Teaching English and Connecting to Ancestry

March 28, 2013

As they have for several years, dozens of English as a Second Language (ESL or ESOL) instructors from all over the city gathered at the Tenement Museum on March 5 and 6 for the annual professional development workshops in conjunction with the City University of New York.

Professional development—the phrase often occurs in tandem with the word “mandatory,” and is all too rarely associated with concepts such as inspiration, renewal or revelation. But there is something uniquely moving about ESL workshops – especially well-conceived and well-taught ones such as these – when they are presented in an actual Lower East Side tenement where generations of immigrants lived, worked, struggled and became Americans.

James Kunen and other ESOL Instructors Visit the Shop Life Exhibit

James Kunen and other ESOL Instructors Visit the Shop Life Exhibit

Pedro Garcia, the museum’s Education Associate for Training and Outreach, led many of us up the narrow stairway and in and out of the tiny apartments as he described the “Shared Journeys” ESOL Program and “Introduction to Shop Life.” I couldn’t help but recall that my own forebears no doubt lived in apartments just like these. And the immigrant students that I teach today—how similar are the challenges that they face? Walking up those creaking stairs, in the footsteps of my ancestors, I realized once more what is so profoundly meaningful about teaching English to immigrants: It’s like helping my own grandparents.

Teacher and Author James Kunen

Teacher and Author James Kunen

Of course, I want to do that teaching as effectively as possible, and the other workshops presented on the ESOL nights at the museum were, as usual, extremely helpful in that regard. From technology tips to the use of evidence in writing to emotionally responsive teaching practices to – my choice – the kinetic techniques of “Pronouncercizing” – there were plenty of nuts-and-bolts takeaways to put to use in class the very next day. I’m looking forward to ESOL Night at the museum next year – and to visiting with my students, family and friends in the meantime.

– Posted by James S. Kunen, ESL instructor at the Center for Immigrant Education and Training at LaGuardia Community College, and author of Diary of a Company Man: Losing a Job, Finding a Life.

Passover at the Lustgarten Butcher Shop

March 27, 2013

This week marks the Jewish holiday of Passover, or Pesach. To celebrate, we’re remembering the Lustgarten family, who ran a kosher butcher store at 97 Orchard Street more than a century ago. 

If you’ve experienced our Shop Life tour, you know that Israel and Goldie Lustgarten and  ran a kosher butcher shop at 97 Orchard Street from 1889 to 1902. At the same time, they raised a family of six children (five pictured here), who often helped out in the store. Notice how all—even 5 year-old William—are wearing aprons. Israel and Goldie provided kosher meat, which many of the East European Jews required.

To keep kosher, one can only eat meat from certain animals, and they have to be slaughtered and blessed by trained and certified specialists. In addition to the kosher rules for everyday meals, the Passover holiday presents another set of more stringent dietary standards.

Lustgarten Family c 1887

The Lustgarten family dressed for work, c.1887

During Passover, Judaism prohibits the eating of chametz, a category of food that includes anything made with wheat, oats, rye, barley or spelt. Matzoh (also spelled matzah), the traditional unleavened crisp bread, is the exception to this rule.

New Yorkers with Matzoh

Free matzoh for Passover distributed to needy families in New York City, c.1908

Meat, however, is very much a traditional part of the Passover celebration. Families enjoy beef, chicken, turkey, duck, goose, or fish during the holiday.

During the preparations for this holiday, the Lustgartens’ store would be brimming over with customers waiting in line to purchase meat for their families with market baskets and young children in tow. While they waited, shoppers would have traded pleasantries and gossip, in Yiddish and English.

These days, the Lower East Side has lost its kosher butcher shops, but New Yorkers who keep kosher have new options, too–kosher meat can even be ordered online (but you’ll have to go elsewhere for the gossip).

