Tenement Museum Collections Storage Reorganization Plan

FAIN: PF-280749-21

Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Inc. (New York, NY 10002-3102)
David Favaloro (Project Director: January 2021 to present)

An implementation project to improve environmental conditions, install collections storage, and rehouse collections in two historic house locations that document immigrant history and daily life in the mid- to late-nineteenth century in Lower East Side Manhattan.

The Tenement Museum seeks a $350,000 grant to implement a collections storage reorganization plan. The Museum keeps its collections in 91 and 97 Orchard Street, two tenements built in the mid-late 19th century. Speculators quickly constructed these tenements to profit from large numbers of immigrants seeking housing. They did not build them with longevity or stable environmental conditions in mind. Thus, just as the Museum has innovated in its telling of the history of “ordinary” people, it has had to innovate in devising ways to care for its collections in tenement buildings. This grant enables the Museum to permanently improve its collections environment by: 1) improving environmental conditions in both storage spaces; 2) installing a high-density collections storage system; and 3) rehousing items into environmentally-appropriate spaces. The project draws upon 15 years of external assessments and staff expertise. When complete, the project will make the Museum’s collections resilient