Planning an exhibit and programs interpreting the backyard as used by tenants from 1864 to 1905, exploring themes of urban sanitation, technological change, and social reform, and the uses of rear yards as communal spaces.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum seeks $40,000 from the National Endowment for Humanities to cover part of the costs associated with hiring outside consultants needed to continue planning the Rear Yard Exhibit. The Rear Yard Exhibit will recreate the backyard and privies (toilets used by tenement residents from 1864 until 1905) behind the Museum's landmark tenement building at 97 Orchard Street. To date, the Museum has researched and restored five apartments in 97 Orchard Street, creating "period apartments" that offer the public a glimpse into the experiences of the diverse immigrant families who lived in the building between 1863 and 1935. The Rear Yard Exhibit will enhance Museum visitors' understanding of the immigrant experience on the Lower East Side in the 19th century by providing visitors with an in-depth understanding of how immigrants existed day-to day. The exhibit will also explore themes such as urban sanitation and the communal aspects of rear yards.

Implementation of a sixty-minute guided tour and interactive media exploring the lives of African Americans and Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century New York City.

The Tenement Museum seeks a $400,000 Public Humanities Projects implementation grant to complete permanent exhibit fabrication and tour development for the “Joseph and Rachel Moore Tenement Home.” The new permanent exhibit takes the form of a recreated apartment in the Museum’s 97 Orchard Street tenement. Today a National Historic Landmark, the building was home to nearly 7,000 people from 15 different nations between 1863 and 1935. Now the Museum will recreate the tenement home of Joseph and Rachel Moore, a Black family who lived in Lower Manhattan during the 1860s. The exhibit will trace Joseph’s history from his free Black community of Belvidere, New Jersey, through his family's migration to New York City for economic opportunity, and the community they built in their neighborhoods and workplaces. It will also employ interactive digital storytelling to examine the era’s Black press, contextualizing both the Moores’ story and the Museum’s research.

To support the purchase and renovation of a nineteenth-century tenement building to expand exhibitions and programs interpreting immigrant life and culture.

Construction to prepare three floors of its recently acquired 103 Orchard Street building for exhibition, program, and administrative space, and to replace the roof and cornice.

The Museum’s 103 Orchard Street Construction and Renovation project will prepare the top three floors of its 1888 tenement into exhibit and flexible program and office space. The exhibit space will recreate apartments in which immigrant families lived to tell the stories of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Puerto Rican migrants and Chinese immigrants who lived in this tenement post-World War II. Flexible program and office space will allow the Museum to provide additional space for educational activities and better accommodate its growing staff. The project enhances the Museum's mission and is the centerpiece of the Museum’s capital campaign and integral to its five-year strategic plan to increase visitorship.

A three-day professional development workshop on best practices for using digital storytelling to convey humanities content in museum settings and a website to disseminate workshop findings to the broader museum field.

Museum experts have acknowledged that "books on a wall," even when crafted by the most scholarly experts in a given field, sometimes fails to reach audiences. Storytelling, on the other hand, can become a powerful way to convey humanities interpretation of art, science, design and history to a wide range of museum audiences. Now, digital storytelling is in the air, upping the ante and promising to enhance these connections, to tell multiple stories and perhaps convey multiple interpretations of those stories to diverse audiences. As attractive as this is, pinning down a definition for digital storytelling as it applies to museums is difficult. Museum professionals know they should be exploring it, but what, exactly, is digital storytelling? Is it an app, a website, an interactive, a video? Does it need to comprise an entire exhibit or can it punctuate a more traditional exhibit? Can it truly prompt different interactions with museum space and other museum visitors? And if so, are there best practices that can be used as guidelines? Most important, how can museums ensure that digital storytelling's attractions enhance humanities themes as opposed to distracting from them? The Lower East Side Tenement Museum proposes a three-day professional development workshop for museum professionals to explore innovative uses of digital technology in the museum setting. Hosted by the Tenement Museum in New York City in the spring of 2016, this workshop will equip up to 20 museum curators with a deeper understanding of the pedagogy and interpretive tools necessary for effective digital storytelling.

The retention of sixteen permanent staff to expand walking tours, conduct research, and develop a new exhibit.

The project consists of: 1) expanding the Tenement Museum's neighborhood walking tour offerings as the centerpiece of the Museum's socially-distanced reopening; 2) developing a new "Black Migrations" walking tour; 3) conducting additional research on race and migration that will enhance interpretation across Museum programs; 4) begin developing a new exhibit planned for 2021. This project will help the Museum retain 16 staff positions from May through December 2020 as it reopens and advance the Museum's 2018-2022 strategic plan to broaden the range of stories it tells.

Implementation of a web-based virtual tour and public programs at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum that examine post-World War II immigration through the experiences of three families that resided at 103 Orchard Street from the 1950s through the 1980s.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a leading cultural institution dedicated to exploring America's immigrant heritage, requests a $400,000 Implementation Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to allow it to develop a website exhibit and series of public programs on post-World War II immigration. This project will also provide the intellectual underpinnings for the subsequent installation of exhibits in three bricks-and-mortar exhibits. The principal deliverable of this project will be the engaging, interactive, and multi-layered 103 Orchard Street Website. As an innovative element in introducing its audience to the history of contemporary immigration, and as a key feature of that longer-term project, the website-based virtual tour will highlight the perspectives of three families who lived at 103 Orchard Street. Taken collectively, these families' separate narratives will underscore broader humanities themes.

To support a self-study of the resources and interpretive programs of the tenement museum, a historic structure on New York's lower east side.

To support planning for an exhibition on the material culture of New Yorkers who resided in Manhattan's Lower East Side tenement district from 1850 to the present.

Planning for the restoration and interpretation of an apartment at the museum's historic tenement house that was once occupied by a 19th-century Irish American family.

Consultation with scholars and interpretive experts to develop an interpretation of an immigrant saloon operated in the museum's historic tenement building at 97 Orchard Street.

Consultation to plan an exhibit about sanitation and the water system in the backyard of a 19th-century tenement building that would explore issues of urban sanitation, immigrant life, the state of medical knowledge about public health, and housing reform pressures in the period 1864 to 1905.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum seeks $10,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in order to cover part of the costs associated with hiring outside consultants needed to implement the planning of a new Rear Yard Exhibit, scheduled to open in 2008. The Rear Yard Exhibit will recreate the backyard and privies (the toilets used by tenement residents from 1864 until 1905) behind the Museum?s landmark tenement building at 97 Orchard Street, and interpret the history of urban sanitation during this period.

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

Funding supports the development of storage plans for the museum's collections, which include clothing, household accessories, furniture, photographs, and architectural fragments from the tenement building at 97 Orchard Street and materials donated by former residents, shopkeepers, owners, and their descendants. The collections document life in Lower East Side tenement houses during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum requests a grant of $5,320.00 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the creation of two detailed plans for the proper housing and storage of its object and architectural collections into secure, climate-controlled spaces. The majority of the Museum's objects are currently stored below ground level in a basement space at 91 Orchard Street, and nearly 1,775 objects are stored in the cellar of its building at 97 Orchard Street. The current storage conditions are substandard, and the collections are at risk. This project will ensure the collections' safety by supporting the creation of two storage plans to adapt newly available space into a secure storage room and to outline the proper storage and housing of large furniture and architectural fragments currently housed at 97 Orchard Street. Support from this grant will cover consultant costs and costs associated with consultant work.