Biography of a Tenement House in New York City: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard StreetI trace my ancestry back to the Mayflower, writes Andrew S. Dolkart. Not to the legendary ship that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, but to the more prosaic tenement on the southeast corner of East Broadway and Clinton Street named the Mayflower, where my father was born in 1914 to Russian-Jewish immigrants. For Dolkart, the experience of being raised in a tenement became a metaphor for the life that was afforded countless thousands of other immigrant children growing up in Lower Manhattan during the past century and more. Dolkart presents for us 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. Dolkart 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 started to change, and concluding in the present day as the building is reincarnated as the museum. children, who were part of the transformation of New York City and the fabric of everyday American urban life. |
Contents
THE TENEMENT AND ITS INHABITANTS 13 | 10 |
DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF 97 ORCHARD STREET 22 | 12 |
NEW TENEMENT LAWS AND THE CHANGING CHARACTER | 28 |
Copyright | |
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97 Orchard Street Abram Allen Street apartments at 97 architects ARCHITECTURAL block Builders Guide Census Charles Lockwood Church Commission Confino COURTESY OF ANDREW COURTESY OF LOWER Croton Aqueduct DeForest DeForest and Veiller Delancey Street Department of Buildings DOLKART dumbbell East Side Tenement Factory Inspector Figure fire escapes floor Folder German Gumpertz hall Historic Preservation History of Housing I-card immigrants inner bedrooms installed Josephine Baldizzi kitchen Lawrence Veiller lived Lower East Side Lubove Manhattan neighborhoods nineteenth century Paint Analysis PARLOR Plunz population Preservation & Illumination Real Estate Record rear Record and Builders rented Report residents Rogarshevsky Romaniote rowhouses Sanitary Side Tenement Museum Slums and Housing tenants tenement apartments tenement construction Tenement House Act Tenement House Department Tenement House Law Tenement House Problem Tenement House Reform Tenement Law Tenement Museum Archives Tenement Story Tenth Ward toilets University Press walls water closets York City York City's York Tribune