Saturday in the City

Saturday, January 19, 2012 – Saturday in the City

I slept late this morning, and I mean really late.  I didn’t open my eyes until a record-shattering 9:45 a.m.  I felt great when I got up, not a single achy muscle, after sleeping on the Ikea couch in Elisa and Christian’s apartment.  Maybe I should get rid of my bed and replace it with one of those Ikea leather sectionals. 

I pushed back the curtains to reveal a brilliant blue sky with plenty of sunshine.  Fortunately, temperatures had moderated since Friday.  I was full of energy and eager to get out on the streets again.  Christian had to go into the office on Saturday, so Elisa and I went out in search of brunch, which is not hard to find in New York.  We ended up at Zoe, on Eldridge Street, where Elisa had her first taste of Middle Eastern shakshouka and I chose a Mexican-inspired dish of shrimp and eggs.  We followed up our meal with a leisurely stroll through the neighborhood.  I even did a little shopping, to support the local economy. 

Flowers for sale on the Lower East Side

Shakshouka for brunch at Zoe

Mexican shrimp and eggs for brunch at Zoe

Then it was time to head south across Delancy Street to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.  First, we had an excellent hour-long guided tour of a tenement on Orchard Street, which was home to immigrants from the 1860s to the 1930s.  The building at 97 Orchard Street was built by a German immigrant in the early 1860s.  There were six floors of apartments, with four apartments per floor.  Initially, there was no heat, no plumbing, no electricity, and no gas.  On the ground floor, there was a bar.  The 24 families who lived in the building shared four outhouses and one water pump, which were located outside, in back of the building.  They burned coal in stoves for heat and cooking.  Candles and kerosene lamps provided light.  Little natural light entered the building.  Whole families, sometimes as many as a dozen people, were crammed into the 325 square foot apartments, which were divided into three rooms (only one of which had an exterior window).

In the late 19^th/early 20^th century, several families at 97 Orchard Street operated sweatshops in their apartments.  Sweatshops originally meant home-based factories.  Most of these sweatshops produced clothing.  These sweatshops were an important part of the chain of production in the garment industry.  The “sweat” referred to squeezing out the profits.

With the introduction of building codes in the early 1900s, landlords were forced to improve conditions in the tenements.  The owner of 97 Orchard was required to add indoor plumbing, which resulted in two toilets per floor (in other words, two toilets for every four families).  Since each room now required ventilation, they had to break through walls to provide interior windows.  They also brought in gas for cooking and created airshafts.  Residents didn’t have electricity, however, until the 1920s.  During the 1930s, the building was deemed unsuitable for occupancy since the owner was unwilling to replace the wood in the public areas with fireproof materials.  I wish I could show you some photos, but the museum doesn’t allow visitors to take photographs.  But check out the museum’s website.

After the tour, we watched a fascinating film about the immigrant experience in the museum’s Visitors Center.  Although I knew quite a bit about the history of immigration from teaching U.S. history to my ESOL students, I learned some interesting new facts.  For example:

Tenement is just another word for apartment building. 

The tenements on the Lower East Side (LES) were built in the middle of the 1800s to provide housing for the growing number of immigrants, primarily from Germany and Ireland.

There were so many German immigrants in New York in the 1800s that the city was the 3^rd largest German-speaking city in the world, after Berlin and Vienna. 

The Irish were the largest immigrant group in New York in the 19^th century.

By the early 1900s, the LES was the most densely populated place in the world, with 1000 people per acre. 

The area was home first to German immigrants and Irish immigrants in the mid-1800s.  Later, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it became the home of Italian immigrants and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.  Later, in the mid-20^th century, immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic moved in the area. 

After spending a couple of hours at the museum, we had worked up quite an appetite, and since we had a late dinner reservation, we had a little multicultural tea party to tide us over.  We picked up boiled veggie dumplings from Prosperity Dumpling on Clinton Street, made some chai back at Elisa’s apartment, and finished off with some baklava that was lurking in the refrigerator.