Biography of a Tenement House in New York City

In this groundbreaking volume, previously available in editions first distributed and then published by UVA Press, Andrew Dolkart presents a precise and informative biography of a typical tenement house in New York City that became, in 1988, the site for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. He documents, analyzes, and interprets the architectural and social history of this building at 97 Orchard Street, starting in the 1860s when it was erected, moving on to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the neighborhood began to change, and concluding as the building became a museum offering a lasting tribute to the legacy of immigrants and their children, who were part of the transformation of New York City and the fabric of everyday American urban life. The third edition updates the history of New York’s tenements by adding the story of an African American waiter, Joseph Moore, who lived with his wife and stepdaughter on Laurens Street, now recounted in an exhibition entitled “A Union of Hope.” This newly added apartment tour originated with a letter received by the museum’s founders from a woman named Gina Manuel in the 1980s, asking them not to forget her Black ancestors, whose “spirits walk those halls and their bones lay in the earth there.” Years in the making, the Joseph and Rachel Moore exhibit traces Joseph’s history from his free Black community of Belvidere, New Jersey, through his family’s migration to New York City, where he lived in the same building as Gina Manuel’s great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, and in so doing provides a more fully realized account of the neighborhood, the city, and the range of residents whose stories are woven into the nation's history.