Irish Apartment Tours Begin at Lower East Side Tenement Museum
By Margaret Foster | Online Only | June 17, 2008
Visitors to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum can now glimpse the way Irish immigrants lived in a New York City tenement during the Civil War. Public tours began today at the newly-opened, fourth-floor apartment inside the Manhattan museum.
"Talking about the Irish experience is something we haven't done at all," says museum spokeswoman Kate Shober. "People are really excited to experience that part of New York's history."
Curators spent five years researching the Moore family and recreating their home inside the landmark 1864 building. One of 20 apartments inside the Orchard Street structure, this is the sixth to be restored and opened to the public. Several unrestored rooms at the museum, which opened in 1988, can also be visited.
The parlor of the fourth-floor apartment before restoration
Credit: Lower East Side Tenement Museum
The museum has two more projects under way, including the recreation of both the "privy yard" and the building's basement saloon, which a German immigrant operated from the 1860s until the 1880s. Schneider's Lager Beer Saloon will likely open in 2010.
Earlier this year, the museum bought a nearby building to renovate as a larger visitors center. It expects 140,000 visitors this year, Shober says.
Last month, because of encroaching development, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the Lower East Side one of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
The museum is an official project of Save America's Treasures, the public-private partnership between the National Park Service and the National Trust. The Tenement Museum was awarded a $250,000 federal SAT grant in 2000. In 2003, SAT and the National Trust fpr Historic Preservation selected it from hundreds of projects nationwide to appear as one of 12 SAT sites featured in the inaugural year of the National Trust and HGTV's "Restore America" initiative; it also received a $75,000 award for its participation.
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Comments
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