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As successive layers of paint and paper were removed from 97 Orchard Street during Reba Fishman Snyder's analysis, it became quite clear that tenants often took it upon themselves to adorn their own apartment walls. Either because of landlord neglect or a tenant's desire to express his or her own personal tastes through decorative treatments, wallpapers eventually differed from apartment to apartment.
In some cases, up to twenty-two layers of paper were found on the walls, suggesting that the affordability of wallpaper, as well as the transience of tenement dwellers, led to ongoing aesthetic revisions of the home space. Along with wallpaper, lace doilies, Currier and Ives prints, and hand painted stenciling were simple, cost-effective ways to ensure that a tenement apartment exuded as much warmth as the apartments of wealthier New Yorkers.
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Layer Four
See a 