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 exc…