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News From the Tenement Museum | June 2007
News From The Tenement

The Museum found hundreds of animal bones both in the backyard of and inside its tenement, including:  rat paws (pictured left),  sheep, cows, pheasants, turkeys, chicken, rabbits, domestic cats and dogs and possibly frogs and turtles. A number of the remains we've identified are fish bones and scales, which may be a sign of resident’s financial prudence: fish was consistently one of the least expensive foods available per pound in the urban Northeastern United States. However, we’ve yet to identify pig remains, perhaps evidence that many residents kept kosher.*


This card advertises the 92 Orchard Street butcher shop of Charles Schubert, a New York-born son of Prussian immigrants. During the late 1880s, Schubert supplied his German-speaking neighbors with meat for their tables. Animals were slaughtered at yards along the nearby East River and delivered to butchers like Schubert, who dressed and prepared the meat for sale. Customer favorites likely were sausages or Wursts stuffed in his shop and available in a host of varieties, including Weisswurst, knockwurst, and the hard-cured Sommerwurst.


Why did you join the Tenement Museum?
I joined after I went on the Getting By tour. It inspired me to find out more about the people who lived in such small apartments. I felt a special connection to the Gumpertz family: like Natalie Gumpertz, my mother had to sew to support her children.

What is your favorite tenement tour?
My favorite tour is Piecing It Together because it connects the experiences of past and contemporary immigrant garment workers.

What is your connection to the Lower East Side?
I am an immigrant. I was born in Honduras, but came to New York for school and decided to stay to raise a family. I have lived on the Lower East Side for 34 years. Currently, I work as a speech therapist at a public school in Spanish Harlem. Many of my students are immigrants and children of immigrants. As I witness their struggles and triumphs, I am reminded of both my immigrant experience and the stories told at the Tenement Museum.

Join The Tenement Museum and help preserve our immigrant heritage.
Send us your membership profile--you might see yourself in the News!

Start your night with a tour of our historic tenement. Every Thursday through August!
+ More Info

June 14:  Fiction Reading
The Price of Silence a new novel by Camilla Trinchieri presented by the NY Book Club.

June 19:  Food Reading
Food Lovers Guide to the Lower East Side presented by the NY Book Club.

June 26:  History Reading
Resistance: A Radical History of the Lower East Side presented by the NY Book Club

To attend Book Club events, RSVP to bookclub(at)tenement.org


Tenement Store:
Food Books

The Bialiy EatersThe Bialy Eaters is the poignant story of Mimi Sheraton's search for a Polish town’s lost culture and the daily bread that sustained it.
Buy The Bialy Eaters.


StuffedStuffed is Patricia Volk's funny, poignant memoir about growing up in a New York restaurant family.
Buy Stuffed



Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Write to us at lestm@tenement.org


* Did You Know source: Claude Milne and Pamela Crabtree in Rebecca Yamin ed. Tales of the Five Points: Working Class Life in Nineteenth-Century New York