Lower East Side Tenement Museum

While I have visited the 97 Orchard Street location of the Tenement Museum before, touring 103 Orchard was a completely new experience. Walking through the recreated homes of 3 families who lived in the building in the decades after World War II, the museum creates a sense of intimacy in its rooms, making it feel as though you are in someone’s home and not just a museum. By taking visitors through this home, I can really see home the museum encourages visitors to connect with not just the history of the building, but also the lives of the people who inhabited it. Personally, I had a strong sense of déjà vu being in Bella Epstein’s room. I might not think I have much in common with the daughter of Holocaust survivors who lived in the Lower East Side in the 1950s, but my bedroom is painted the same color, and I owned many of the books sitting on her shelves. I could picture myself in that room, and it made me feel closer to the girl who lived there. That element of this exhibit- that you can walk into a home and sit on the furniture as if you are just visiting a friend- combined with technological elements that let you hear from the actual people who lived in the building, can foster a real connection between the visitor and the subject matter. Here, history isn’t just a collection of dates and objects: it is the lives of real people- their hopes and struggles- who are more similar to us today than we often realize.

Something else that interested me was the sign across the street from museum. In addition to letting you know the museum is there, the sign brings a little bit of the neighborhood’s history into the open. I know the Tenement Museum also offers walking tours, which I think is an interesting way to expose people to the history they might walk past without looking twice.

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