Over 7,000 people lived at 97 Orchard Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side between 1863 and 1935. The five-story tenement building housed mostly immigrant families from Italy, Germany, and Ireland, with names such as Baldizzi, Rogarshevsky, and Moore.
Tired of constantly updating the small apartments with each new domestic advance (first indoor plumbing, then gas, then electricity), the owner boarded up the top four floors in 1935 and just rented out the bottom floor to businesses, creating a sort of time capsule of the residential units.
In 1988, the building was then turned into the Tenement Museum, where visitors could tour apartments made to look as they were when immigrant families lived there. Researchers took great care in identifying the actual families that lived in each apartment so that museum staff could tell the real stories of the people that lived there.
In 2017, the museum bought a second building up the street, enabling staff to incorporate the stories of the Chinese and Puerto Rican families that lived there. At no point could researchers identify a black family who lived in either tenement, however, and that became a huge problem in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd.
The Tenement Museum initially issued a statement supporting Black Lives Matter, acknowledging that “black people have lived in the area we now know as the Lower East Side since the 1640s.” But this was not nearly enough.
A second statement was issued claiming that “white supremacy and anti-blackness are central to American history and its violent present.” “Part of that violence,” the statement continued, “is an institutional practice of omitting and erasing black voices and perspectives.”
In other words, the Tenement Museum was forced to say that by not pretending black families had lived in its buildings, the organization was committing violent acts of white supremacy.
So, a black family that never lived in the building is being added. The family is from New Jersey and will be described as “internal immigrants” by museum staff.
The Irish immigrant family that actually lived in that space is now being recast from hero to villain. Where once the museum would tell visitors about the discrimination Irish immigrants faced in the 19th century, now the Irish will be cast as violent white supremacists who killed black people during the Civil War draft riots.
In 1984, O’Brien tells his captive Winston, “Who controls the past controls the future: Who controls the present controls the past.”
That is exactly what the Black Lives Matter movement is attempting to do to our country right now. The truth and our nation are suffering because of it.