– Posted by Kira Garcia and the Museum’s Education Staff

 

 

Stories Yun Told Me: Simplified Character

March 19, 2013

“Stories Yun Told Me” is a series of illustrated stories created by Tenement Museum Educators Jason Eisner and Ya Yun Teng. The series will explore themes of language, interpretation, memory, and community through the adventurous eyes of Yun, a fictitious Chinese American immigrant born in the year of the Pig. At twenty-two, Yun immigrates to New York City from her native Taiwan. She loves to share stories about her experiences—stay tuned for further installments!

I found myself heading towards East Broadway to visit a new Chinese community. They call East Broadway the Fuzhou Street because there are so many immigrants from Fujian province living there. Coming here much later than the Cantonese, the Fujianese established their own community across the Bowery from Mott Street, creating and expanding along East Broadway.

I have never been to Fujian, but some of my family members, if I trace far back enough, came from there. Compared to Canton, Fujian is much closer to Taiwan in many ways. If I were a good swimmer, I could swim across the Taiwan Strait to get myself to Fujian (the shortest distance is 80 miles).

I passed by the gift shops of Mott Street with their Chinese lion puppets dangling from awnings, and leaped across Bowery to East Broadway. The tenement buildings were not so different from those around Mott Street. But on the street there was a young and thriving energy.

 

Only some stores maintained the old-fashion signage which had a look from the 70s. But popping up in every other storefront were newer grocery stores and restaurants that served Fujianese rice noodles and fish balls. Many ground floor tenement storefronts were re-modeled, with big glass windows and doors with stainless steel handles. Although everyone loved the light brought in by the windows, the vendors soon covered them up with sale announcements to compete with other stores in the mall. Most of these signs were printed in simplified characters.

I was not used to seeing simplified characters in public spaces while growing up in Taiwan. After the Communist Party established the new government, many changes came to China. Even the language was revolutionized. The Communist party did away with the traditional character form and began teaching simplified characters schools. This was done to increase the rate of literacy, and eliminate the gap between rich and poor. But in the eyes of the Taiwanese government, replacing traditional characters with simplified ones would result in permanent damage to the Chinese culture and language.

As someone growing up in Taiwan, a country ruled by the Conservative Nationalist Government established by Chiang-Kai Shek (who miserably lost his battle to the Communist party in 1949), it was probably my duty to defend my tradition.

 

 

 

But I didn’t get a chance to do that–I felt like there wasn’t even a part for me to play. I was just an outsider walking through Fujianese Chinatown.

When I visited Mainland China in the 90s, it was the first time I was surrounded by simplified characters. I stuck close to my mother, and my mother stuck close to the other travelers from Taiwan, and all of us stuck with our tour guide. This was the first time since the Chinese Civil War that Taiwanese were allowed to travel to China. There were so few of us, and we felt vulnerable.

Along with our clothes we packed our imagination of Mainland China. We were looking to verify our long held beliefs. We imagined the Chinese on the Mainland lived behind the iron curtain, and grew up eating tree bark. Of course, we didn’t find any evidence of that.

Meanwhile, East Broadway was hustling and bustling.

Two children were on their way back home from school. In their hands, they held some orange and black Halloween decorations they made as school projects. They were with their mother. The elder sibling was using English to comment on the more primitive-looking quality of the younger sibling’s project. The younger one seemed hurt. All this time their mother was talking to someone working in a market using a language I could not understand. It didn’t sound like Cantonese to me, and it was definitely not Mandarin. Maybe it was Fujianese? My family spoke Taiwanese, which originated from Southern Fujian. I was trying to find some words that I could recognize, but their language sounded very far away from any languages I knew.

I realized that the man she was talking to was a phone card salesman. He started to speak to the mother in Mandarin, a language I grew up speaking, but his accent was totally unfamiliar. He used his chin to point at the children and said, “They are so big now. How many years you’ve been living here? Have you been back home? They speak so well, like American now.”

