Slum Preservation

I SHOULD LOVE THE TENEMENT MUSEUM. Spanning three apartment buildings on Orchard Street, the tremendously popular Lower East Side institution recreates and celebrates the home lives of working-class immigrants from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The project speaks to nearly every part of my interests and identities. I’m a New York City know-it-all (a “history buff,” in polite terms). I’m a Jew whose immigrant family did the typical thing of living first in Lower East Side rookeries before transitioning to other boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, Florida). Over the past twenty years, I have lived in several different New York City tenement buildings, including one just blocks away from the museum. I work as a housing policy analyst at an organization that helped write the tenement reform laws. My socialist politics have roots in the labor and tenant struggles of the Lower East Side, which the museum commemorates. I have several friends and colleagues who have worked at the museum in various capacities over the years. And I would buy the entire contents of their excellent bookstore if I had all the money and space in the world.

But I must now do the unthinkable: Summon the NYRA wrecking ball to take out one of the most beloved cultural sites among people exactly like me.

The Tenement Museum was founded by historian Ruth Abram and artist Anita Jacobson in 1988. According to the documentary that plays on repeat in the gift shop, the pair was looking for a space to demonstrate that present-day conditions for working-class immigrants have clear historical antecedents. Then Abram and Jacobson stumbled on a “for rent” sign for the commercial space at 97 Orchard, a classic tenement from 1865: five stories tall and a cellar, built of sturdy brick, and packed with small apartments on either side of each floor’s hallway. Not only were the ground floor and basement vacant, but the entire building, they discovered, had been boarded up for over fifty years, leaving behind a palimpsest of immigrant life.

In 1935, the apartment house was found to be in violation of building code standards. Impervious to injunction and refusing to make the necessary improvements, the landlord threw out his tenants and sealed off the residence, demonstrating one of the greatest frustrations of our housing system: The government can mandate improvements, but if capitalists consider them too onerous, they can walk away.

The same landlord responded coolly to Abram and Jacobson’s offer to buy the entire property. As they waited for him to change his mind, they engaged architectural historians to research 97 Orchard’s history, find records about the erstwhile tenants, and design accurate recreations of their homes. After the purchase finally went through, this small staff oversaw the rehabbing of the apartments and trained tour guides to speak about the lives of the former inhabitants. (The training extended to thespianism, with some guides learning to adopt the names and manners of the tenants themselves.) The shoestring institution quickly became notable for being the rare house museum that did not celebrate the rich and famous, but instead championed working-class struggles and subjectivities.

It was especially popular with people whose elders might have lived in exactly this kind of housing—Jewish, Italian, Irish, and German transplants—but whose families had since moved on to other neighborhoods and dwelling types. It was also popular with educators and became a staple of school field trips. But the museum’s growing popularity also meant mounting strain on the structure itself, which buckled under the stress of hundreds of thousands of annual visitors walking through its halls. The staff struggled to find time and space for all the tours and classes they were hosting.

As the building began to show wear and tear, so did the museum’s mission. According to the historian Andrew Urban, who worked at the museum two decades ago, some guests were confused as to why the institution existed at all. They lived or grew up in cramped apartments just like these. Many were themselves immigrants. For these visitors, 97 Orchard wasn’t the stuff of history; it was just another apartment building.

THOUGH THE LOWER EAST SIDE is one of the most famous cases of gentrification—from 1990 to 2016, median rents rose more there than in any neighborhood besides Williamsburg or Harlem—the area continues to be home to a great many working-class immigrants. According to the American Community Survey, 47 percent of the residents in the census tract where the Tenement Museum is located are “foreign born,” a classification that does not include the neighborhood’s many Puerto Rican residents—whose presence has continued to grow, particularly since Hurricane Maria in 2017. Of the “foreign born” population, 62 percent are from China and 14 percent are from Latin America and the rest of the Caribbean. Most households in the census tract speak a language other than English at home, while
41 percent make less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line, an amount the city classifies as “extremely low-income.”

