Preservation vs. Access

Stairs leading up to tenement apartments at 97 Orchard St.

I have visited the Tenement Museum twice in the past, both times at 97 Orchard Street where I learned the story of a Jewish family who had lived in the tenements after fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe around the time my family came to this country, and for the same reason. This museum has always been my favorite in NYC because the museum isn’t in a museum at all. It’s in the tenements themselves. In 97 Orchard, the floors were the same floors the family had walked on, the walls had the many layers of wallpaper from different families, from different eras, pealing at different angles from the walls. The windows were those that were opened so that the families slaving over the hot iron as they worked the day away making shirtwaist dresses could get some air.

Layers of wallpaper in the tenament. Courtesy of the Tenement Museum.

Today we visited the new tenement apartments that the museum purchased a few years back. As part of a new tour called, “Under One Roof,” they converted one larger apartment belonging to two Holocaust survivors and their children in the late 40’s into sections — two rooms for each of three families, the other two being Puerto Rican and Chinese. I didn’t get to walk up the creaky stairs with little to no light to get to these rooms, but walked up a modern back stairwell and through a metal door. What I noticed this time about the architecture was that old met new. Old floors pressed up against new floors, layers of paint were chipped away from the layers beneath revealing wallpaper and brick while new walls stood strong. Some hallway windows were new, though their frames were not, and pieces of once-used pipes now stuck out in odd directions unscrewed, pointing to nowhere (I wish I could have photographed all of this but no photographs were allowed). The marriage of old and new was quite a confusing, and oddly disorienting one. While it connected the past to the present, I felt out of place and time. Who decided where old floorboards ended and the new ones would begin? When was I? According to the education staff, the curatorial staff, along with an architect and preservation team, decide what is left and preserved, what structures need to be reinforced for visitor safety, and what will be reinterpreted for educational purposes. This museum is there to teach and if this means not preserving a wall, then that’s a decision that might have to be made. The issue at hand is preservation vs. access.

Mezuzzah covered in layers of paint still hanging on the door frame of #103. Courtesy of the Tenement Museum.

This museum is unique. It IS the story that it tells without having a single object behind glass. You’re in the Epstein home and you’re sitting on beds belonging to the Wong children. You are in the late 40’s and in the late 60’s only divided by a doorway. A doorway with a mezzuzah still on it, though under layers and layers of paint. That moved me the most.