An updated new edition of a now-classic work

"I trace my ancestry back to the Mayflower," writes Andrew S. Dolkart. "Not to the legendary ship that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, but to the more prosaic tenement on the southeast corner of East Broadway and Clinton Street named the Mayflower, where my father was born in 1914 to Russian-Jewish immigrants."

For Dolkart, his father's experience of being raised in a tenement became a metaphor for the life that was afforded countless immigrant children growing up in Lower Manhattan during the past century. In this revised edition of his classic book, Dolkart presents for us a precise and informative biography of a typical tenement house in New York City that became, in 1988, the site for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The author documents, analyzes, and interprets the architectural and social history of this building at 97 Orchard Street, as a way of understanding the physical fabric of tenements in general. The story begins in the 1860s when 97 Orchard Street was erected, moving on to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the neighborhood started to change, and concluding in the present day as the building is reincarnated as the museum.

This edition expands on the story of the many immigrants who lived in the building to include the story of Joseph Moore, an African American waiter who lived nearby with his wife and stepdaughter, providing a more fully realized account of the neighborhood, the city, and the many tenement residents whose stories have become woven into the nation’s history.