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VOICE ONE:
This is Steve Ember.
VOICE TWO:
And this is Bob Doughty with theVOA Special English program EXPLORATIONS. Today, we tell about anunusual museum in New York City. It explores and celebrates thestories of people from different nations who came to the UnitedStates to live.
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VOICE ONE:
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is one of the smaller,unusual museums in New York City. It lets visitors see andexperience how early immigrants to the United States lived. Themuseum is a building at Ninety-Seven Orchard Street. It was one ofthe first tenements in New York City. It was built inEighteen-Sixty-Three.
The word “tenement” comes from a Latin word meaning “to hold.” A”tenement” building holds many rooms where different families lived.
The word is not used much anymore in the United States. Whenpeople use the word today, they mean an old crowded building wherepoor families live in terrible, unhealthy conditions. But in theEighteen-Hundreds, the word “tenement” simply meant a building inwhich many families lived.
Later, many immigrant families were able to improve their livingconditions by moving from the lower east side to other areas of NewYork City. Some lived in the same kinds of buildings, but the livingareas were cleaner and larger. They did not want to call themtenements, so they called them “apartment” buildings or “flats”instead.
VOICE TWO:
History experts say that more than half of the people in New YorkCity lived in tenements in Eighteen-Sixty-Three. To get one of theseliving areas, a family had to pay one month’s rent to the owner,usually about ten dollars. This money gave the family the use ofabout one-hundred square meters of living space often divided intothree rooms.
The tenement building at Ninety-Seven Orchard Street shows thekind of space families had to live in. The front room was thelargest. It was the only one with a window to the outside. Behind itwere a kitchen for cooking and a small bedroom for sleeping. Therewas no running water, no toilets, showers or baths. Six areas wherepeople left their body wastes were in the back yard, next to theonly place to get drinking water. Such unhealthy conditions led tothe spread of many diseases in such buildings.
Over the years, New York City officials passed laws to improveconditions in the tenements. The owners of Ninety-Seven OrchardStreet placed gas lighting in the building in the Eighteen-Nineties.They added water and indoor toilets in Nineteen-Oh-Five, andelectric power in Nineteen-Twenty-Four. But they refused to make anymore required improvements. They closed the building inNineteen-Thirty-Five.
The rooms remained closed until Nineteen-Eighty-Eight, althoughthe street level of the building continued to be used as storesuntil Nineteen-Eighty-Seven. In the Nineteen-Nineties, the buildingwas declared a National Historic Place protected by the federalgovernment.
VOICE ONE:
In recent years, museum officials have been researching thehistory of the building and its twenty apartments. Museumresearchers found more than one-thousand objects that belonged topeople who lived there during the years. These include kitchendevices, medicine bottles, letters, newspapers, old metal money andpieces of cloth. They have also learned the histories of many of theseven-thousand people from more than twenty countries who livedthere. And they have spoken with and recorded the memories of peoplewho lived at Ninety-Seven Orchard Street as children.
VOICE ONE(cont):
The museum officials used this information to re-create some ofthe apartments as they would have looked during four time periods inthe building’s history. These four apartments are what visitors seewhen they go to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Let us join oneof the guided visits.
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VOICE TWO:
We are entering the apartment of the Gumpertz (GUM-perts) family.They were Jews from Germany who lived here in theEighteen-Seventies.
On October seventh, Eighteen-Seventy-Four, Julius Gumpertzdressed for work, left the building and never returned. He leftbehind his wife Nathalie (NA-ta-lee) and their four children, ageseight months to seven years. Nathalie was forced to support herchildren by making dresses in the apartment. She earned about eightdollars a week, enough to pay for the apartment each month and sendher children to school.
VOICE ONE:
The Gumpertz apartment in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum hasa sewing machine and other tools similar to those Nathalie used inher work. She made the largest room into her work space. That waswhere she saw people who wanted clothes made or repaired. It wasalso where she did the sewing.
VOICE TWO:
This next apartment we see belonged to the Italian Baldizzi(bal-DEETS-ee) family during the period known as the GreatDepression. Adolfo Baldizzi, his wife Rosaria (ro-SAR-ee-ya) andtheir two children moved to the Orchard Street tenement inNineteen-Twenty-Eight. They quickly became friends with otherfamilies in the building. Their daughter Josephine liked to helpother people. For example, every Friday night she would turn on thelights in the nearby apartment of the Rosenthal family. TheRosenthals could not turn on the lights themselves because it wasthe Jewish holy day.
Josephine Baldizzi remembers those long ago days. Here is arecording of her voice as she tells how she felt each week afterseeing Missus Rosenthal in the window motioning to her to turn onthe lights:
JOSEPHINE BALDIZZI: “It made me very proud to have to do that. Iused to feel good that she chose me to do that job for her. And Ican still see her till today-the vision of her in that window. Ithas never left my memory.”
VOICE ONE:
This third apartment belonged to the Rogarshevsky(RO-ga-shef-skee) family of Lithuania. They moved to Ninety-SevenOrchard Street sometime between Nineteen-Seven and Nineteen-Ten.Abraham and Fannie Rogarshevsky had six children. Abraham developedthe disease tuberculosis. In this apartment, we can see some of thetools used to fight the disease. But the efforts did not cure him.Abraham Rogarshevsky died in Nineteen-Eighteen.
The table in the apartment is set with models of the kinds offoods that would have been eaten after Abraham’s funeral. The foodsinclude hard boiled eggs and round bread. Both represent the circleof life, from birth to death.
Fannie Rogarshevsky was faced with the same problem that NathalieGumpertz had so many years earlier. What could she do to support herfamily? She got the owner of Ninety-Seven Orchard Street to let herclean and do other work in the building in exchange for rent.
VOICE TWO:
The fourth apartment is an example of living history. It can bevisited on a special tour. It belonged to the Confino (Con-FEE-no)family in Nineteen-Sixteen. Abraham and Rachel Confino had come toNew York from what was the Ottoman Empire but now is part of Greece.They were Sephardic Jews, Jews who had been born in North Africanand Middle Eastern countries.
Visitors are welcomed here by a living history actress who playsthe thirteen-year-old daughter Victoria Confino. She will tell aboutVictoria’s experience living in the building. Here, she explains thelanguage of Sephardic Jews, called Ladino, and sings part of a sadLadino song:
VICTORIA CONFINO: “Oh, it’s a very mixed up language. It’s like alittle bit Spanish. We call it Judeo Espagnol, and it’s a little bitTurkish, a little bit Hebrew — a lot of languages mixed up alltogether.”
VOICE ONE:
Museum officials say one of the purposes of the Lower East SideTenement Museum is to provide its visitors with a usable past. Theywant visitors to use the stories of the people who lived in thebuilding to start discussions about issues from the past that areimportant today. Examples of these kinds of problems include thoseof immigrants and single mothers who must deal with poor livingconditions and find ways to build new lives.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum has been trying to exploreways to help solve modern problems through understanding history. Itis cooperating with other international historic places around theworld to do this. The District Six Museum in South Africa, the GulagMuseum labor camp in Siberia, and Project Remember in Argentina arepart of the project. Others are the Terazin Memorial in the CzechRepublic, the Work House in England and the Slave House in Senegal.Officials of these historic places are working together to helpexplore and solve modern problems in their own societies.
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VOICE TWO:
This Special English program was written by Nancy Steinbach andproduced by Caty Weaver. Our studio engineer is Keith Holmes. Thisis Bob Doughty.
VOICE ONE:
And this is Steve Ember. Join us again next week for anotherEXPLORATIONS program on the Voice of America.