First of all, you had to take the back stairs into the privy yard to use the privy—one of four to six outhouses. You also had to come down to this yard to get water for any purpose at all; it had the only spigot serving the building. On the first floor, next to the yard, was Schneider’s Saloon. If it was at all like New York bars today, you might not always be in the mood for its company.
But that’s how it was in 1869 at 97 Orchard Street, and these conditions were more generous than the law mandated—the sewer was even flushed (into the East River) once a week.
My group is standing in the back yard of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. This is the new Irish family tour that the museum debuted on June 17. Our guide, Ya Yun Teng, takes us up the back stairs to the fourth floor and, first, into a “ruin” apartment. (The building was shuttered in 1935 and left untouched until the tenement museum took it over in 1988.)
In an interior window—a law passed in 1901 specified that each room must have a window, but only one room in an apartment actually opened to the outdoors—we watch slides while we listen to period songs that give a flavor of life for immigrants at the time, such as “Thousands Are Sailing,” which goes along with the “American wake” they’d throw in Ireland the night before a family left for the States, probably never to return.
Next we proceed into the new family apartment, set up to show the living experience of Joseph and Bridget Moore and their three daughters (Mary, 4, Jane, 3, and baby Agnes), who lived somewhere in the building in 1869. The afternoon light is dim; they would have had to rely on kerosene lamps. The bed takes up about half the bedroom, in the back; the rest of the room is crowded with linens and trunks.
The kitchen table, in the middle room, is spread with bread, potatoes, onions, and ceramic bottles of beer. The kitchen also holds the washbasin and a clothesline, with stockings and tiny girls’ dresses, by the large coal stove. It’s a hot day, and it’s easy to imagine how smoky and close it must have been, especially if you were wearing a long skirt.
Imagine trying to take care of two toddlers and a baby in that space.
Then there’s the central issue of the milk, which you’d have to buy every day—there’s no refrigerator. It was often contaminated; this was probably the cause of baby Agnes’s scrofula and malnutrition. She was sick pretty much from birth, and she died in the apartment before she was six months old.
Her funeral vigil is arranged in the front room, with a circle of chairs. This parlor is much lighter (having a true window) and not as cramped. The space and its careful decor seem to represent the family’s aspirations, yet now it’s a scene of sorrow. Our guide turns on a recording of a woman keening a song of mourning.
The plain white wooden coffin sits on a cloth-covered table. A rosary lies on top of it. It’s so very small, almost as tall as it is long.
The apartment at 97 Orchard was a step up for the Moores from their previous place in Five Points. But they weren’t able to stay long, less than a year. They moved from here to 224 Elizabeth Street, which the New York Times described as an “area of destitution.” Bridget gave birth to five more daughters, only two of whom survived.
Their grim story was a common one. Poor and often unwelcome, the Irish (among others) had to struggle hard in this city, and some of them didn’t make it.
Eventually, though, things got better; the tour continues in the apartment next door where the Katz family lived in the 1920s and ’30s. Milk got pasteurized. Disease became less mysterious, and hygiene bloomed. Gaslight and indoor plumbing arrived.
End of tour. Now you can check your cellphones and complain that you just had to spend an hour without air conditioning.
Questions? Take the tour yourself and learn much more! You can also see how they put it together on the museum’s Flickr page.
