A Glimpse at Turn-of-the-Century Immigrant Life

While visiting my family in Greenwich Village on a beautiful, sunny weekend, I walked over to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum for a peek at another era in this working-class neighborhood between the Williamsburg Bridge and the restaurants of Little Italy, and not far from the bustle of Chinatown. It was well worth the time. See, http://www.tenement.org/ (a virtual tour is available). During an extremely informative 75 minute guided tour, I was immersed in the lives of two recently arrived immigrant families who once lived in the simple, three-room apartments on the first floor of a narrow brick tenement. One family, Julius and Nathalie Gumpertz of Germany, survived the Panic of 1873, and the second, Adolfo and Rosaria Baldizzi of Italy, who resided just next door some fifty years later, endured the Great Depression.

While the museum's well-stocked gift shop (which includes posters stating "Irish Need Not Apply") and its ticket office are in a new structure at the corner of Orchard and Delancey Streets, the museum gives tours of 97 Orchard Street, a tenement built in 1863 which was home to 7000 people during its seventy year lifespan in this densely populated immigrant neighborhood. The tenement is four stories high-- not including the basement that was once a thriving German beer pub. Visitors can take a separate tour of each floor where there are four small apartments with a shared water closet in the hall. As our very personable guide informed the tour group immediately, although we associate the term tenement with poverty, it is simply, as defined by New York State law, a building which houses three or more unrelated families. Hence most New Yorkers have always lived in tenements.

In its earliest days, the Orchard Street tenement's dark hallways and windowless rooms were lit only by candlesticks and heated with dusty coal. Tenants relied on a four-stall outhouse behind the building, which they unfortunately shared with the bar's patrons. Water-borne diseases were prevalent, and the Gumpertz' young son died of diarrhea while a resident of the tenement. When gaslight was introduced, the walls of the narrow and stark entry hall were decorated with painted medallions depicting tranquil pastoral scenes which belied the chaotic street view just beyond the front door, as well as with other adornments that served to entice new tenants. By the 1930's, the tenement's residents enjoyed cold running water in their apartments, and were provided with a toilet on each floor. The Baldizzi's apartment was updated with a large interior transom-like window between the sunny front room and the windowless kitchen. This allowed for the much needed flow of air and light in an era when tuberculosis was a constant worry.

The tenement was ultimately abandoned in 1935 when the landlord refused to replace the thick mahogany banister which ran the length of the stairway between the first and second floors with one made of metal in order to conform with a newly enacted building code to prevent fire hazards. Apparently, the required renovation was much too expensive for the owner to incur during the Depression, thus the tenement remained vacant for fifty years, except for the store fronts at street level.

The museum was created and the tenement slowly restored in the second half of the 1980's after its purchase by an enterprising woman dedicated to bringing the immigrant stories back to life. In 1992, it opened its door to guided tours of the three-room flats occupied by an array of hopeful families arriving in the United States during the country's largest waves of immigration. What is perhaps most impressive is that the museum strives to locate the ancestors of the families who resided in the tenement in order to faithfully re-create the lives that existed within the walls of those tiny apartments. Therefore, visitors are privy to sentimental family stories, and glimpse at personal objects. For example, we learn that Julius Gumpertz is presumed to have abandoned his wife and three young daughters, an action that was not so uncommon during this particularly troubled economic period. However, when Nathalie Gumpertz inherited $600 from her father-in-law in Germany, she was able to move her family to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. And a Gumpertz' descendant, who worked for Cantor-Fitzgerald in 2001, was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Similarly, the Baldizzis' now elderly granddaughter, Josephine, donated a photo of herself as a girl playing on the roof of the building, as well as the solemn portraits of her Sicilian great-grandparents, which rest peacefully on a chest of drawers in the living room of the apartment on Orchard Street, long after the family moved on to better opportunities in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The museum has also captured Josephine Baldizzi's voice on tape recounting her vivid memories of the cozy kitchen and her grandmother's extraordinary cleanliness.

Perhaps one of the points that most impressed me during the tour was when we were told about Adolfo Baldizzi, a talented cabinetmaker who remained unemployed for over four years during the Depression, and was at the mercy of prejudiced "welfare" workers who treated immigrants with disdain. In order to receive the Government assistance made available by FDR's Administration, Baldizzi had to purchase fake identification to prove his U.S. citizenship, which, of course, he did not have. I looked around the room and saw my fellow tourists nodding with understanding when the tour guide explained Baldizzi's desperation. It seemed obvious to everyone that this poor man's actions were wholly justified under the circumstances. I couldn't help wonder, though, why it is that sometimes current generations of Americans forget the struggles of their heritage, and appear unable to empathize with the sadly similar plights of today's immigrants.