Lower East Side Tenement Museum - New York, NY

Address:108 Orchard St.
New York, New York
Tel: (212) 431-0233

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is our gateway to a variety of immigrant and migrant experiences of those living on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The heart of the museum is the Tenement Building, at 97 Orchard St., which was the first home of urban working class and poor immigrants in the United States, and housed some 7,000 people from over 20 nations between 1863 and 1935.

Visitors to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum can see carefully restored apartments and learn about the lives of its past residents such as the German Jewish Gumpertz family from 1870 who lived through the Great Panic of 1974 or the Levine family from Poland who ran a garment business out of their apartment. You will also learn about the Baldizzi family of Italian Catholics from Sicily who were among The Tenement's last residents during the Great Depression of 1929.

Visits must be by group tour only, and advanced reservations are advised. There are three tour options available, each about one hour long. In the Piecing It Together Tour, visitors celebrate the 1897 birth of Max Levine in the garment shop/apartment run by his Polish parents. The tour then pays a shiva (bereavement) call to the Rogarshevsky family, mourning the loss of their father Abraham who passed away in 1918. The Getting By Tour takes visitors to the apartments of the German-Jewish Gumpertz family in the 1870's and the Sicilian-Catholic Baldizzi family in the 1930's, to get an appreciation of the hardships and the networks of support that were available at the time and how different immigration is today. The Confino Living History Tour is based on the Sephardic-Jewish Confino family from Kastoria. As part of the tour, a costumed interpreter dressed up as teenage Victoria Confino, welcomes visitors as if they were newly arrived immigrants and teaches them how to adapt to life in America. This tour, suitable for children five years and older, is a hands-on experience with the apartment and visitors are encouraged to use your imaginations, as if you had just gotten off the boat into New York City.

Jewish, Irish and Italian gifts and novels can be purchased at the Tenement Museum's store.

Located at 108 Orchard Street, between Delancey and Broome, near Delancey, you can get to the museum by taking the B, D, J, M, or Z trains or the M15 bus to the corner of Grand and Allen St.

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.