When I was instructed to attend a tour at the Tenement Museum for class, I wasn’t sure how I felt. On the one hand, I like museums – but I mainly frequent art museums. I really want to like history, but it’s kind of boring.
I went to the Tenement Museum website and read about the “Hard Times” and “Irish Outsiders” tours, which were the two I had to choose from. I decided to buy a ticket for the 12:15 p.m. “Irish Outsiders” tour on Saturday. As I was walking to the corner of Orchard and Delancey streets (where the museum is located) I happened upon a cool coffee shop and I told myself that I would treat myself to a coffee after I had served my time.
I wanted to buy everything in the gift shop as soon as I got there. It was very hard to restrain myself. I also had bought the wrong ticket for the same time as my tour, and the lady working the ticket counter was kind enough to refund me even though that’s technically against the museum’s policy.
The tour started and I was immediately interested in everything the guide had to say. The museum owns a tenement building that was built in 1863. In 1935, it was condemned unfit to live in and no one entered it until 1988, when the museum was allowed in.
The part of the building I toured housed the Moore family: Irish immigrants Bridget and Joseph, and their three daughters. It was three rooms and 325 square feet.
They moved to the building after living in an area called Five Points, which was home to gang violence. Five Points had a large Irish community, but Bridget and Joseph wanted their kids to be safer. They relocated to a tenement (the one I toured) that had running water and toilets in the backyard, something they didn’t have before. However, most of the people living in the building were German (there was only one other Irish family) and they quickly became outcasts.
After the tour guide explained all of this, she took us upstairs to a small room with about 10 folding chairs and two benches. She played two Irish songs that set the tone of how it felt to be an Irish immigrant. We discussed the songs as a group before we toured the rest of the tiny apartment. My group was very lively (a couple from Canada, a couple from California, and a man from England who lived in a tenement building in Scotland when he was in college) and I learned that the tour guide and one of the men both graduated from NYU.
I was a little bummed when the tour was over because I liked it so much more than I had expected. I thought about the hour I had just spent on my walk back to Union Square. And I did return for that coffee.
