across the country, students from middle school, high school, and college, can upload not only their object and their story, but also it forces them to ask questions to their parents and grandparents, and 10 times out of 10, they discover something that they had no idea about.

- Do you think if your parents were moving to this, thinking about moving to a different country right now, they would still pick the US?

- I asked them this recently and my father said yes.

- Wow.

- Every single time, yes.

- [Narrator] The museum produces a variety of lively events that promote engagement with the distant and recent past.

- It's my honor to introduce Michael W. Twitty.

We host what we call tenement talks, which are a discussion series livestreamed from our recreated tenement apartments with experts and authors, historians, community members for conversations about what it has meant to be American today and the issues that Americans both new and old are facing.

- [Narrator] Like a beloved family heirloom passed down generation to generation, the original building at 97 Orchard Street began to show signs of significant structural wear.

In 2023, the Tenement Museum completed a once-in-a-lifetime, multimillion dollar preservation project.

[saw buzzing] - 97 Orchard was built in 1863 to be a tenement.

No one thought it would ever become a museum.

Over time, the reverberations from the movement of visitors caused changes in the building that had to be addressed.

And what we needed to do was go back into the building, go back into the infrastructure, and support it so that it could last another 100 years.

- You know, it's the challenge, the kind of conundrum for us of how we balance the kind of access to the building's interior that is essential to the interpretation and the storytelling we do, to the kind of experience a visitor has here with preserving the historic resource for perpetuity.

- [Narrator] Li/Saltzman Architects was brought on board to strengthen this National Historic Landmark while also maintaining its historical integrity.

Now, 97 Orchard Street has been secured for the future.

- We don't want to preserve every building to be just a stale structure.

Buildings have lives.

It's not just about the bricks and mortar.

It's about peopling the life of the building, and the Tenement Museum does that in a really compelling and brilliant manner.

- [Narrator] Literally and figuratively, the preservation project afforded space for a yet untold story.

For the first time in the museum's history, the fifth floor is open for a new exhibit on Joseph and Rachel Moore, Black New Yorkers who resided in Lower Manhattan in the 1860s and 1870s.

- We wanted to expand the understanding of the Tenement Museum and of Lower Manhattan as a space that includes Black history.

Even if they didn't live in these particular buildings, the larger history of tenements includes African Americans who moved to New York.

- To tell the story of Joseph Moore is to tell a much more accurate story about New York City, to tell a much more accurate story about race and class.

It's just one more drop in the intellectual bucket to tell a much more holistic and accurate portrait of what this country was.

- [Narrator] Similar to an archeological dig, the ongoing discovery of public records has been fundamental to giving voice to those who had been lost to time.

The story of the Moores emerged from an 1869 city directory.

- I was looking at all these Joseph Moores, and I saw C-O-L'D next to the name of one of the Joseph Moores.

I knew that was short for colored.

That was really the beginning of all of this.

- Visitors ask questions.

What was it that led him to New York, to the tenements?

And, well, what would his life have been like to be a Black waiter in New York in 1869?

What were the kind of contours of his life as he created a family here?

And that kind of set us off on this journey of looking to kind of understand that.

[gentle music] - [Narrator] The Tenement Museum recognizes that history isn't static.

By uncovering and sharing these stories in thoroughly modern ways, a more inclusive American identity has been brought to the fore.

- When Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson envisioned the Tenement Museum, they envisioned a museum that would include all Americans.

This helps fill in gaps within the history of tenements, within the history of the Lower East Side, but also within the history of New York City.

- We have several missions connected to that number though.

One big mission is try to identify everyone who ever lived here.

We've been able to identify about 1,400 so far.

Pretty amazing, isn't it?

Another mission of ours is to try to track down their descendants.

- [Narrator] For over 30 years, the Tenement Museum has curated meaningful experiences for museum-goers to make insightful connections with the past.

Each visit affords a personal and powerful opportunity to reflect on the legacies of those who braved their way into New York City and into our shared heritage.

- How do we understand what it means to be an American citizen if we don't understand the past?

You know, these were immigrants who were striving to make it against, you know, really bad odds.

They were here to become Americans, and we need to understand these stories because they're stories that are still with us today.

- To be in this space is to sort of open your world not just to the past, but to the possibilities of, like, who you can be as a contributing individual, citizen or not, to this country or whatever country you come from.

- I think the more the Tenement Museum can share the stories of ordinary people who faced difficult challenges and, you know, show what they were able to do with what was dealt to them, the more we can inspire people, students especially, to think about the important role in building our country and moving it forward.

[bright music] - [Narrator] Funding for this program was provided by the New York State Education Department.

[bright music] [bright music]