Sometimes you walk into a setting that takes you back in time, decades, even centuries, before you were born, and there is a familiarity that penetrates the soul. Often, it is so ephemeral it slips away before you can grasp it with your consciousness and you dismiss it as déjà vu. Other times it lingers nearby, a presence looking over your shoulder, meaning you no harm but disappearing from view whenever you turn to look.
That’s the feeling I got when I walked into an era inhabited by my great-grandparents and their parents before them in a tenement building on New York City’s Lower East Side. I have no knowledge whether any of my ancestors lived in tenements in what was, in its time, a bustling garment district and the most populous few blocks on Earth. Still, there was something about it that made me feel both familiar and uncomfortable. It was as if distant, distant memories, somehow harking back as if in a dream through lives other than mine, had been roused from a deep sleep.
The address was, and is, 97 Orchard Street where 7,000 immigrants, many of them just off the proverbial boat from Germany, Ireland and other nations, lived between 1863 and 1935. When you walk up the stoop and into the building itself, past the storefronts just below street level that served clientele for many years after the apartments inside had been vacated, you step back in time.
That’s because the landlord evicted all the tenants who were living there in 1934, with the exception of one elderly woman named Fanny Rogarshevsky, the building’s senior resident who had raised her family there, transforming the kitchen into a bedroom for their daughters every night. She stayed on as something of the caretaker and janitor for four floors of empty apartments, each comprised of a basic three rooms and providing about 325 square feet for kitchen, bedrooms and living area. Fanny herself left in 1941 for quarters provided by her grown children. She had lived there for more than three decades, the early years as a young mother without electricity and running water. Many of the immigrants used the rooms for primitive versions of sweatshops, cutting, basting, stitching and sewing garment pieces in the so-called bargain district, which by 1910 was producing 70 percent of all women’s clothing in the country and 40 percent of all men’s. Fanny and her husband, Abraham, had come to America from Lithuania as Abram and Zippe Heller, and, as is often the lot of immigrants, their names changed after arriving in America. A family of eight people lived in those three rooms, and Abraham, a garment worker, working long hours in a dark unventilated shop and constantly breathing in fibers and dust, died from tuberculosis in 1918 after being bedridden and cared for by Fanny for many months.
As I walked through the rooms at 97 Orchard Street, now fittingly the property of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, I thought about Fanny and others like her walking up and down flights of steps to fetch water for the most basic of needs. It was these steps that led to the evictions in 1934, with the landlord abstaining from the expense of getting those historic and steep stairways up to code. There was even a shared privy in the so-called backyard of the building—a composite of three or four outhouses—that was the only restroom facility for the tenants. That, too, required trekking up and down the precipitous steps for the first few decades after the building was constructed in 1863. With more than a dozen families in the building at a given time—some with six, seven and eight members—there was a definite need for a professional with an intriguing name, the midnight soiler. He was the one who cleaned out the human waste accumulating at such communal repositories throughout the Lower East Side.
One of the tragic aspects of the lives of these urban settlers in what is a nation of immigrants was the infant mortality rate. Children of immigrants at that time died at 10 times the rate of the children of the native born. This was dramatized in an apartment restored to look as it would have when a family of Irish immigrants, the Moores, lived there in 1869 and helplessly watched their daughter, Agnes, waste away and die at the age of five months. One of the rooms is even set up as it would have been at the dead child’s wake, a tradition in Irish mourning. For many Irish immigrants who sailed to America, an “American wake” was held for them by family and friends before departing because they knew they would never see them again.
As a resident of rural and small-town America—and dairy country at that—I found all of this to be fascinating. I live in town, but like the folks in the countryside, I walk freely in and out of my house and am surrounded by trees, grass and living things other than people. I tried to imagine life in these stacked rooms crammed with humanity, doubling as living and work space with people literally working themselves to death. Most of all, I dwelled on the ultimate indignity of little Agnes Moore’s death. She died of a form of malnutrition, called marasmus on her death certificate, and a contributor to her death was the milk that was sold on the streets.
As the chorus of a popular Irish song of the time warned: “Oh, mothers, be careful and cautious/What milk for your children you buy,/Be careful ’tis not the swill poison,/That’s sold in some carts that drive by.”
The “swill milk” sold on the streets was often contaminated and came from cows fed on distillery waste, with virtually no nutrients and then doctored with ammonia and chalk to make it look right and generally palatable. Mothers like poor Mrs. Bridget Moore would empty on to the street to have their pitchers filled with milk ladled from milk cans on carts. The very liquid that was supposed to provide sustenance for infants and children was actually killing them. It was even depicted in a Thomas Nast cartoon in Harper’s Weekly in 1878, with the milk vender portrayed as a grotesque caricature of death.
It is a sad chapter in American history in many ways, almost impossible to imagine today, even in the most trying of economic times. Agnes Moore never had a chance at life and Fanny Rogarshevsky was, in a way, one of the stories of success who came out of the tenements of New York and our other cities. The surviving children of survivors like Fanny went on to become some of our greatest success stories, and it was perhaps the legacy of the tenement, fueled by the sacrifices made there, that drove and inspired them.
IA visit to a tenement might be the very thing to help you appreciate what you have now. There are tours of the building itself at 97 Orchard Avenue, with the museum headquarters across the street to sign up for tours or learn more. The website is at www.tenement.org and you can even get a virtual tour.
