Tenement Museum Virtual Tour using Photogrammetry

Take a look inside to see how the Tenement Museum has preserved its history

Kolin Pope

Dec. 7, 2021

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In the middle of the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of new Americans flooded into New York. They found homes in buildings like this one, on Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where the population density in some neighborhoods approached nearly a quarter-million people per square mile by the mid 1860s.

Architecturally, 97 Orchard St. was simple and indistinguishable from thousands of other utilitarian structures. Today, it is preserved by the Tenement Museum, an innovative public history organization. Inside, visitors can see relics and reminders of one of the most consequential migrations in human history, a flood tide of humanity that changed the fabric of America.

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For decades, tenement dwellers had only basic protection from fire but almost none from disease. As public understanding of contagious disease improved, housing laws in 1879 and 1901 helped spur incremental changes. “The Tenement acts were not about comfort, but about public health,” says Dave Favaloro, the Tenement Museum’s senior director of curatorial affairs.

Step into its cramped spaces to follow this brick structure along the y-axis of time, as landlords and residents grappled with such diseases as tuberculosis, cholera and influenza, — and as the fear of fire and bad air, even immigrants themselves, left indelible marks on its design and structure.

In the 1860s, disease was an urgent fear, and rife in New York’s tenements. Tuberculosis was endemic in the city, but in the years after the Schneiders’ deaths, scientific understanding of how the contagion spread would expand. In addition, progressives used changes to the law, architecture and urban design to fight disease.

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Among the most feared was cholera, spread by human waste. To access a toilet, patrons of the Schneiders’ bar, like residents of the apartments above, would have had to make their way to the backyard.

Step into what would have been a small, dark and smelly exterior courtyard to see the minimal plumbing this building offered when it was new.

The tenement at 97 Orchard St. appealed to the museum’s founders in part because the building behind it had been torn down. That allowed street access to the back of the museum and room for this modern external staircase, which provides egress.

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The museum works to balance today’s safety demands while preserving the interiors as much as possible. Some apartments have also been left exactly as they were found, after years of decay. Others have been re-created to represent a particular time period. The Tenement Museum doesn’t preserve this building to represent a single historical moment but, rather, a cross-section of different times.

Step into an apartment preserved as it would have looked in 1910, with some basic improvements to living conditions.

In 1924, the fear of immigrants reached a peak, and the United States passed the Johnson-Reed Act, barring most immigrants from Asia and cutting by 80 percent arrivals from countries in Europe. In 1934, New York required landlords to replace wooden stairs with brick or masonry. Fewer immigrants, stricter housing codes and upward social mobility depressed demand for apartments in such buildings. A year later, the owner of 97 Orchard St. evicted his remaining tenants and closed the upper-floor apartments, leaving only a few businesses on the lower two levels. For more than half a century, these apartments fell into ruin, until the Tenement Museum moved in and started to re-create the lives of the building’s former occupants.

Millions of Americans can trace their ancestry back to buildings like this one, and collective memory frequently softens the narrative. Conditions were often dire, and disease rampant, and tenement laws were driven as much by xenophobia as by genuine concern for the poor. The fear of outsiders, often associated with actual and metaphorical disease, continues to shape Americans’ views of their own identity and security. Today, these buildings are part of a thriving neighborhood, with many apartments joined to create larger, more habitable spaces. And the Tenement Museum continues its mission to preserve and memorialize the lives, not of the great and famous, but of ordinary Americans who did their best to make this place home.

correction

An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that among the effects of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 was a cut by 80 percent of immigrant arrivals from the Western Hemisphere. The act effectively cut immigrant arrivals from many countries in Europe. The story has been corrected.

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About this story

Kolin Pope is a three-time Emmy nominated animator and director whose work in documentary and journalism has been featured in The Washington Post, NBC News and Vice. He lives in Portland, Ore.

Editing by Jenna Pirog, Amy Hitt, Elite Truong. Audio editing and original score by Ted Muldoon. Copy editing by Adrienne Dunn. Photogrammetry and laser scanning by SOE Studio.

This story uses photogrammetry, a noncontact, nondestructive technique that records the exact size and shape of existing spaces and objects by combining thousands of images to output a 3-D rendering of a space. The Post used a lidar scanner, drones and handheld cameras to scan and photograph all sides of the building and rooms on location at the Tenement Museum on the lower east side of Manhattan. We used Reality Capture to process the images, clean up and output a 3-D model, and Cinema 4D to customize the lighting and animate the 3-D sequences.

Some cleanup of the models is required for purposes of formatting, authenticity, and visual clarity, especially of features that do not render well with the technique. As a result, some objects, like the gas lighting hanging from the ceiling, appear to have holes in them. The water closet we scanned is located on the Museum’s second floor, and was added to the third floor in post-production.

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Fernande Dalal

Update: 2024-08-04

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