My Day in NYC: Day 5 The Tenement Museum
On our last trip out this week, we visited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Though it was smaller than some of the other tours we took, the effect was an extraordinarily rich experience that deserves to be commended.
Our tour was titled “Under One Roof” and dealt with the lives of three families who all lived in the current museum structure and whose experiences serve as a kind of microcosm of New York life. Unlike many other historical exhibits I've seen over the years this is one where you feel completely immersed in the lives of its residents. Of course there are the large house museums of the rich and famous, but there’s an empathy gap between those spaces and the tenement rooms of people that are far more relatable. I can empathize more with the Velez brothers whose main afternoon task consisted of not burning their mothers beans, as opposed to someone like Cornelius Vanderbilt who had an extraordinary life but is far beyond what I can relate to.
The nice touches of background noise and interactives displays also made the experience more immersive, and the audiovisual interactives within the sewing room were very well done and creative. The real heart of the exhibit however lies with its former residents, who all contributed something that left the exhibit feeling more real and tangible than any historical enactment. By the time we all left, it really didn’t feel like we were leaving an exhibit, but more like leaving a neighbors home.
References
The Tenement Museum of New York. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.newyorkbyrail.com/local-guide/tenement-museum-of-new-york/
