Lower East Side Tenement Museum

You are approaching a five-story red brick building that looks much like its neighbors, but it holds a secret that makes it unique in American history. While other buildings on Orchard Street were continuously renovated or demolished over the last century, this specific tenement at number 97 remained frozen in time. In 1935, its landlord decided it was too expensive to bring the building up to modern fire safety codes, so he simply evicted the residents, boarded up the windows, and sealed the upper floors. For over fifty years, those apartments sat untouched, preserving the layers of wallpaper, floorboards, and daily debris of thousands of immigrant families who had lived there since it was built in 1863. When researchers rediscovered these rooms in 1988, they realized they had found a rare urban time capsule that could tell the story of the working-class people who defined the American immigrant experience.