The ongoing diversification of the Lower East Side underscored a dissonance between the outlook and operations of the Tenement Museum. If its founders and staff initially sought to connect the past with the present, its programming focused on past waves of immigration at the expense of more recent arrivals. Former museum employees have related to me that visitors sometimes asked questions or made statements that contrast the “good immigrants” who once resided at 97 Orchard with “bad immigrants” who might be arriving and living nearby today. Museum leaders endeavored to extend the museum’s scope by expanding its footprint, but this only deepened the contradiction between its intentions and its impact.

In 2001, under Ruth Abram’s leadership, the Tenement Museum offered $1.36 million to buy the mid-block residence next door to 97 Orchard. The owners, Louis and Frances Holtzman, who also lived in the building, declined, having already formed a partnership with restaurateur Ron Yu to expand his restaurant Congee Village into 99 Orchard’s ground-floor commercial space. This required alterations and upgrades, funded in part by Yu, which the museum alleged were disturbing their property. At this point, the museum
tried to have New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) seize the neighboring tenement by invoking eminent domain.

Had Abram and her colleagues gotten their wish, they would have doubled their exhibition spaces and installed an elevator, which would have made the museum accessible to those who cannot climb flights of stairs. But to do
so, they would have had to displace fifteen households from rent-stabilized apartments— many of whom were themselves working-class immigrants—as well as the wildly popular Congee Village, which employed forty workers at the time. At a contentious community board meeting about the museum’s planned takeover, one enraged resident asked, “What are they going to tell the tourists of 99 Orchard Street? ‘This is the history of the people who lived here before we evicted them?’” The board’s district manager told a journalist “the irony just smacks you in the face.” Amid considerable community pressure and opposition—most notably from then State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who represented the Lower East Side from 1977 to 2015 before being ousted on corruption charges—the ESDC opted to take no action.

Five years passed. With 99 Orchard off the table, the museum looked instead to the two corner buildings on the north and south sides of their block. Since 2002, they owned 91 Orchard on the south side, with administrative space located on the first two floors and apartments above them, and they bought 103 Orchard on the north side, where they had already been renting the ground floor and basement for their gift shop and staff break rooms, respectively. According to the restoration and masterplan architects, Perkins Eastman, the purchase of 103 Orchard in particular was “a game changer. It gave the museum a prominent location and the chance to create a ‘front door’ to the whole experience.”

103 Orchard is an odd building. It was originally three mid-block tenements, which the owner combined into a single address ahead
of the city’s plan to widen Delancey Street and facilitate traffic to the new Williamsburg Bridge. With 103 Orchard projected to be a corner lot, the owner chopped off the back (western) side to make room for a new bank and turned the front (eastern) side into an apartment house with the biggest units of any tenement on the block. Many migrant families moved into the residence and continued to live there when the Tenement Museum came knocking.

To uphold its mission and exhibit the homes of more recent and more racially diverse migrants, the Tenement Museum, having bought 103 Orchard, now needed its more recent migrants of color to vacate their homes. The museum hired staff to conduct oral histories of the existing tenants and then moved them into the upper floors of 91 Orchard, or elsewhere if the tenants preferred. By law, the former residents of 103 Orchard retain rent stabilization in their new apartments. Perhaps these are even nicer than their old ones. Nevertheless, the museum did exactly what neighborhood residents had called foul several years earlier: It displaced existing working- class immigrants in the Lower East Side in order to preserve the memory of the Lower East Side’s working-class immigrant communities, and in the process, it removed a large building’s worth of rent-stabilized apartments from
the area.

SINCE 2017, THE TENEMENT MUSEUM has offered tours in 103 Orchard highlighting three families with post–World War II migration stories: the Epsteins, Jewish refugees who came to the Lower East Side after surviving the Holocaust; the Saez-Velez family, who moved to the neighborhood from Puerto Rico in the 1950s; and the Wongs, who moved from Hong Kong in the 1970s.

