After Ellis Island: A Triumph of the Human Spirit
How’s this for an American dream:
It’s 1874. You’ve just come off the boat from Poland. You speak no English. You’re packed with your husband and four children in a tiny tenement apartment in New York’s Lower East Side.
Then your husband disappears.
And your baby dies.
Nathalia Gumpertz survived all this, eking out a living for her three daughters by sewing dresses and trimming hats for eight dollars a week.
And now her life is a stunning history lesson featured in a most unusual museum, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
Everything here is real—a real tenement, restored with real objects owned by real people and animated with real stories of success and tragedy.
This building, 97 Orchard Street, was home to ten thousand people from twenty-five countries from 1863 until 1935, when it was closed and its residents evicted.
It was sealed up for fifty years—a time capsule awaiting the bulldozer.
But Ruth Abram and her partner found it first.
They had been searching the city for a tenement to house a museum that would, Abram says, “speak to the greatness of the human spirit.”
A tenement museum, Abram believed, would help Americans appreciate where we’ve come from—and therefore be more tolerant of the newcomers now in our land.
That was ten years ago.
This year, Congress is poised to make the museum part of the National Park Service. And seventy-five thousand visitors will meet Nathalia Gumpertz and see how she lived.
They’ll also meet the Baldizzi family, Catholics from Sicily, who lived in the building in the l930s. And the Confino family, who came to America from Turkey in 1913.
Their lives have been re-created but not sanitized.
Visitors gather at 90 Orchard Street for guided tours of the tenement across the street. The hour-long tour begins in the cramped hallway of the six-story tenement, then leads up the creaking stairway. It’s dark and scary.
As many as eighteen people lived in each apartment at the turn of the century, when Orchard Street was the most populated place on earth. Nearly half of the babies born in this building died.
Nathalia was successful enough to eventually move to the Upper East Side, where she died in 1894 at age fifty-eight.
Her story still touches Abram, the museum’s president, as do the others.
“For everybody who emigrates, there is this potential for greatness, for great courage,” she says. “These people are role models for all of us.”
Abram still guides one tour through the tenement each week—and each time she is struck by the immigrants’ self-sacrifice.
“Our story is the story of adults sacrificing their own dreams for their children’s and grandchildren’s dreams.”
—by Jan Tuckwood from The Palm Beach Post, July 5, 1998
Click here to navigate between: The New Colossus, After Ellis Island and Homework.
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