Quote:
Originally Posted by ns_kid
Any denizen of these pages who visits NYC should make a point to visit the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, Lower East Side. Built in 1863, the building was a time capsule, empty and untouched for 50 years before being purchased for a museum in 1988.
Over the years it housed thousands of immigrant workers and the building has been only minimally restored to recreate the claustrophobic apartments (six of them now) of the families that lived there. It might well give a sense of what it was like to live in some of those lost Jacob Street tenements.
Much of the rest of the Orchard Street streetscape is also preserved but most of the buildings have been restored to house offices, apartments and shops (not all of them trendy).
It's a real window on the past and well worth a visit if you are in Manhattan.
http://www.tenement.org/about.html
. |
This is very interesting. Few people get to see the condition of these buildings as they would have existed in the 1800's. Once people get to see them they have been restored with modern amenities such as running water, easily accessible washroom facilities, adequate insulation, modern HVAC and meeting modern fire safety codes.