mention madison used it as freedom of the press to publish things. it is not what we refer to as institutionally the press. >> watch american history tv on c-span3 every weekend. lectures in history are also available on a podcast. find it where you listen to podcasts. you're watching american history tv all weekend every weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook at c-span history. each week, american history tv's american artifacts features museums and historic places. up next we visit 97 orchard street in new york city to learn how immigrants cope with poverty and crowdedness in the 1930s.

>> hi, i work at the tenement museum in new york city. we're going to be taking a look at our historic tenement building which was built in 1863. about 7,000 immigrants lived here between the years of 1863 and 1935. what you see here is a mix of original architectural details and some things that came a little bit later in the building's history. throughout the years, our building changed, of course, over time. in the year it was built, there were virtually no housing laws on the books yet here in new york city. so the gentleman who built it, a german immigrant named lucas glockner, was basically working on his own. he was kind of putting together a building that he would see fit to live in. and, in fact, he did live here in the building's early years with his family. but as compared to what we're used to today, it was a pretty difficult place to live. there was no source of interior

light. there was no running water, no plumbing, no toilets, sinks, showers or tubs, and there was not a designated number of windows that mr. glockner had to provide in his building. we're going to take a closer look at that before we go upstairs and look at a few recreated homes where immigrant families lived. some of the things you see around you here in our entry hall is evidence of how the building changed over time. for example, some of these decorative touches, like these paintings on the wall, were added after the building gets interior light. once you can kind of maneuver your way through the hallway with the added benefit of overhead light, the landlord also begins to be interested in dressing the place up and making it look a little bit more beautiful. so the wall coverings are burlap. they're simulated leather, actually, which was a very luxurious kind of wall covering that was popular in the time.

then we also see these painted panels on the wall, and they're in these sort of ornate plaster frames. one of these panels has been restored, and you can see its original bright colors. and the other has not. the reason we've done this is to show the difference, of course, between before and after, right? what did the many years of neglect do to the interior of this building? and between 1935 and 1988 when the museum opens up, this building is basically abandoned. there is almost no activity in this building. it's just left alone. so when the museum's founders come along in 1988, they open the door to what is essentially a time capsule. it's been left standing here in new york city for decades. and some of what we show to visitors are recreated apartments that represent different time periods in the building's history. other apartments have been left as they were in 1988 as a record

of that decay and neglect. some of what you see around you is original to the building's construction in 1863. and this handrail that i'm holding onto right now is one of those things. so every resident of this building, all 7,000 of them, use this same handrail. and here we are in one of the museum's ruined apartments. we leave some of the apartments as we found them to show the layer of change that happened over time. visitors often ask us why we don't recreate each and every apartment throughout the building, and that's a very good question. part of the reason we do not do that is because there are clues left behind in some of these apartments that show us how people lived here, what they were doing, what they were thinking, how they changed the building over time. there is a great one right over here. right here on this door frame, you see a list.

there are numbers and garments and check marks. what our museum's historians have surmised is that the merchants who were doing business on the ground floor in this building were using abandoned apartments to store garments in the off-season. the lower east side was long known as a bargain district, and typically it was a great place to find bargains on clothing. many people manufactured clothes on the lower east side and sold clothes on the lower east side over the years, so this list is evidence of that. so here we are in what was once the home of the confino family. the confinos were a jewish family from a part of the world which is now greece. they lived here in this apartment, which is three rooms, about 325 square feet as all of

our tenement apartments are, with ten family members. so two adults and eight children of varying ages. what's special about this apartment is that visitors see this apartment through the eyes of a young woman who lived here named victoria confino. they experienced this through the magic of costumed interpretation, so trained actresses portray victoria confino, and they guide visitors through this space and explain what life was like for early immigrants at 97 orchard street. we put together information from a lot of different sources, so much of it is based on public record, censuses, phone directories, that sort of thing. but we also get generous information from the descendants of people who lived in this building. the descendant of victoria