I recently made two separate visits through the fragmented period rooms that reconstruct their living spaces. The guides—both excellent, as was the guide the first time I visited the Tenement Museum over fifteen years ago—emphasized the relative spaciousness of the apartments in 103 Orchard compared to those over at 97 Orchard while also underscoring the struggles of garment workers and others trying to eke out a living.

But despite their best efforts, the guides have scandalously little to show visitors of the Epstein, Saez-Velez, and Wong homes. For reasons I can’t fathom, after displacing an entire rent-stabilized building full of working- class immigrant tenants in a gentrifying neighborhood, the Tenement Museum only turned about one and a quarter’s worth of an apartment into exhibition space.

The Wong family’s apartment, the first I saw, lives on as a small children’s bedroom with two beds. A larger room is inexplicably given over to a reproduction of a workstation at a Chinatown garment factory. It is certainly poignant, and the staff has impressively transformed inanimate objects like sewing machines into audio-visual projection devices to augment the space with the voices of garment workers. But why is it here? Isn’t the point of the Tenement Museum to recreate ordinary people’s home lives? This is doubly confusing because many households in the nearby older tenement did, in fact, sew garments in their own apartments, but by the 1970s and 1980s, when these exhibits are set, garment production had moved into large nearby sweatshops.

Another adjacent apartment is split between the Epstein and the Saez-Velez families, with the Epsteins getting the front door, bathroom, hallway, small dining room, and children’s bedroom, and the Saez-Velez household getting a kitchen and a den. Both arrangements are evocative, and the guides do their best to enliven them, but these portraits are constrained by their subdivided canvas. Visitors never see anyone’s home in full, giving the impression they were more crowded than they were.

I was flabbergasted by how little of 103 Orchard does what the expansion promised: to display the diverse domesticities of more recent immigrants to the Lower East Side and counter the idea that working-class migrants were a part of the neighborhood’s past, rather than its present. Just one floor holds exhibitions, while the remaining levels are dedicated to a visitor center, offices, and spaces for student groups and food-related programming.

If most of 103 Orchard is used for non-exhibition purposes, and some of the former administrative space at 91 Orchard is now turned over to storage, did the residents of 103 Orchard really need to be displaced? Could the museum have secured space for their administrative needs elsewhere, such as the massive Essex Crossing development that was rising in the old Seward Park Urban Renewal Area during the time it was planning its expansion? Clearly, the institution had connections to that project’s developers, who were honored at its 2014 fundraising gala.

The Tenement Museum’s board has long been a mix of eminent scholars and FIRE-sector goons. As Andrew Urban wrote in a review of Under One Roof, the guided tour of the 103 Orchard exhibits, “the museum’s Board of Trustees is chock full of developers, representatives from hedge funds, and other capitalist luminaries who now guide a museum that interprets the history of a neighborhood once renowned for its socialism and radical politics.” This tension was on full display when, in 2008, museum educators sought to form a union and the institution rejected their bid for a card-check election. While the museum was eager to celebrate organizing efforts by Lower East Side workers of a century earlier, its leaders were less comfortable with their contemporary counterparts doing the same. The organizing drive rebounded in 2015, 48 however, and the museum’s management changed. Since 2019, the staff has been affiliated with a local of the United Auto Workers, which has members at a number of New York City museums.

Still, real estate representatives remain a core constituency on the board, and as Urban notes, they are not there “to forge a more critical view of how the past might reveal what economic justice in the present should look like—unless something truly subversive is taking place behind closed doors.” Real estate has long held a special fondness for the Tenement Museum. This might seem odd at first: Don’t developers usually hate preservationists? Shouldn’t the existence of the Tenement Museum in the heart of the Lower East Side stand as a challenge to the idea that the old should be swept away to make room for newer, richer residents paying sky-high rents?

