ABSTRACT

To retrofit an old tenement building for touring in 1994, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City re-created historic residential apartments within a living neighborhood. The Museum’s historic tenement-97 Orchard Street-is located at an intersection of a rapidly gentrifying area of the old Jewish Lower East Side with a visibly growing immigrant Chinatown. For many visitors, the Tenement Museum is part of a Lower Manhattan immigration triad in which the Museum marks the first immigrant housing destination in partnership with the National Park Services’ better known sites of immigration, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The Museum serves as a site of heritage tourism for immigrant descendants, including American Jews for whom the neighborhood is seen as a site of American origin, particularly for families that arrived before World War I.