confino graciously and kindly helped us understand what her life was like, what her personality was like, and even have provided us with images of the family, so that, of course, has been really important for us. in the early 20th century when the confino family lived here, they would have enjoyed a few amenities which were relatively new including gas, light and running water. as you can see, the confinos enjoyed a sink, they had a bathtub albeit right here in the kitchen, so there wasn't a great deal of privacy, but there was running water. they would have cooked using a coal-burning stove like this one. these amenities presented a tremendous improvement on the way earlier residents had lived. so when this building was originally built -- and there's really not much in the way of housing regulation in those days, so landlords kind of

presented a building as it was, and there is not much to tell them legally what they could and could not do or the amenities they were forced to provide pho their tenants. everyone is kind of on their own in those days. fast-forward a little bit to the early 20th century and the tenement act has changed that. these lovely new amenities that the confino family would have enjoyed did not come about magically overnight. this is a long fought battle that goes all the way to the supreme court before tenement residents can enjoy interior light and running water and flushing toilets in the hall as well. the tenement house act is a culmination of activism on the part of middle class reformers who start to understand how tenement residents are living and the sometimes deplorable conditions of tenement living through photographs, through the

photographs of people like jacob reese, which are really well known today. they're still very important historic documents. when these reformers fully started to understand that ten men tenements are making people sick, they realize something must be done. we get the enforcement of change to improve the life span of people who live in buildings such as this one. in an apartment this small with a family as big as the confinos were, the sort of notion of defined spaces for sleeping and eating and cooking go out the window. so this contemporary idea that you sleep in a bedroom and that's the only place you sleep does not apply in this scenario. to fit ten people into a 325-square-foot apartment, you

have to put someone in every room. for example, victoria confino may have slept in the kitchen which might have been a coveted location in the winter. it's a little bit warmer. her brother and cousins may have slept here, and tenement residents remembered and wrote about improvising sleeping locations. whether that was perhaps stacking up a few fruit crates and calling that a bed for a small child, or sleeping head to toe in a twin bed, there were all kinds of creative ways to fit families into these tiny spaces. you'll see this improvised fruit crate bed here toward the back of the room. and then a simple iron bed here on the other side which, again, very likely would have been shared by two children. we've recreated different wallpaper patterns that we found

throughout the building to create a historically accurate look of the early 23rd century. after the passage of the tenement house act, this building gets windows in every room. these are required by law. so this window onto a bedroom happens to face a common hallway. so it delineates private space from public space. these bars on the window were for security. this was a busy building, so many people moving in and out. the front door would not necessarily have been locked during the day. so you probably would have wanted a little extra security just to make sure nobody is climbing in through the window into your bedroom. when our tenement building gets

interior plumbing, it doesn't look like anything we're used to today. this is still very humble. it's not necessarily a facility that you would be excited to use, but it represents a tremendous improvement over the privies in the backyard, which residents were using before the installation of these toilets. here we are in the kitchen of the gumforts. they emigrated from germany. as german-speaking immigrants, they would have been particularly attracted to this neighborhood, because during the 1870s, this neighborhood was not known as the lower east side, it was known as deutschland or little germany. immigrants from the region got together and created an intentional community because they shared the same language and the same culture. they lived here in this

apartment with three daughters, rosa, olga and annie, and a young son who sadly died in infancy, which was not uncommon at all in those days. julius gumpertz was a shoemaker, so he was going out every day to make whatever money he could to put together money to pay the rent, which was about is $10 at that time. his wife was not earning a paycheck but she certainly was earning her keep. she was a very hard-working woman. she would have been firing up the coal-burning stove to cook the family dinner every day. she would have been bringing up every single drop of water this family needed to cook and bathe from a spigot in the backyard. she must have been a very strong woman to carry all that water and coal every day, not to mention four children in quick succession. they're very busy and keeping themselves afloat, keeping food on the table. at first during their lives here, it's a time of relatively