 

I stopped walking and moved closer, just to listen to the song of their accent – a piece of music performed with a new and unexpected interpretation. I thought I could sing along, but failed to follow the beats. A workingman with loads of fruits and vegetables asked me to step aside. The market was filled with people singing their languages and picking groceries for dinners tonight. East Broadway rolled along…

– Posted by Jason Eisner and Ya Yun Teng 

The Search for General Tso

March 14, 2013

I just spent a week in Arizona and California, where I survived a white-out blizzard in Flagstaff, envied the trees heavy with citrus in Los Angeles, and interviewed a dozen restaurant owners, historians, and economists about one thing: Chinese food.

Owner Fred Wong at Flagstaff’s Grand Canyon Café, where the menu has offered Chinese American chop suey among its classic American comfort foods since the 1940s. Photo courtesy Wicked Delicate Films.

When I’m not at the Tenement Museum, I work as a documentary filmmaker with a production company in Brooklyn. I was out West to gather footage for a feature-length documentary I’m producing, in collaboration with the author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, about the history, development, and popularity of Chinese food in America.

For the film, I’ve interviewed historians, authors, chefs, restaurateurs, and everyday eaters (including this guy, who’s checked in at over 6,000 Chinese restaurants!) about some big topics, including the forces and events that brought Chinese immigrants to the U.S. to begin with, and the barriers they faced. Many early Chinese immigrants entered restaurant work in the first place because of exclusionary laws that gave them few economic options. The film’s working title is The Search for General Tso, a riff on the ubiquitous and totally Americanized dish called General Tso’s Chicken that the film uses to tell a much larger story.

Restaurant owner Tammy Fang serves up General Tso’s Chicken in rural New Mexico. Photo courtesy Wicked Delicate Films.

There end up being a lot of parallels between my work in film, exploring cultural and historical topics, and the work here at the Tenement Museum. The story of Chinese food in America, for instance, begins in the nineteenth century and is very much a story of immigration, entrepreneurship, and adaptation. Topics the Museum knows well! (Did you catch our president’s recent Op-Ed in the Washington Post?)

The Search for General Tso uses food to tell a larger story of immigration and adaptation, and the Museum does this in many ways, too–like on our Foods of the Lower East Side walking and tasting tour, in Schneider’s saloon on our “Shop Life” tour, and on the table in the Rogarshevsky parlor where two loaves of Challah are displayed.

The re-created Rogarshevsky parlor at 97 Orchard Street, with a loaf of challah bread on the table. Photo by Keiko Niwa.

In addition to parallels, there are also some interesting departures. Because of its location and mission here in New York City, the Museum tells urban immigrant stories. The Search for General Tso does spend time in America’s big cities, but the film also explores the immigrant stories found in small-town Chinese restaurants across the country.

In Tucumcari, New Mexico, I met Tammy Fang, owner of the Golden Dragon Restaurant on old Route 66. Tammy’s family is the only Chinese family in town, and she told me, “My friends think I’m crazy! Why not live in San Francisco? Why not Albuquerque? It can feel isolating.”

In Louisiana, I spent a day with Frank and Tommy Wong, Chinese-born brothers who opened restaurants in Hammond and Mandeville, after learning the ropes at their grandmother’s chop suey house in Amarillo, Texas. In his kitchen, Tommy smiled and held up his five fingers, and then curled them into a fist, illustrating his mom’s favorite advice for her five sons: “Together, you’re strong.” Tommy and his brothers also adapted the food they serve, creating a menu that appeals to southern American tastes and uses local ingredients. Think Szechuan alligator and crawfish, and honey-pecan shrimp.

Chef Tommy Wong showing a photo of his mother in the kitchen of Trey Yuen Cuisine of China. Photo courtesy Wicked Delicate Films.

I love the ways in which my two “hats” have enabled me, quite unexpectedly, to become immersed in immigrant stories from America’s big cities and its small towns, and to see how we’re all part of a larger story. The Search for General Tso will be finished this summer, so stay tuned!

