CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Dedicated to the history of immigration, the museum was founded in 1988 by Ruth J. Abram and Anita Jacobson and is housed in an 1863 building built by Lukas Glockner, an immigrant from Prussia. It tells of the experiences of blacks, Irish, Germans, Chinese and others who came to this country between 1865 and 1935 in the hope of finding a better life. The building itself shows the precarious conditions in which many of the immigrants lived with apartments no larger than 30 square meters (323 Square Feet) where there was a lack of running water, sewage and electricity. Even the windows were often luxury and various rooms were lacking despite a law of 1897, the Old Law Tenement so-called dumbbell tenement law, which provided for at least one window for each room.

References

Kenneth T. Jackson, Lisa Keller, Nancy Flood. The Encyclopedia of New York City: Second Edition. Yale University Press, 2010. p. 770
Lower East Side Tenement Museum (National Park Service)
Lower East Side Tenement Museum (Wikipedia)