economic prosperity. people are feeling pretty confident immediately after the american civil war. but all that changes and those economic circumstances change drastically until we begin to see a series of panics, which create joblessness, they create runs on the bank, they create this sort of economic chaos which, in particular, impacts immigrants and working class folks. at one point julius gumpertz gets up, has his breakfast, goes to work and never returns again. so effectively abandoning his family or otherwise never appearing, we don't know, leaving natalie to support her children alone. natalie gumpertz is in a tough

spot. she's all alone with children to raise and no paycheck coming in anymore. she is left with a few options. she can go to public assistance. more likely she would have turned immediately to her community, which is a close-knit community of immigrants who rely on each other during difficult times. she probably would have asked for help from john and caroline schneider who were also german-speaking immigrants who ran the saloon on the ground floor of this building, schneider's saloon. ultimately natalie sets herself up in business. she sets herself up as a seamstre seamstress. she is making individual things for clients. this is before a large scale growth. pretty soon, natalie was making

as much fun in those days, so her daughter grows up and lives a life of her own in the new york city. by the time natalie moves on from 45 orchard street, it's no longer a deutschland and we're starting to see immigrants from europe and immigrants from italy. here we show how we have closed over time. this is where the wall between the parlor and the kitchen was when we came along in 1988. according to blueprints, if, so we mover the wall back to represent what the apartment

would have looked like authentically in the 1870s when the gumpertz family was living here. so here we are in the baldicci family home. we've taken a leap forward in time to about 1935. you'll see that around you in all of these wonderful amenities that the baldicci would have enjoyed. by 1935, this building has electricity, so the baldiccis were able to list ten to the radio. they had electric light and a gas cooktop, which is installed here on top of the old coal-burning stove. and a sink and a bathtub right here. they live here after ellis

island, so the balducci had a great deal more bureaucracy to deal with going through the immigration process, not the least of which was the united states' immigration quotas which are on the books in those days. these quotas dictated the number of immigrants who were allowed to come here to the united states based on nationality. there were few italians let in than they were immigrants from other countries. the baldiccis knew this. the quotas which the government used in those days were based in part on sued o'giants, which is all beasts are not made historically beautiful, are inherent.

he was worried that his wife would not be able to cope. he's not sure how his wife ended up here in the united states, but best of our knowledge, she works around the system. we talk to visitors to think about how clearly immigration is discussed in the present day, because rosaria's story is similar to present-day immigrants. we like to put faces to names, and we share family photos of the baldicci. rosaria and josephine balducci

have two children. i think it would be so strange for her to see that her childhood home became a museum and tourist attraction. unfortunately, she was really excited about the museum and shared some memories with us. i have some audio of her memories of living here at 97 orchard street. >> i remember sitting around the table in the kitchen under the wind window, and my mother would have made us something like bread and butter. the music was always playing, italian soap operas, and my mother crying all the time. she missed her family. she left her whole family in italy, came here as a young girl, and she never saw them again until many, many years later.

she never saw her mother or father again. >> they were some of the earliest residents. they made their home here in 1869. the moore family shared this apartment with their three daughters, mary, jane and agnes. baby agnes was just a few months old when the moore family arrived here at 97 orchard street. as you can see around you, the moore family had a very simple home. the building was relatively new at the time they lived here, and in fact, might have been more desirable than the circumstances

other irish immigrants lived in in those days. bridget moore would have been keeping house just like natalie gumpertz. she's carrying the coal upstairs and cooking for her family, trying to keep them hetalthy. her father was going out to work. what we talk about is discrimination that immigrants faced in those days. discrimination in the job market was a particular hardship. joseph moore certainly grappled with that. according to records, he worked variously as a bartender and waiter, depending on the year. he probably would have been able to bring home some leftover food at the end of the shift to supplement whatever it was that bridget had found to feed the family. another issue that we talk about

