Crossing Delancey

As I mentioned, my NYC hotel was on the same block as the Tenement Museum.

It’s a different sort of museum, located in a former tenement apartment building at 97 Orchard Street.

(A new book – 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement - is one of several studies of the life flowing through this building over the years.)

You can’t just stroll through – you must take a guided tour.  The tours are centered on the stories of different, real families  that lived in the building.  I chose “Piecing it Together” which presents a tour of an apartment in which a Jewish family lived and worked as garment workers and another of a slightly later period.

It’s an engaging tour – maybe a bit too intent sometimes on breaking down assumed presumptions about immigrant life, but that was all right.  The docents are young and enthusiastic, and engage in some role-playing at times in different programs.

It’s not cheap – $20 for an adult -  so I don’t know if I’d haul an entire family there, especially if one had the option to, and hadn’t yet visited,  Ellis Island.  But it was well worth the money for me.

I was most intrigued by a point raised by the guide about Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives.

Now, I’m not up on my Trends in Social History. I don’t know if the guide’s perspective is au courant at the moment or old hat or what. But here’s what he said:

Standing next to a typical dress that might have been made in this room, – a beautiful pink with bell sleeves and black trim -  other cut pieces spread on the table nearby, he held up one of Riis’ photos – of a family in a room much like the one in which we were standing, an immigrant family and some others,  piecing garments.  He asked us to imagine what we might think if we, a typical buyer of one of these dresses, opened our newspaper on the way to the department store and saw this photo of it source. What might our reaction be.

At first I thought, oh, we’re supposed to think about injustice, but then I tried to do some mental role-playing myself and something else hit me.  “You’d think the dress was – dirty,” I said. “You’d have second thoughts about where it came from.”

The guide nodded and said that this was part of Riis’ appeal for reform – that, for example, tuberculosis was being sown into every thread and spread among the good people of New York City because of it.

This fits the bigger picture of most 19th century and early 20th century reform, of course, from women’s suffrage to prohibition: a concern for injustice injected with heavy doses of fear and bigotry. He mentioned that Riis essentially shot and ran – he would come into the tenements, open doors, take his photos and leave,  getting in and out quickly to avoid accusations or appearances of setting up shots or situations. The downside, the guide said,was that he hardly ever spoke to any of the people he photographed and never directly considered the consequences of some types of reform on their livelihood.

Now, I don’t know if any of that is absolutely accurate. Historical assessments shift and change with great regularity. But I have to say, even if I shouldn’t have been, I was surprised by the perspective and quite interested to hear it, aficionado of the Law of Unitended Consquences that I am.

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