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WEEK of February 4, 2008
@BFS! archives

Eighth Graders Take a Trip Back in Time at Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Middle schoolers are on the move at BFS in more ways than one this year. Field trips to the cultural, historical and artistic attractions of New York City make up an important part of the academic program. Our students see dance productions at BAM, visit the galleries of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and tour the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the Cloisters, among other local trips; just recently, the eighth grade took a trip back in time when they visited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street on December 14.

“Since we study American history from the Civil War until the end of World War II, the trip to the tenement museum connects with the curriculum in several different ways,” said eighth grade advisor and history teacher Ed Herzman. There is a unit of study strictly on the New Immigration period, from the 1880s to World War I, a unit on the Gilded Age, 1877 to 1900, and a unit on the Progressive Reform era. “These units overlap to cover a similar theme,” explained Ed. “In the period after Reconstruction, the United States grew in area, population, wealth and power at an astounding rate. With this growth came a number of problems such as terrible living and working conditions for immigrants.

“Tenements were miserable places to live around the 1890s, when Jacob Riis wrote about them and took pictures of them for his book, How The Other Half Lives,” Ed continued, “But as his book inspired reforms, conditions improved. I think the students got a visual understanding of that progression through this trip.”

One half of the eighth grade group participated in the “Piecing It Together” tour and the other half the “Confino Family Living History” tour. Piecing It Together focused on the garment industry, and the group toured the homes of the Levine family, whose apartment functioned as a garment shop at the turn of the century, and the Rogarshevsky home, whose father worked outside the home as a garment worker and suffered an early death from tuberculosis. The Piecing It Together tour group also viewed a contemporary ten-minute film about garment manufacturing and labor abuses in Asia. This inspired the 8th graders to make overseas garment labor conditions a topic for their upcoming “Letters for Change” project.

“Because different sections of the museum represent different time periods, the students got a sense of the building with and without electricity, with and without plumbing, with and without ventilation,” explained Ed. “We talked about it in class and many of the students were surprised at how ‘nice’ certain sections of the tenements were.” Added trip chaperone Joan Martin, “The museum educators were excellent, and many of the students seemed to agree that it was a very worthwhile and inspiring trip. Topping it off with a trip to the local Starbucks was a huge plus.”

Photos: The Lower East Side of New York has been called a “Gateway to America” because of the millions of immigrants who made their first homes there. Photos (from top) show the facade of the Tenement Museum, home to an estimated 7,000 people from more than 20 nations between 1863 and 1935; another building similar to the Tenement Museum, which has been rehabilitated for residential use; and the intersection of Orchard and Delancey Streets. Below, 8th graders enjoy an after-tour visit to Starbucks.