is the fact that the moores did lose their infant daughter. the cause was multiple issues, but certainly malnutrition played a serious role in her illness. malnutrition was a problem which contributed significantly to the infant mortality rate in those days. so here in the parlor, we've recreated what the wake would have looked like for baby agnes after her passing. this, of course, was an incredibly sad time for the moore family, but also a social moment, a time for the community to gather together. there are a couple of important traditions that we've created here to show what the wake would have looked like. one was to cover the mirrors, to

encourage humility or discourage vanity. we also open the window on days when it's not quite as cold as it is today, which was a tradition of the wake meant to set the soul free. this pardon me, was the home of jenny levine and her children also served as a small garment factory. what you see here are the tools of the trade. during the late 19th century when the levine family lived here, garments were still being made predominantly in small apartments like this one. so this space was incredibly busy. it would have been noisy, filled with the sound of a sewing machine and a busy street outside. and the levine family would have worked nearly incessantly to make as much money as they possibly could, and we tell the

story of life in this apartment as just an ongoing, incredibly busy, vibrant, bustling experience, and very likely when jenny levine gave birth to her son, which she did right here in this apartment, work would not have stopped here in the front room, in the sweat shop, because it was that critical to the family's survival. so this apartment was the home of the rogochevsky family in the first decade of the 20th century. again, we see around us some of the amenities which were brought to the building by the tenement house act in about 1905 or 1906. so they would have enjoyed gas lights and a gas cooktop on top of the coal-burning stove there, and of course running water. the rogochevsky was also involved in the garment industry, but by the time they get involved, we begin to see

garment manufacturing on a larger scale. so rather than sewing garments individually right here at home, they would have gone out to work in garment factories. so this building ultimately closes in 1935 because another piece of legislation has passed requiring that the interior stairwells in buildings like this one be fireproofed, which would have meant tearing this whole stairwell out and rebuilding around stone and metal, which would have been a huge expense, rather than bringi -- rather than bring the building up to code, the landlord decided to evict the tenants. after 1935, this building is no longer a residence. part of what makes the tenement museum unique is that every visitor has a very lively experience here. we try not to just give a

lecture, we try to have a conversation with our visitors, and because these stories are really everyone's stories, they're very relatable and often our visitors will chime in and share a story of their grandmother or their aunt, something has sparked a memory for them that they want to share, and that's one of the most, certainly, valuable experiences for us here at the museum, is that it it is a great experience. we hear as much from our visitors as we want to share with them. it's a wonderful place to not only hear about history but to see how lives were lived in the past and really become immersed in the past experiences of our ancestors. part of what makes this building so special is that it is so ordinary. it's a very, very typical place where thousands of people started new lives.

and there are many buildings just like this all throughout new york city and all throughout the country, really. so it's incredibly important that places like this are preserved, because they are the sites of shared memory. these are places where our great-grandsons and great-granddaughters, our ancestors, began their lives in america. learn more about the tenement museum at tenement.org. you can view this and all c span programs at cspan.org. browse words like tenement. while many holiday traditions will be different this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, we can still remember festivities from years past. here we are in the state

dining room, the last stop for the tour, and on the table we have carolers that were handmade by nancy clark. right behind there we have the portrait of abraham lincoln and then the fireplace decorated with garland and snow and ribbons. then over here is a masterpiece done by what is known as the dessert doctor here at the white house, rowland mesnia, the pastry chef. it was reconstructed when adams was president. back then it was actually a brown color. it is constructed entirely of gingerbread, marzipan and chocolate, which is the mortar that holds it all together. what he did was he had a

recreation of the white house done, and each piece of gingerbread was sawed and put together. if you look closely, there are some fun things you'll see. a little taste of texas here with the first pets, bobby, sparky and also william the cat. you'll also see the humor of our pastry chef. season's greetings from all of us at american history tv. >> "theodore roosevelt: american" was created by the u.s. army marking it is sthe cel of the 96th president's birth. the army pays tribute to the