—Posted by Amanda Murray

Revisiting the German Table

March 12, 2013

Editor’s Note: On March 19, we’ll host our next Culinary Conversation, The New Little Germany: New York Revisits the German Table. Tickets are available on our website, or make it a date and get a free gift by purchasing two tickets through HowAboutWe.com.

How’s this for a pairing at our next Culinary Conversation? We’ll celebrate New York’s rich historical relationship with German brewing and food culture, as well as the recent resurgence of craft beer and brewing.

Throughout the nineteenth century, German immigrants flooded into lower Manhattan—earning the neighborhood the nickname “Kleindeutschland,” or “Little Germany.” Many of these immigrants brought a passion for brewing and consuming lager, a style of beer that was lagered, or stored, at cool temperatures during fermentation. Because it’s often lighter and crisper than its British-style counterparts, lager was conducive to the kind of communal, prolonged drinking that New York’s German saloons and beer gardens became known for as they welcomed picnickers, merchants, laborers, and even families.

The Atlantic Garden beer garden in New York City, 1872. Courtesy New York Public Library.

While German food never truly fell out of fashion, German-style beer gardens in New York diminished in the face of the Temperance movement and Prohibition. By Prohibition’s end, over half of American breweries failed to reopen. While New York breweries like Rheingold attempted to bounce back, they were soon overtaken by big Midwestern corporations brewing and marketing inexpensive adjunct lagers, or light beers that use corn or rice as filling ingredients. But then there was a turnaround when the Cranston Act, passed by the Carter administration in 1979, legalized craft and homebrewing and opened the door once more to small-batch beer culture.

Patrons at Brooklyn Brewery. Photo by Willamor Media on Flickr.

Today, craft beer bars are again popping up all over the city, from Evil Twin’s new Greenpoint outpost, Tørst, to rare-beer speakeasies like Proletariat in the East Village. And right across the street from our own Museum is the friendly craft-beer haven Top Hops. Beer production is experiencing a renaissance, too, with homebrew supply shops and new local breweries opening all over the city.

Behind the scenes at SingleCut Beersmiths in Astoria, Queens.

Next week’s Culinary Conversation, The New Little Germany: New York Revisits the German Table, will bring together renowned restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton, charcuterie master Jeremy Schaller, Kurt Gutenbrunner of the Standard Biergarten, craft beer expert Joshua M. Bernstein, and Culinary Conversations curator Jane Ziegelman. These panelists will elaborate on a three-course Austro-German menu, with beer pairings provided by Brooklyn Brewery and SingleCut Beersmiths, the first brewery to open in Queens since Prohibition. Join us!

And bring a date!

—Posted by Meredith Heil

Waking Up at 97 Orchard Street

March 7, 2013

Spring is just around the corner… we hope! To help us through these last winter days, we turn to hot tea and coffee for warmth and caffeine. Here at the Tenement Museum, we also imagine how they might have awakened the senses of residents at 97 Orchard Street.

Confino Kitchen

The Confino family's stove--with a coffee pot at the ready!

Evidence of coffee and its preparation can be found throughout our tenement. In the Baldizzi apartment there’s a canister of Maxwell House Coffee. In the Confino apartment, visitors take a whiff of Turkish coffee. And a coffee grinder is now a hands-on object in the “Meet Bridget” program. How did these beverages get to New York in the first place, and how would the families in our tenement at 97 Orchard Street have consumed them?

Though coffee had been drunk for centuries in Africa and the Middle East, it did not appear in Europe until the seventeenth century. The Cafe Procope in Paris, which opened in 1689, served philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire (who supposedly consumed 40 cups of coffee each day!) as well as the future emperor of France, young Napoleon Bonaparte.

Moorish coffeehouse, Algeria, c. 1899. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

In early nineteenth-century Germany, women got together to gossip in coffee shops. Uneasy husbands derisively termed these get-togethers “Kaffeeklatsches” (literally, “coffee-gossip”) but for the women involved they served as important opportunities to think and speak freely.

