EXPLORATIONS - Tenement Museum Recreates Old Immigrant Life in New York City

A visit to the apartments of the Gumpertz family, the Baldizzis, the Rogarshevskys, the Levines and the Confinos. Transcript of radio broadcast:

　 
VOICE ONE:

I’m Gwen Outen.

VOICE TWO:

And I’m Steve Ember with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Today, we tell about a museum in New York City. It explores and celebrates the stories of people from different nations who came to the United States to live.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:
　
The front of 97 Orchard Street

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is one of the smaller museums in New York City. It lets visitors experience how early immigrants to the United States lived. The museum is a building at Ninety-Seven Orchard Street. It was built in eighteen sixty-three. It was one of the first tenements in New York City.

The word “tenement” comes from a Latin word meaning “to hold.” A tenement building holds many rooms where different families lived.

The word is not used much anymore in the United States. When people use the word today, they mean an old crowded building where poor families live in terrible, unhealthy conditions. But in the eighteen hundreds, the word “tenement” simply meant a building in which many families lived.

Later, many immigrant families improved their living conditions by moving from the lower east side to other areas of New York City. Some lived in the same kinds of buildings, but the living areas were cleaner and larger. They did not want to call them tenements, so they called them apartment buildings instead.

VOICE TWO:

History experts say more than half the people in New York City lived in tenements in eighteen sixty-three. To get one of these living areas, a family had to pay one month’s rent to the owner, usually about ten dollars. This money gave the family the use of about one hundred square meters of living space, often divided into three rooms.

The building at Ninety-Seven Orchard Street shows the kind of spaces where families lived. The front room was the largest. It was the only one with a window. Behind it were a kitchen for cooking and a small bedroom for sleeping. The apartment had no running water, no bathroom, toilet or shower. There were six places where people left their body wastes in the back yard, next to the only place to get drinking water. Such unhealthy conditions led to the spread of disease.

Over the years, New York City officials passed laws to improve conditions in the tenements. The owners of Ninety-Seven Orchard Street placed gas lighting in the building in the eighteen nineties. They added water and indoor toilets in nineteen-oh-five, and electric power in nineteen twenty-four. Then they refused to make any more improvements. They closed the building in nineteen thirty-five.

In nineteen ninety-eight, the federal government declared the building a protected National Historic Place.

VOICE ONE:

Museum officials researched the history of the building and its twenty apartments. They found more than one thousand objects that belonged to people who lived there. These include kitchen devices, medicine bottles, letters, newspapers, money and pieces of cloth. They also learned the histories of many of the seven thousand people from more than twenty countries who lived there. And they spoke with and recorded memories of people who lived at Ninety-Seven Orchard Street as children.

Museum officials used this information to re-create some of the apartments as they would have looked during different time periods in the building’s history. These apartments are what people see when they visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Let us join one of the guided visits. First we climb several flights of worn stairs. It is a very hot day and we feel the heat in the dark, narrow hallway.

[1] [2] 下一页