The Sweat Shop Tour of the Tenement Museum, NYC

During my visit to New York City I managed to squeeze in a Sweat Shop Tour sponsored by the Tenement Museum. This tour was of a tiny apartment of 300+ square feet, occupied by about 12 members of the Levine family, in a building very near the Tenement Museum gift shop at 97 Orchard Street (around the corner from DeLancey) on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The tenement’s landlord, Lucas Glockner, was exceptional in that he brought fresh water from an aqueduct instead of digging a well near the privies in the backyard, which in other tenement buildings caused contamination from the privies to the wells and causes diseases like cholera.

Eastern European Jewish immigrants and one Irish family, the Moores, lived in his building and sewed for a living as home industries. Department stores would send cut-out pieces of cloth to be sewn into dresses to the building residents. Papa, the tailor, had to hire a baster to hand-sew the pieces together in large stitches to hold them together; a presser to use hot irons to press the pieces once the tailor sewed them together with a tiny little sewing machine that was the third the size of an antique Singer sewing machine. It would definitely hurt your eyes to sew on such a machine for 10-12 hours a day, six days a week.

One of the advantages of having a home industry on your own time for a Jew, the guide told us, is that you would be able to observe the Jewish sabbath, which is on Saturday. Most working hours at the time were six days a week, Monday through Saturday.

The Tenement Museum did not allow photography of any kind, even without a flash, which the Fashion Museum allowed, so I was reduced to photographing pages of my Tenement Museum calendar. Sorry about that.

After I looked up stories of the Eastern European Jewish migration to the garment industry on the Lower East Side of New York, formerly pasture land in the mid-nineteenth century, I realized that the tour I took was focused on a particular family at a particular time. In that family, papa was the tailor. His profit on each dress he made, which sold for $15.00, was 75 cents. He would have to share the 75 cents with his baster and presser.

Women garment workers started the labor movement in the United States by going on strike at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and other sweatshops, beginning in 1908 and again in 1909-1910. A year later, in 1911, 145-146 immigrant women died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the garment district. Only one of four elevators worked, and you had to walk down a long narrow corridor to get to it. The fire escapes were so narrow that it would have taken hours, hours the women did not have, to evacuate 600 workers. A supervisor tried to put out the fire that started in a ragbin, but the hose was rotten and the valve was rusted shut. The one working elevator stopped working after four trips, and women who made it downstairs found one of the two exit doors locked shut from the outside, to prevent stealing, and burned alive.

Those who protest “business-stifling regulation” should think of the conditions prompting regulations and fire codes following the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Max Blanck and Isaac Harris owned the Triangle Factory. It was located on the top three floors of the Asch Building on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in Manhattan. Nearly all of the workers were teenaged girls who did not speak English and made only about $15 per week working 12 hours a day, every day.

As a result of fire code regulations, in 1935, city government forced residential building landlords to replace wooden staircases leading from the streets to inside their buildings with metal staircases. Lucas Glockner, the landlord who brought fresh water to his tenants from an aqueduct instead of contaminated water from a well dug near privies, couldn’t afford to replace his wooden staircases. Therefore, his building where I took the Sweat Shop Tour was shut down to residents and remained open only to business tenants.

How ironic is that?

So for 50 years, from 1935-1985, the building was preserved and decayed at the same time. Historic artifacts were preserved/decayed, but at least they were there as they had been left and could be restored as much as possible to present as a museum of the early days of New York tenements. Hence, the Tenement Museum.