Manhattan’s Tenement Museum offers a trip back in time to when the now ultra-gentrifying Lower East Side was a melting pot of working-class immigrants struggling to make better lives with limited means. Founded in a squalid 1863 tenement building at 97 Orchard Street in 1988, the museum has become a staple for school trips and history buffs, with its apartments painstakingly restored to what they were when occupied in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by poor families from Italy, Germany, Ireland, and Eastern Europe. A recent expansion by Perkins Eastman into a separate, five-story historic building at 103 Orchard—purchased by the museum in 2007—provides more space for exhibitions and staff.
The project is the last phase of Perkins Eastman’s 10-year master plan for the institution. In 2011, the firm added a visitors center and gift shop, classrooms, and support spaces within the first, second, and basement levels of 103 Orchard, at the corner of Delancey Street. But the apartments on the upper levels were still occupied, so work on the expansion couldn’t begin, ironically, until the tenants relocated.
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