New York's Lower East Side

Victoria Confino’s pretty face displays a series of emotions as she recounts her family’s ­history and shows visitors around their tiny, three-room apartment. She explains that her Sephardic-Jewish parents migrated from Turkey to New York City, where her father found work as a pushcart peddler, then within three years saved enough money to open a small factory that produces underwear, where she works.

Seven people share the cramped space in a dimly lit tenement building in the Lower East Side. Victoria sleeps near the coal stove so she can keep the fire going on cold nights, while crates covered by throw rugs serve as beds for her brothers.

Despite the hardships, the vivacious teenager smiles as she describes the wonders of conveniences like gas lights and running water. “A lot of things in America are magic,” she exclaims.

Outside the narrow, six-story building at 97 Orchard Street, the year is 2009. Inside what now is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, visitors are transported in time back to 1916, as Victoria—played by a costumed interpreter—describes life as it was.

Her story personalizes the trials and tribulations of first-generation immigrant families to the United States. It is augmented by equally moving narratives about several others of the nearly 7,000 people from more than 20 countries who lived in the building over seven decades, until 1935.

Their histories weave a rich tapestry of the Lower East Side when it served as a magnet for immigrants to the neighborhood in a nation of immigrants. For visitors like my wife and me, the stories in ways resembled those of our own families. For our grandchildren who were with us, they introduced a facet of America’s past in a very personal and meaningful way.

We combined stories of Victoria Confino and other former residents of the building with an organized neighborhood walking tour. Each of us left with increased appreciation for the challenging obstacles that millions of new Americans faced and overcame.

The Tenement Museum is the perfect place to begin an exploration of New York’s Lower East Side. It provides a fitting introduction to a quarter of the city where waves of immigrants in search of the American Dream came face-to-face with a more stark reality.

By the 1840s, people from Ireland and Germany were flooding into Manhattan, followed by Italians. The roots of Chinatown are traced back to the turn of the 20th century. Between the 1880s and 1920s, more than two million Jewish people, most from Eastern Europe, joined the flow.

After World War II, Poles and Ukrainians added to the migration. So did Hispanics, many from Puerto Rico and, recently, the Dominican Republic. The Tenement Museum provides very personal introductions to several immigrant families. One tour visits the apartments that once served as home to the German-Jewish Gumpertz family and Italian-Catholic Baldizzis, furnished much as they were during the 1870s-1930s. Another describes the life of the Moores, an Irish couple who in 1869 were dealing with the death of a child.

What makes these tours especially telling is that each story is based on meticulous research. One product of this scrupulous attention to fact is a recording made by Josephine Baldizzi Esposito before her death in 1998, recalling when she lived at 97 Orchard Street between 1928 and 1935, from age two through nine.

She recounts how family members savored a roll with butter that each received on a weekend morning, a special treat during the Depression. With a smile in her voice, she recalls weekly baths she and her brother enjoyed in the same sink where dishes were washed, and her mother listening for hours to Italian music on the radio.

Expanding our historical horizon to the entire neighborhood, we next embarked on a guided walk with Big Onion Tours. Perusing the list of options, we exclaimed in unison, “The Multi-Ethnic Eating Tour.” It explores the Lower East Side with knowledgeable guides who discuss the immigrant groups that descended upon the area, and also directs participants to a parade of eateries for tasty samples.

Visits to several religious and other structures demonstrated the mixed and changing ethnicity of the neighborhood. What once was a Baptist church later housed a synagogue. An English Lutheran church subsequently served an Irish Catholic parish.

But it was our stomachs that offered the most welcome evidence of the multi-cultural melting pot. A kosher bakery stands adjacent to a falafel shop. Mendel Golberg Fabrics (“Established 1890”) is next to the Chang Wang Restaurant. Vic’s Pizza is neighbor to The Pickle Guys.

Among numerous tastings were tofu and dried plums in Chinatown, and fried plantain, which represented the immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Halvah, a sweet confection from a Jewish bakery served as a fitting dessert, along with canola in Little Italy.

Along with a virtual gastronomic world tour, thoughts of the Lower East Side conjure up images of pushcarts and mom-and-pop shops where vendors peddled clothing from racks on the sidewalks at cut-rate prices. That was the scene at the time when the Confinos, Gumpertz and Baldizzis resided there.

Today, the setting is different. True, a kind of outdoor mall still exists along a stretch of Orchard Street each Sunday, where store owners set up tables outside from which they peddle their wares. And there still are stores where shoppers engage in good-­natured bargaining and leave with goods that would cost more elsewhere.

However, in recent years those echoes of the past have been losing out to more pricey boutiques and specialty shops. A smattering of luxury condominium and apartment buildings has sprung up, along with upscale restaurants.

While some people call those recent changes progress, others complain that they are erasing the past. Yet the ghosts and memories of men, women and children who crossed oceans to reach that neighborhood in search of their dreams live on, for those who wish to recapture them.

If You Go
Lower East Side Tenement Museum
108 Orchard Street; $17 for adults, and $13 for seniors 65 and up, and students.
212-982-8420; www.tenement.org
Big Onion Walking Tours
Most tours last about two hours and move at a leisurely pace. All tours cost $15 for adults, and $12 for seniors 63 and up and students. There’s an additional charge of $5 per person for the “noshing stops” on the Multi-Ethnic Eating Tour, which turned out to be a real bargain.
212-439-1090; www.bigonion.com.

Victor Block is an established, award-winning travel journalist whose work has appeared in a variety of major outlets for over a quarter-century. His specialties include off-beat travel, overseas destinations and seniors travel. He augments basic information with an introduction to the people, culture and essence of places he visits. He currently focuses on newspaper travel features. He is based in Washington, D.C., and can be reached at shayphred@aol.com.