97 Orchard Street, New York: Stories of Immigrant Life

Sylvia Pantaleo is an assistant professor of education specializing in
children’s literature at the University of Victoria. She is the
co-author of Learning with Literature in the Canadian Elementary
Classroom.

The Lower East Side of New York City was home to many new immigrants to
the United States. The tenement building located at 97 Orchard Street
housed about 7000 of those immigrants from 1863 until it closed in 1935.
That building now houses the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Granfield,
using material from the museum’s archives, has created this photoessay
about the lives of four of the families who lived there. The living
conditions were grim. The small apartment each family occupied had only
a front room, a kitchen, a back room, one window, and no running water.

The German-Jewish Gumpertz family lived there in the 1870s. When Julius
Gumpertz mysteriously disappeared one day in October 1874, his wife
Nathalie worked as a seamstress to support herself and her children. The
Rogarshevskys, a family of eight Eastern European Jews, moved into the
building in 1901. Abraham worked in a garment shop and, following his
early death, his wife worked as the janitor of 97 Orchard Street. The
Confinos, a family of 10 Sephardic Jews from Turkey, moved into their
cramped quarters in 1916. The Italian-Catholic Baldizzi family were
residents from 1928 to 1935. As we glimpse their daily lives, we gain a
broader understanding of immigrant life in New York before and after the
turn of the century.

Unfortunately, the information presented in the photoessay does not
follow a chronological timeline, and this detracts from our
understanding of the linear development of events at 97 Orchard Street.
Furthermore, a table of contents and/or an index would have made the
book more user-friendly. Nevertheless, the text and archival materials,
complemented by the black-and-white photographs, provide readers with
insight into the immigrant experience at a particular time in history.
Recommended.