Minding the Store: Commerce and Community on the Lower East Side

FAIN: BR-50141-10

Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Inc. (New York, NY 10002-3102)
Annie Polland (Project Director: January 2010 to November 2014)

Implementation of a permanent interpretation of lower-level spaces for living and commerce at 91 Orchard Street, including a saloon (1870, Germans), a kosher butcher store (1890, Eastern-European Jews), and an auction house (1930s, second-generation Jews), as key sites of immigrant Americanization.

Minding the Store will broaden public understanding of American history and culture by educating visitors about how immigrant shopkeepers and their communities introduced practices and customs that challenged, accommodated, and helped reshape American society and its values. In Schneider's 1870s German lager bier saloon, visitors will learn how saloons served as community centers for German immigrants and sites of political activity, and how the German saloon influenced American leisure culture. In the 1890s home of kosher butcher Israel Lustgarten, visitors will learn how Jewish immigrants adopted American capitalism to serve the religious needs of their community, and how owning a business was a vehicle for economic and social mobility. In Max Marcus 1930's auction house and the media installation in that space, visitors will experience the ritual of buying and selling across the generations of storefronts housed at 97 Orchard Street. Minding the Store will open in January 2011.