When I visited New York City last autumn, one of the museums that I went to was The Tenament Museum. This museum documents the living conditions and lives of some of the people who lived in the building over the decades. It documents the lives of different groups who came to the city to seek new lives from abroad and gave America its unique "melting pot" of culture and identity.
Each of the apartments have separate tours to be booked at different times, and the tour will give the slice of information about that specific apartment and its inhabitants. "Family Owned" is the tour that I went on. It is the oldest apartment tour offered at the Tenament Museum. Below is the saloon, which would have expanded further to the right behind the present day wall.
"Family Owned" follows the story of German immigrants in the 1870s and spans 75 years. The German husband and wife managed a beer saloon in the basement apartment block, and there were a lot of these in operation in this area of New York. There was a whole life around the saloon with clubs, political organisations, entertainment, food, and drink.
We saw a table with food on it that would have been traditional food served by the German family, and these foods are still popular in Germany - pretzels, sausages, pork, saurkraut, and more.
At the back of the saloon were their private rooms - a kitchen, living room/office, and bedroom.
The family did not have a good ending when the wife passed away, and the husband did a couple of years after. This would have left their small child an orphan, and they have not been able to trace what happned to him.
In the 1930s, the apartment became an auction house selling a variety of items. We had an interactive display of this phase of the tour.
The tour was very interesting, and I would return to one of the other ones.
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