How do you turn a five-floor walk-up that is mostly in ruins into a museum? Preserve it as it was found? Restore its original form? Recreate it to a specific moment in time? The answer is yes to all three. Join Untapped New York for a virtual tour where you will get a behind-the-scenes look at the Tenement Museum, and explore the process and philosophy behind the Museum’s approach to recreating historic spaces.
Tickets to this live virtual tour on Tuesday, February 16th are just $10!
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Photograph by Ryan Lahiff, Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
Built in 1863, 97 Orchard Street wasn’t intended to be a museum. It was tenement—a multi-family residential building built by a German immigrant with the intention to house the ever-growing population of New York City. Once home to thousands of immigrants and migrants, as well as dozens of businesses, the building would be re-made into a museum in 1988 to uncover and share the stories of those who lived and worked there, and illuminate how those experiences have shaped American history and American identity. From the kitchen of Irish immigrants to a German beer saloon, the recreated rooms and shops inside the museum represent the lives of multiple families who lived and worked in the tenement from the 1860s through 1930s.
On this virtual tour you will:
- Uncover the history of 97 Orchard, a 19th-century tenement built by a German immigrant
- Discover how the 158-year-old building was transformed into a museum
- Hear from experts who performed restoration work inside the historic building
- Find out which furnishings and objects are original
- See photographs of the stunning transformation from tenement to museum
Photograph by Ryan Lahiff, Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
Learn what it takes to recreate apartments that tell the stories of the 1860s and 1930s with before and after photographs, highlights of often-overlooked architectural details, and expert interviews with a restoration carpenter and furnishings curator- folks who did the actual work. If you’ve ever visited a historic building and wondered how the walls were plastered, where a piece of furniture came from, or which objects are original, this program will pull back the linoleum and share those secrets with you.
Tickets to this live virtual tour on Tuesday, February 16th are just $10. You can also gain access to unlimited virtual events per month and unlock a video archive of past events as an Untapped New York Insider starting at $10/month.
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