Funded Projects Query Form
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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

In May 2016, the LESTM hosted a Digital Storytelling Workshop in New York City with 20 museum professionals. Evaluator Dr. Kate Haley Goldman’s summative report found that participants learned the following: 1) A more purposeful practice and language around digital storytelling that they’ve since used at their respective institutions; 2) Working on Digital Storytelling projects helped them focus on their role as storytellers, and in turn helped them to conceive of more audience-focused projects; 3) Access to exemplars of digital storytelling that they could bring back to their board and staff and provide a better appreciation for the infrastructure needed to support the projects. The evaluation also demonstrated that participants identified five main  attributes of conveying humanities content that can be enhanced through the use of digital storytelling: 1) A sense of presence or immersion; 2) Multiple voices and diversity; 3) Telling more complex stories; 4) Moving from listener to participant; 5) The ability to investigate several monuments in time. In turn, these elements helped participants better describe their own project goals.
Despite the conference’s impact, a refrain emerged that participants lacked the opportunity to work on their individual projects. We’ve thus developed the plan for a conference reunion dedicated to workshopping participants’ projects. We will construct sessions to not only shepherd along the individual practitioner’s progress, but yield best practices for the museum community, to be shared on the Weebly dedicated to museums and digital storytelling. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Light reduction measures in the museum's national landmark historic tenement building, where humanities collections are displayed in five "apartments" restored to depict the homes of former immigrant residents.

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.

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.

A permanent installation, audio tour, website, and school and public programs interpreting a 19th-century sweatshop.

To support three phases of conversations among community leaders, neighborhood residents, and museum visitors, focusing on the experiences of past and presentimmigrants to America.

To support exhibitions, period installations, audiovisual programs, and tours that will interpret a surviving Lower East Side tenement and its residents from 1863 to 1935.

To support planning for a series of "living history" walking tours interpretingsix immigrant communities that existed on New York City's Lower East Side from 1850 to 1910.

The Conservancy seeks NEH funding to develop THE LOWER EAST SIDE IMMIGRANT HERITAGE TRAIL, a series of "living history", social history walking tours which present and interpret the lives of members of six immigrant communities which lived on the Lower East Side from 1850-1910: Free Afro-American, Irish, German, Jewish, Chinese and Italian. Set in the context of New York City, U.S. and world history, and led by costumed interpreters, the tours explore the daily lives of "ordinary" members of these six immigrant groups and the major institutions, events and leaders in their communities.