Migration History in Five Stories (and a Basement): The Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Abstract

IN LATE 2012, JOHN SCHNEIDER’S SALOON on Manhattan’s Lower East Side reopened—nearly a century and a half after Schneider first set up shop—and this time, without the beer. Schneider, a Bavarian immigrant, and his Westphalian wife, Caroline, ran their lager beer Lokal out of the basement of a tenement building at 97 Orchard Street from 1864, just after the building’s construction, to the mid1880s. Today, a reconstruction of Schneider’s front barroom, complete with polished bar top, beer Steine, and a “free lunch” table with (plaster) comestibles, greets visitors to the “Shop Life” exhibit at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Shop Life, now in its third year, exemplifies the approaches that have made the Tenement Museum one of the most innovative and compelling interpretive sites of immigration and urban history in the United States. Located in perhaps the longeststanding immigrant neighborhood in the country, and centered on the fivestory tenement built at 97 Orchard in 1863 (fig. 1), the museum uses period reconstructions of tenants’ apartments to explore the lives of some of the thousands of newcomers who rented there between 1863 and 1935, when the upper floors became a warehouse. Shop Life goes downstairs to examine the immigrant businesses that ran out of the building’s basement over a century—Schneider’s saloon, Lustgarten’s kosher butcher shop, Marcus’s wholesale auction house, and Meda’s discount underwear store, among others. In its use of one locale to explore a facet of immigrant life across multiple groups and a stretch of time reaching down to the present, Shop Life reflects the museum’s focus on immigration history as a multiethnic matter that should involve visitors making connections between their own and their families’ experience and the nation’s immigrant past and present. This article provides an overview of the Tenement Museum, its history and recent initiatives, and its potential as a resource for college and university teachers, along with some observations about the challenges it faces in pursuing a public immigration history. That pursuit has involved a notable