Here in America, early colonists were not big coffee drinkers, but their habits changed following the various blockades on tea prior to the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. By 1810, coffee was available on menus throughout New York City. During the Civil War, coffee was part of the Union Army’s ration, but when the Southern ports were blockaded, the price soared. The price per pound of coffee in 1861 was $3; but by 1864, it was going for $12 to $60 per pound! The preparation of coffee also changed with new technologies in the home; 1860s-era coffee recipes were written for both the hearth and the new iron stove. By the end of the nineteenth-century, the United States was consuming thirteen pounds per capita and importing over forty percent of the world’s coffee.

"The Lebanon Club, New York working-men's coffee-house, 1880." Courtesy New York Public Library.

German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Italian families all brought coffee-drinking culture to New York, and you can imagine the aroma of coffee wafting out of the Gumpertz, Schneider, Confino, and Baldizzi apartments in the mornings, whether it was 1872 or 1935.

During the era of the Jewish East Side, Houston Street, at the center of the Hungarian and Romanian communities, was known as café row. Coffee was often served “shwartzen,” a small pot of cream and a tumbler of water. Or, coffee with milk would have been served in a glass. Josephine Baldizzi, whose family lived in 97 Orchard Street during the Great Depression, remembers that her parents had bread dipped in coffee for breakfast and that her mother would save the used coffee grounds to make several more batches of coffee in order to save money.

Little Italy tenement kitchen interior, 1937. Note the can of Italian “caffe” on the shelf in the upper right. Courtesy of New York Public Library.

And what about the Irish Moore family that lived at 97 Orchard Street in the 1840s? In Irish culture it is tea rather than coffee that prevails. Louise More’s (1910) breakdown of an Irishman’s budget for a family of ten included: “One-half pound tea; no coffee $.20.” Reformers of the time called Irish women “tea inebriates.”

Likewise, Russian and Polish Jews such as the Levines and Rogarshevskys who lived at 97 Orchard Street preferred tea to coffee. They drank tea in cafés by putting a sugar cube in their teeth and then sucking the tea through it. They would drink dozens of glasses of tea this way, late into the evenings. And there’s an interesting contrast between the Irish and Jewish drinking habits: Irish immigrants drank tea at home and liquor in public spaces, while Jews drank liquor at home with family, and tea in public.

—Posted by the Museum’s Education Team

Adapting to America

March 5, 2013

Adaptation is one of the themes that come up most often during our tours here at the Museum—and it will be a key topic at tomorrow’s free Tenement Talk with New York Times journalist Kirk Semple. We hope you can join us! To get the conversation started, we’re taking a look at the history of assimilation & adaptation. 

The U.S. has long been called a “melting pot,” in which people of different cultures come together into a cohesive whole, but the metaphor is a problematic one. It suggests that cultural difference is something to be avoided, and even overcome. The “melting pot” metaphor brings up some important questions on our tours: Should immigrants and their descendants maintain their cultural roots? How can we balance our individual identities with participation in American life? How does the process of adapting to America today differ from the experience a century ago?

Cover of "The Melting Pot" play, 1916. From the Library of Congress and University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department.

Dating to 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer contains American literature’s first recorded use of the concept of immigrants “melting” into the receiving culture. He wrote that America is a place where “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”

Automobile magnate Henry Ford not only firmly believed in the virtues of the melting pot—he literally, and bizarrely, built one. In the 1920s, Ford required his immigrant workers to attend lengthy “Americanization” courses. The graduation ceremony from this program culminated in a pageant in which workers clad in outlandish versions of their “native” costumes descended into a giant pot—a twenty-foot-tall crucible made of wood, canvas, and papier-mâché—and emerged on the other side wearing modern business suits, waving tiny American flags, and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The “melting pot” at Henry Ford’s Americanization School. From the “Automobile in American Life” online exhibit, University of Michigan-Dearborn, and the collections of The Henry Ford.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ford hoped that his physical demonstration of the melting pot would, as he put it, “impress upon these men that they are, or should be, Americans, and that former racial, national, and linguistic differences are to be forgotten.” (Based on investigations into their home lives, Ford employees who failed to uphold his standards found they could also forget about keeping their jobs.)

