NYC EOY 2025 (part one)

Felix Empanadas
(Do you know this trio?
Would like to credit them.)

Since Covid, my wife and I have been making a point of visiting NYC at least once a year. It’s a city that holds so many important memories for both of us; primarily hers, she lived there for seven years. But Manhattan has changed so much since the 1990s, and we have spent a great deal of time there since, together and apart.

Toni finds the most amazing places to stay, this time it was the Historic Blue Moon Hotel on the LES, right across the street from the Tenement Museum. We checked in late on Saturday evening, and walked about the neighborhood to find necessaries (beer, wine, pain reliever).

Yes, it was Saturday night and yes, it was New York City, and yet I was surprised by the sheer density of clubs for which young people would stand in line in the freezing cold to access. As a trio of bright young things in short shirts passed us on the sludgy sidewalk, one observed, “I can’t feel my knees.”

Russ & Daughters Cafe

We passed a walkdown jazz club, we knew it was a jazz club because there was a sandwich board outside reading “Live Jazz” and though we were on a drug store mission we were both like, “Maybe? Maybe some jazz?” So when further down the street we noticed and then did a double-take on a trio wedged into one corner of a small empanada emporium, and were then waved in by a seated patron, we were primed to engage.

By then it was nearly midnight, we sat for a few numbers, an entertaining ensemble that warmed my bones and made the walk back to the hotel much more jolly. We promised each other to return for lunch before our time was through.

Sunday morning we took breakfast at Russ & Daughters Cafe and then made our first visit to the Tenement Museum, an institution which is a testament to everything the current administration hates and fears, a monument to the immigrant experience in America and to the working class in general.

The Tenement Museum

The Tenement Museum was founded in the late 1980s by two women, Ruth J. Abram and Anita Jacobson. 97 Orchard Street (later, 103 Orchard was also acquired) was built during the Slaveholder Rebellion in the style which had become prevalent, with four street front business spaces and four stories of apartments above, featuring a total of twenty apartments built specifically to accommodate the exploding immigrant population.

For the museum, many of the spaces have been restored to a state they may have appeared in when they were home to a variety of first generation Americans. Our first tour, Tenement Women: 1902, was to the home to the Levine family, when learned a great deal about the garment business, and of the Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902 for which the Jewish women of the Lower East Side united to mount a successful (if often violent) protest against a sudden rise in the price of beef.

Now a National Historic Site, 97 Orchard Street was required to maintain a number of spaces in the condition they were found at the time of their designation. As the landlord had decided in 1935 that bringing the residential spaces up to newly revised safety codes was no longer cost-effective, he chose rather to leave the apartments unoccupied and to only let the storefronts. You can imagine what state the apartments were in after fifty years of neglect.

It was just his kind of space – ceiling buckling, lath exposed, plaster cracked, wallpaper torn, no water, no heat, no electricity – that we can imagine being occupied by the denizens of the musical Rent, and it makes you wonder how many theatre kids would continue to fetishize “la vie Bohème” if they were forced to spend one night in such a squat.

God, I hate Mark.

To be continued.