Tenement Museum

You are approaching ninety-seven Orchard Street, a building that serves as a time capsule of New York City history. In nineteen thirty-five, the landlord evicted all residents of the upper floors rather than pay to install mandatory fire safety features, leaving the apartments shuttered and frozen in time for over fifty years. When historians Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson discovered the building in nineteen eighty-eight, they found it remarkably intact, with layers of wallpaper, original floorboards, and abandoned personal items still resting where they had been left decades earlier. This accidental preservation allowed the museum to reconstruct the lives of thousands of working-class families who called these tiny, three-room apartments home.