The Lower East Side Tenement Museum's mission is to promote tolerance and historical perspective through the presentation and interpretation of the variety of immigrant and migrant experiences on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a gateway to America.

Today, although most citizens trace the beginnings of their American journeys to the urban rather than the rural environment and most descend from immigrants, The Tenement’s landmark tenement building at 97 Orchard Street is the first homestead of urban working class and poor immigrant people preserved and interpreted in the United States. Located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, an immigrant portal for almost two centuries, 97 Orchard Street was home to an estimated 7,000 people from more than 20 nations between 1863 and 1935.

The Tenement is a designated National Historic Site, affiliated with the National Park Service and a featured property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In fiscal year 2006, The Tenement hosted nearly 125,000 visitors, representing all 50 states and more than 30 countries; its website at www.tenement.org received more than 300,000 online visitors.

Visitors to The Tenement tour carefully restored apartments and learn about the lives of actual past residents: the German Jewish Gumpertz (1870s) who lived through the Great Panic of 1874; the Levines from Poland (1897), who ran a garment business in their apartment; the Rogarshevsky family, Eastern European Jews (1918) mourning the loss of their patriarch from tuberculosis; the Sephardic Jewish Confino family (1916), the focus of an interactive family-oriented living history program; and the Baldizzi family, Italian Catholics from Sicily (1930s), who were among The Tenement’s last residents during the Great Depression.

With an anticipated opening in early 2007, The Tenement is researching the Moores, an Irish Catholic family in residence during the Civil War. Lower East Side Stories, The Tenement’s neighborhood walking tour, showcases the area’s complex history.

The Tenement has assembled the nation's first archive and collection documenting the urban, immigrant/migrant, working class, poor and tenement experiences. They are the resources through which the Museum engages the public by reconstructing stories of immigrants who lived at 97 Orchard Street.

Each year, over 30,000 school children from throughout the United States, as well as Canada, China, and Venezuela, annually experience highly original programs that use history to teach tolerance. In 2004, the Museum’s Confino Living History Tour received the EdCom Award for Excellence in Programming through the American Association of Museums. The Tenement’s staff development workshops train teachers to employ The Tenement’s innovative methods of using history to encourage students’ dialogues on contemporary issues.

All of The Tenement’s tours can be adapted as touch tours, including handling artifacts, verbal imaging and an architectural model of the building. The Tenement’s off-site programs bring the experience to students who cannot visit The Tenement.

Artists work with area immigrants to interpret the history of the neighborhood and immigration, as well as the experiences of the newest arrivals to the United States, through art installations displayed in The Tenement Windows. The Digital Artist in Residence Project (DARP) is a series of web-based artworks that explores contemporary immigrant experiences.

The Tenement's programs make conscious use of history to address contemporary social issues. Immigrant students use the diaries and letters of past immigrants to learn English. Learning that charity workers often helped immigrants at Ellis Island, these students exclaimed, "No one was there for us at Kennedy!" In response, the Museum has partnered with The New York Times and St. Martin's Press to publish The New York Times Guide for Immigrants in Chinese, Spanish and English.

Through Dialogues, visitors participate in discussions of such contemporary issues as immigration, labor and social welfare.

The Tenement organized the Lower East Side Community Preservation Project, using historic preservation to unite a diverse community. LESCPP brings together diverse community leaders to identify, restore, and interpret local historic places as centers for dialogue on shared community concerns. In 2000 and 2001, participating Community Preservationists worked with the African American congregation of St. Augustine's Church to preserve and interpret the Church's 1828 "slave galleries." Today the group is collaborating with Place Matters to create innovative place markers of important places around the neighborhood.

Located within the Visitors Center at 108 Orchard Street, The Museum Shop provides visitors with an authentic New York experience. The Museum Shop offers an impressive array of New York-centric books, gifts and toys. A selection of these items can be found on The Tenement’s online shop. The Visitors Center and Museum Shop also hosts The New York Book Club, a regular series of readings and panel discussions about New York —its history and its people.

The Tenement organized The International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience to establish a new role for historic sites around the world as forums for civic dialogue and action. Through the web site, www.sitesofconscience.org, and the Dialogue for Democracy program, Coalition members invite visitors to consider the contemporary implications of historic issues raised at their sites.