Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
Fluid sloshes in glass vials when Danielle Swanson, the Tenement Museum’s collections manager, pulls open a shallow metal drawer full of little perfume bottles and other cosmetics.
Even through sealed plastic baggies marked with tidy, scribbled labels, they smell vaguely medicinal, slightly floral, pleasantly antiseptic.Like everything else in this basement storage space on New York’s Lower East Side, the perfumes were once trash—forgotten, left behind, or tossed away. The museum is known for having preserved or restored a handful of cramped living spaces and businesses in two tenement buildings—the kind that typified the neighborhood throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was a dense immigrant enclave. Today, its tours give visitors some sense of what life was like for Kosher butchers, Puerto Rican garment workers, and more. As the museum combed through these cramped, dilapidated apartments and storefronts, they exhumed plenty of debris that generations of residents had left behind.
The museum’s archive of antique garbage and cast-offs is off-limits to visitors. The trove, some 6,000 items, is south of the visitors’ center, down two flights of stairs, past a darkened room full of whirring servers, and beyond cabinets stacked with printer cartridges. A few pieces are on display in the museum’s restored apartments, but the vast majority of it lives down here—cleaned, catalogued, preserved, then tucked away.
Typically, once artifacts go from a dig site (or historic renovation) to a museum, their management becomes about stalling time and halting entropy with the right kind of storage materials, climate control, and careful handling.
The Tenement Museum’s trash collection has it a little different. “It’s not actually the most ideal storage space,” Swanson says. In a dream world, she adds, the museum would be able to stow this material in better conditions and make it more available to the public, but that’s not how things stand right now. Though there’s a precision to everything—each drawer and bag is labeled and numbered, and everything is cradled by archival-quality foam or kept in acid-free boxes—the basement isn’t designed for precious things. A rat poison sign is fastened to the wall and little glue boards are laid out to intercept insects. A dehumidifier squats in a corner. The ceiling hangs low enough that it is striped with yellow-and-black caution tape. Water rushes through overhead pipes with a slurp, loud enough to interrupt a conversation.
Most of the trash in the archive turned up when the museum worked to stabilize the floors, ceilings, or staircases of 97 Orchard Street, one of the two tenements it owns. The five-story, multi-family building went up in 1863. Between then and the end of the 1930s, tens of millions of immigrants landed in New York City, and the museum estimates that roughly 7,000 of them passed through 97 Orchard. The tenants came from all over Europe: first from Germany, Russia, and Eastern Europe, and later Turkey, Greece, Spain, and Italy. People lived in the building until 1935, when the owner decided to board the apartments up rather than continue to update and maintain them. Shopkeepers operated out of its street-level storefronts for decades after the apartments went vacant—for more than…
The post Inside a Hidden Archive of New York City’s Historic Trash appeared first on FeedBox.