And then there’s the rest of it. How do we accurately recreate our tenement homes when not everything is found beneath the floorboards, donated from a family’s attic, or remembered in an oral history? To fill in the blanks, researchers, curators, and historians must draw upon what they already know to figure out what they don’t. They must use their historical imagination, inferring from their expertise and research to determine what should be in a particular space. Then, it’s only a matter of hunting stuff down – in flea markets, thrift stores, online auction houses, or even making it ourselves.
What Gets Let Go
In November 1897, Jennie gives birth to her third child, Max, and is already caring for two young children. Eventually, she would have five children in the small, 325-square foot apartment. We learn this by searching through census records, birth certificates, legal documents, and other primary resources to piece together the family tree, as well as firsthand accounts from descendants like Martin Hirsch.
While the focus of a tour of the Levine family home is often the garment work done in the parlor, much consideration is also given to Jennie and how she raised her family, kept the home clean, and prepared Sabbath dinners while sharing her kitchen with garment workers. It isn’t outside the realm of possibility that Jennie gave birth to Max in the small bedroom while Harris continued to work in the parlor with his employees still present.
A glass bottle like this one, positioned in a crib beside the stove in the Levine’s recreated kitchen, was purchased in 2001 at an antique market with a cracked glass, and a curator fabricated the rubber nipple and extension using a reference period piece. This device was invented so babies could feed themselves without holding the bottle, sometimes necessary in busy homes with working parents. This bottle also helps guide conversations towards health and safety when living in tenements. The bottle’s tube was almost impossible to clean, and bred bacteria, resulting in many children getting sick and some dying.
We don’t know for sure that this was the exact bottle Jennie used for her children, but it was commercially available in 1897 and commonly found in households like the Levines. Generally, when finding objects for working class homes, we would look for items that were mass produced, and thus would have been readily available and inexpensive. In the late nineteenth century, there was much less variety in mass produced objects than there is today, so fewer curatorial choices had to be made when developing this exhibit.
In October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed, starting a 43-month period economic crisis we know as the Great Depression. Jobs, housing, and food were scarce across the nation. Unemployment rose to 25 percent, but more jobs were available to women than men: employment for women rose by 1.3 million in this period, while falling by a million for men. For the Baldizzi family, this meant Rosaria was able to find work in a garment factory, while her husband, Adolfo, struggled to find a lasting job.
Josephine remembered mornings where her mother, before heading out to work, would make everyone a roll with cream cheese, distributed in wooden boxes by the state government as part of home relief programs.
Press play to view one of the cheeseboxes in our collection from every angle!
The Baldizzis had a great appreciation for social welfare programs, the New Deal, and Franklin D. Roosevelt himself, who was first governor of New York and then president during the Great Depression. A portrait of Roosevelt even made its way into our recreated Baldizzi parlor, based on a memory of Josephine’s. As governor through the Great Depression years, he founded Home Relief, the first state relief system in the United States. This program was vital for some people, providing relief in the form of government surplus: cheese, cans of food, and clothing were provided, as well as assistance with their rent. The process of obtaining Home Relief was complicated and for some, humiliating. It would often entail investigators interviewing everyone in your life to make sure your family had no other means of support and an inspection of your apartment to decide if you were truly in need.
It wasn’t always the most consistent help either. Josephine recalled receiving through home relief a pair of men’s shoes when she was just a little girl, and her parents stuffing the toes with newspaper so they would fit. She also told us about the boxes of surplus cream cheese, which they’d receive more than any other item. And she also recalled her father taking these cheese boxes to grow morning glories on the windowsill, a flower from Rosaria’s hometown in Italy.
It’s unsurprising that the boxes of cream cheese were so common since they are now relatively easy to spot in antique markets across the country. The museum currently has about seven boxes in our collections, some donated and some purchased. A couple were even found by a staff member in a dumpster on Orchard Street between Hester and Canal Streets. Not many museum collection items have “dumpster diving” as their provenance!
One of the most memorable collection items we have here at the museum is the plastic covered couch in the Saez Velez home. It’s an incredibly special item, being one of the few objects in our collection that visitors are actually encouraged to sit on. The plastic covering evokes strong memories for a lot of visitors, a mid-century staple that they recognized from the homes of their parents, grandparents, friends, or neighbors.
The couch held a great significance to Ramonita Saez too. José recalled his home always filled with music, which his mother loved. She would spend weekends cooking to host parties with family, neighbors, and other members of the community. José told us that these parties were a big part of Puerto Rican culture in New York. Ramonita was known to be very sociable, so a nice, sturdy, and easy to clean sofa like this one was essential for entertaining coworkers, her sons’ friends (where she was able to keep a close eye on them from the kitchen), and, eventually, grandchildren.