A different assimilation strategy could be found in the American settlement house movement. Settlement houses were privately-funded social service agencies staffed mostly by wealthier, native-born Americans who believed they were working toward the general welfare of immigrants, and the larger society, by bringing each immigrant group into mainstream America.

These organizations provided health and employment services, cooking classes, education and after-school recreation for children. Families who lived in our tenement building at 97 Orchard Street might have seen settlement houses as a gateway into American life. Today, the University Settlement, Henry Street Settlement, and Educational Alliance, among others, continue to deliver a wide range of social services and creative programs to tens of thousands of New Yorkers each year.

Children reading in the Mulberry Settlement House library, 1920. Image courtesy the New York Public Library.

Tomorrow’s Tenement Talk will focus on a more recently founded program: The Refugee Youth Summer Academy. The Academy helps youth find footing and prepare for school over the course of the six-week program of academic coursework, creative-arts classes, and field trips. In his 2012 New York Times article, “In New York, With 6 Weeks to Adapt to America,” Kirk Semple wrote of that year’s Academy enrollees:

“They hailed from at least 13 countries, including Nepal, Burkina Faso, Iran, Iraq and Cameroon. Some had been in the country for a couple of years… They spoke at least 17 native languages. Some could speak and read English fluently; others could not write their own name in any language. Some had attended school in their home countries; others had never been in a classroom. If there was any commonality in their experience, it was that their families had been driven from their homelands and were seeking a better life in the United States.”

At our Tenement Talk Semple will lead a panel discussion with The Refugee Youth Summer Academy principal, an upper-elementary school teacher, and a student leader. We hope you’ll join us for this moving program, looking at what adaptation means for some of America’s newest, young arrivals.

—Posted by Lokki Chan and Amanda Murray

Child’s Play at 97 Orchard

February 28, 2013

Most visitors don’t notice it, but the re-created apartments in our tenement are constantly evolving. We’re adding new interpretive objects to our educational tours all the time, in an effort to tell the full story of the people who lived at 97 Orchard. For example, some new objects were recently added to our “Meet Bridget” program, which takes place in the Moore family apartment. These new items include a full coal bucket, a coffee grinder, a copper-tipped pen and ink bottle, a fiddle bow, and a letter.

Our “Victoria Confino” tour also has some interesting new props. The tour will now incorporate two toys appropriate to the tour’s era of 1916, thanks to Museum Educator Sarah Lohman, who researched and sourced these additions. These objects can be used to explore the role of play in the lives of young immigrants to the Lower East Side as they adjusted to their new surroundings, met neighbors, and learned new customs. In Children of the City (1985) David Nasaw paints a portrait of the role of play in urban immigrant life: “The children’s play community of the street, like all other play communities, was founded on a bedrock of rules… The block—that totality of street, gutter, sidewalk, stoop, and doorways—was informally divided to provide each group with the space it needed and a bit of distance from the others. Children of every ethnic, religious, racial, and language group played together. But girls did not always play with boys. Nor were the little ones allowed in the bigger ones’ games.”

Sidewalk card game, c. 1900-1937. Photo by Lewis Hines courtesy New York Public Library.

The first new object in our Victoria tour is a batch of 1916-appropriate bottle caps that would have been used to play the game of Skelly.

Vintage bottlecaps used to play Skelly.

