#246 Tales from a Tenement: Three Families on the Lower East Side

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Places & Travel, History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2017

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In today’s show, we’ll continue to explore housing in New York, but move far from the mansions of Fifth Avenue to the tenements of the Lower East Side in the 20th Century. Specifically, we’ll be visiting one building, 103 Orchard Street, which is today part of the Tenement Museum. When we step inside 103 Orchard, we’ll be meeting three families who lived there after World War II: the Epsteins, the Saez-Velez family, and the Wong family. We’ll be getting to know them by walking through their apartments, faithfully reconstructed, often with their very own furniture, to tell their stories. The Epsteins were Holocaust survivors who moved into the building in the 1950s, the Saez-Velez family moved in during the 60s and were led by a mother who left Puerto Rico and worked as a seamstress here, and the Wong family, whose mother raised the family while working in Chinatown garment shops, moved in during the 1970s. They’re included in an exciting new interactive exhibition at the Tenement Museum. This exhibit, which includes a tour of the apartments, is called “Under One Roof”, and opens to the public this month. We’re led through it on our show by Annie Polland, the museum’s curator of this exhibit. For more information on the exhibit, visit tenement.org and boweryboyshistory.com. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The Bowry Boys 246.
0:02.5	Tales from a tenement, three families on the Lower East Side.
0:06.5	Hey, it's the Bowry Boys.
0:08.1	Hey.
0:09.3	Support for the Bowry Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:12.8	Join us for as little as a dollar a month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowry Boys.
0:21.4	Hi there and welcome to the Bowry Boys.
0:23.6	This is Tom Myers. Greg Young is off this week.
0:27.4	But we will shortly be joined by a special co-host who will lead us on a rather unique adventure in this week's show.
0:35.5	Because today we're going to do a little bit of time travel.
0:40.0	Now in our two previous shows, we explored the homes and the mansions of New York's wealthiest residents along Fifth Avenue.
0:49.1	In today's show, we'll continue to explore housing in the 20th century,
0:53.9	but move far from Fifth Avenue to the Lower East Side and specifically to one building at 103 Orchard Street,
1:03.3	which is today part of the Tenement Museum.
1:05.9	And when we step inside, we'll be meeting three families who live there after World War II.
1:12.5	Of course, we won't literally be meeting them because they no longer live there,
1:16.6	but we'll be getting to know these families by walking through their apartments,
1:22.0	which have been faithfully reconstructed often with their very own furniture to tell their stories.
1:28.8	In several previous episodes, Greg and I have discussed the waves of immigrants who came by the millions in the 19th century.
1:37.0	And many of them settled at least at first in Tenements, which are apartment buildings that were constructed to really fit as many
1:46.1	pain tenences as possible under one roof.
1:49.7	And despite attempts by progressive reformers to get the city to regulate their construction and improve conditions,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Tom Meyers, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Tom Meyers and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.