In a promotional video for the same fundraising gala, various friends in real estate give a straightforward, if hilarious, explanation for their affection for the Tenement Museum: They misread it as a love letter to landlords. Paul Massey—then a museum board member and the CEO of Massey Knakal, one of the city’s largest realty firms—says, “Real estate people love the Tenement Museum because it’s a window onto our past and a
 very rare thing in New York.” By “our past,” Massey seems to mean two things: our past 
as immigrant households, and our past as tenement landlords. One of the Essex Crossing developers, Ron Moelis of L+M Development Partners, continues, “The real estate community is a natural industry to support the Tenement Museum because the Tenement Museum is about real estate.” This is true in so much as the city’s memorial to the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire is about the fashion industry. I suspect, however, that there is a longer game at play for the museum’s biggest real estate backers.

Many Manhattanites live in tenements—I certainly do. Immigrants continue to come to this city, as the past two years have shown. And as the census figures discussed earlier demonstrate, a good number of working-class migrants continue to call the Lower East Side their home. In the real estate industry’s conception, though, the existence and expansion of the Tenement Museum could help secure the idea that this is all a thing of the past. Rather than being a hub of immigrant life, they see the museum as a place to come, visit, imagine what used to be, and then leave. It gently shifts the neighborhood’s reputation from an enduring magnet for migrant workers to a former locus of immigrant culture. This was never the museum’s official intention—in fact, it’s the opposite of what their founders say they hoped to do—but it may be one of its enduring legacies.

ALL OF THAT IS EPHEMERAL, reputational. It’s the material consequences of the museum’s expansion that I can’t move past. The Tenement Museum had a golden opportunity in their original building, which had been empty for decades when Abram and Jacobson bought it. It’s one thing to turn an empty building into a museum of its former occupants; it’s quite another to empty a building of its occupants, and then turn a fragment of the interior into a tribute to those they removed. That original building had its limitations, but a recent exhibition shows one way the museum could move beyond them.

In 2023, the Tenement Museum opened A Union of Hope: 1869 at 97 Orchard. Staff reproduced the cramped but lovingly and elegantly decorated home of Joseph and Rachel Moore, an African American couple who had lived nearby in a tenement long since demolished. The initiative meant breaking the rules of the museum—the couple did not reside at 97 Orchard—but in doing so it found a creative way to diversify the picture of who lived (and still lives!) in lower Manhattan tenements.

Chinese immigration didn’t start with the Hart-Celler immigration reforms of 1965; Chinese immigrants have lived in lower Manhattan since the 1830s. As my late mentor Peter Kwong often reminded white interlocutors, some Chinese New Yorkers have longer-standing ties to the neighborhood than most Jewish, Italian, or Irish Americans. Similarly, while the Puerto Rican population boomed in the city’s postwar era, that was the third wave of Puerto Rican migration. Could these older stories of Chinese and Puerto Rican home lives been integrated into the old Tenement Museum without removing living, breathing working-class migrants from a nearby building? There is a finite number of stories that could be told at 97 Orchard, but the Union of Hope exhibition demonstrates the museum’s capacity to expand beyond the institution’s site-specific remit. Instead, the museum’s leaders went the real estate route and expanded into other people’s homes.

I’ve written more pages than I can count about the horrors of American “urban renewal” in the Lower East Side and elsewhere. I fully recognize the irony of my calling for the (rhetorical) demolition of the Tenement Museum. But while the museum is at its core a preservation project, it has embarked on a strange inversion of “slum clearance” for the twenty-first century: Clear the tenants, preserve the slum.

To a leftist urban planner, this may be even more offensive than the classic brand of slum clearance. The easternmost half of the Lower East Side was one of the most bulldozed corners of New York, and it has all the scars to show it. But the area also has one of the largest assemblages of public housing and union- sponsored cooperatives in the entire city. If the goal is to get new social housing built while keeping old tenements cheap, this model of slum preservation doesn’t offer much help.

With a tear in my eye, I say to the wrecking ball: Your work on the Lower East Side is
not yet done. Take a swing at the Tenement Museum.