 

Skelly—also known as skelsies, skully, killsies, loadsies, caps, bottle caps, or dead man—was played by flipping or flicking bottlecaps along a board (or pavement) drawn in chalk with either nine or thirteen squares on it. Anywhere from two more players could play. Each neighborhood had its own variation on the rules, but the basic idea was to use one’s fingers to shoot the piece (a bottlecap, poker chip, or other small item) through the course drawn on the street, then “kill” all the other players.

 

A modern-day Skelly board at the DeSalvio Playground, at Spring and Mulberry Streets. Photo by Flickr user wallyg.

The other new addition to the Victoria tour is a homemade ball—made according to early-twentieth-century instructions—to play stickball.

Homemade stickball ball, as it would look c. 1916.

If you grew up on the Lower East Side, you might be familiar with the spaldeen, the red bouncing rubber ball that was used starting in 1949. (“Spaldeen” was a New York pronunciation of “Spaulding,” the ball manufacturer.) However, the game of stickball predates the spaldeen. Its predecessor was a homemade affair, made by taking a rock, wrapping it with rags, and winding string around. This new ball will be especially helpful for students in the “Meet Victoria” program who participate in the Creative Reuse activity, in which students make their own toys using recycled materials—a lesson in the limited resources and limited possessions many immigrants could bring with them from their home countries.

—Posted by the Museum’s Education Team

Five Questions With…

February 26, 2013

This is a new regular feature on our blog to introduce our readers and visitors to some of the Tenement Museum staff and trustees working behind the scenes.

Who better to launch this series than the Museum’s President? Here are five questions with Morris Vogel.

Tenement Museum President Morris Vogel at 97 Orchard Street

1. What brought you to the Tenement Museum?

I worked with Museum founder Ruth Abram before she discovered 97 Orchard Street, and was impressed by her hopes for the Museum from its earliest days.  Lots of historians were talking in the 1970s and 1980s about telling the stories of ordinary people and everyday life; Ruth found a way to do it outside of an academic setting where it might have an audience.  She reached out to me in 2004, inviting me here to discuss the Museum’s evolution. So I was pleased when I got a call from a search firm looking for someone to succeed her as the Museum’s President.

2. What is your personal connection to immigration?

I was born in Kazakhstan and immigrated to the United States as a child. My family lived in the middle of an immigrant farming community in rural eastern Connecticut. Oscar Handlin’s Boston’s Immigrants, which I read as an undergraduate, really impressed me, so much so that I titled my dissertation “Boston’s Hospitals” in homage.

3. What’s your favorite shop or restaurant on the Lower East Side?

Russ and Daughters, and Niki Russ is my favorite shopkeeper!

4. What makes someone a New Yorker?

Sharing in the dreams that define the city.  The novelist Wallace Stegner wrote of “the geography of hope” in distilling the character of the American West; I’m comfortable appropriating that phrase for the communities that generations of newcomers created in following their dreams to this city.

5. Of all the families whose stories we tell here, which family would you most want to spend a day with and why?

Max Marcus, from the Shop Life tour.  He was a dreamer—and an entrepreneur.

Max Marcus, far left, is featured on our "Shop Life" tour.

—Posted by Emily Mitzner

New Highlights Video

February 21, 2013

We hope you’re enjoying the Museum’s extended hours on Thursdays! You can shop at 103 Orchard until 8:30pm, and enjoy special evening tours of “Shop Life” and “Exploring 97 Orchard” — a great choice for architecture and preservation buffs.

It’s been an exciting year for our evening programs as well. In addition to dozens of Tenement Talks featuring lively discussions with authors, journalists, and cultural critics, we launched Culinary Conversations, a series of tastings and discussions with food historian Jane Ziegelman and some of New York’s most vibrant and innovative chefs.

Tenement Talks Assistant Meredith Heil put together this trailer showing some of our favorite moments from recent programs. We hope you’ll join us on evenings to come! Click “Talks” at the top of this page for a full calendar.

Tenement Talks Trailer from Tenement Talks on Vimeo.

—Posted by Amanda Murray and Meredith Heil