The Fashioning of 97 Orchard Street
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TENEMENT TALES: THE FASHIONING OF 97 ORCHARD STREET Elissa J. Sampson A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Geography. Chapel Hill 2015 Approved by: John Pickles Nina Martin Scott Kirsch Yaakov Ariel Timothy Marr © 2015 Elissa J. Sampson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Elissa J. Sampson: Tenement Tales: The Fashioning of 97 Orchard Street (Under the direction of Nina Martin and John Pickles) New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum reflects its famed immigrant neighborhood’s history in tours of 97 Orchard Street’s reconstructed ethnic household apartments. The Museum interprets its landmarked building to let visitors experience a past multi-ethnic Lower East Side, oscillating among different scales of representation to harness Jewish collective memory pointing to an American immigrant place of origin. One message is that for today’s newcomers as well as those of the past, hardship precedes multi-generational success. I examine the Museum’s discursive and material practices in its acquisition and interpretation of 97 Orchard Street to tell a history of American immigration through the personal stories of past building residents. More broadly, this thesis uses 97 Orchard Street to trace how history is produced, displayed, received and interpreted spatially through a Lower East Side building where narratives stick to place, eventually coming to seem inevitable. Interpretive layers expose how stories accrete and get reused, making them harder to dislodge in a building whose commodified tours re-inscribe collective memories today. I trace how a poor tenement building was transformed into an American national landmark (touching on the role of the state in promoting museums, heritage and citizenship), as a new site of memory at a iii time when gentrification permits the tenement to be newly presented as precious and authentic. The Museum’s use of history involves interdisciplinary debates about migration, memory, representation, historicity and heritage, and urban immigrant acculturation in space and time. One claim I make in conclusion is that its initial interpretive schemes for its building– including its earliest residential stories–simultaneously failed to give full voice to a fuller range of the Lower East Side’s groups (historic and post-1935) and undercut its Jewish specificity of place. An activist museum subsequently found it hard to cordon off a local immigrant present from a historic past re-created in place expressly for visitors. I also claim that the question of whose story gets told in 97 Orchard’s privileged spaces has again shifted as a post-9/11 Lower East Side further hollows out into a place of memory, with hyper-gentrification accompanying Downtown’s shift into a destination. iv To my UNC Professors and Committee whose commitment to critical thinking and intellectual engagement is nothing short of extraordinary; To a different generation of professors whose classes I still treasure: Jay Winter, Geoffrey Barraclough, and Louise Tilley To Justin Ferate—New York’s urban and architectural historian par excellence—officially and truly known as "New York's Most Engaging Tour Guide” To Jonathan Boyarin for support v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A profound acknowledgement of gratitude goes to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum whose larger than life 97 Orchard Street building now defines a neighborhood for its many visitors. The Museum graciously provided access to its archives on its building. Another debt is to Professor Naomi Seidman who ran the 2011 two week workshop for The Posen Summer Seminar: The Literatures of Jewish Secularism and Secularization. Similarly, Professor Sarah Chinn usefully convened the 2011 New York Metro Studies Association Summer Institute on the Lower East Side held at Hunter College. Both created congenial, productive settings to learn from colleagues and workshop current research. Parts of Chapter Five were previously published as Sampson, Elissa J. 2014. "Moral Lessons from a Storied Past in New York City." In Moral Encounters in Tourism, edited by Mary Mostafanezhad and Kevin Hannam, 107-122. Farnham, Surrey England and Burlington VT, USA: Ashgate in association with the Geographies of Leisure and Tourism Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................ii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ..................................................................................................... iii Prologue .............................................................................................................................. vi Want to See the Building? ............................................................................................... vi A Short Tour .................................................................................................................... xi Introduction: The Tenement Museum ............................................................................... 1 Welcome to New York’s Lower East Side ........................................................................ 1 Representing History Now .......................................................................................... 3 A Building for a Nation of Immigrants ........................................................................ 5 The Tenement as American Immigrant Experience .................................................... 7 Questions: The Fashioning of 97 Orchard Street ............................................................ 9 Representing Immigrant Ethnicity ................................................................................ 11 A Past for the Present ................................................................................................... 14 A Universal Great Ghetto .............................................................................................. 16 Searching for the Lower East Side ................................................................................. 20 Community Space .......................................................................................................... 24 Literature Review .......................................................................................................... 26 Center City / Inner City Gentrification ...................................................................... 29 vii Audience ................................................................................................................... 30 Methodology ............................................................................................................. 31 Definitions and Usage ............................................................................................... 33 Thesis Organization ....................................................................................................... 34 Chapter 1: Presenting an “Immigrant Neighborhood” ..................................................... 42 Faith’s House ................................................................................................................. 42 The Past is Present ........................................................................................................ 46 Building Presentism ....................................................................................................... 50 Noblesse Oblige: Reformers as Social Activists ............................................................. 55 “Introduce LES as Immigrant Neighborhood Past and Present” ................................... 60 A Timeless Lower East Side ....................................................................................... 64 Sharing Hardship and Assistance .............................................................................. 67 Affectively Packaged ................................................................................................. 69 Good and Bad Immigrants: Imperfect Descendants ................................................. 70 Modeling a Migrant Future? ..................................................................................... 72 “To Use the Past to Build a Better Future” ................................................................... 75 Commensurable Neighborhood Framings ................................................................ 76 Spatializing New Stories ............................................................................................ 77 Chapter Two: Building Ethnicity ........................................................................................ 81 Navigating a Past Lower East Side ................................................................................. 84 Ethnic as Past Perfect .................................................................................................... 85 Building Diversity at the Start ....................................................................................... 88 viii Contestation and Contingency.................................................................................. 94 Composite Heritage ....................................................................................................... 97 This Group Goes Where? 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