For anyone studying immigration into the United States today, “the lower East Side” of New York has a recognizably hallowed status, so celebrated has it become as a site for commemoration of immigrant arrival and settlement for a century and more. While other neighborhoods, such as Chinatown, have a similar past, it is “the lower East Side” that evokes those staples of the immigrant narrative: economic hardship, poor and overcrowded housing, the struggle to “become American” that continue to circulate and resonate in the present. I have recently re-read How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York by Jacob Riis for a class I am teaching; discussed with the students some of the photos he took snooping in the tenement alleyways in the 1890s. Our trip to the Tenement Museum follows from these activities, as we try to understand why history matters, whose history is it anyway, and how to make sense of immigration today.

We are scheduled to take a guided tour of one of the preserved tenement buildings on 97 Orchard Street.  The tour starts at the Tenement Museum bookshop, a big room with very tall glass windows and a huge and impressive array of books covering all aspects of immigration, with a particular focus on New York City. I saw Jane Jacobs’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities written in 1961 and Colin McCann’s Let the Great World Spin from 2009. There were coffee tables books and books full of iconic pictures of old New York neighborhoods that look very different today. It is this connection with the present that makes the Tenement Museum’s role vital in disseminating new thinking about immigration. A panel discussion that evening which I attended was a book launch of One Out of Three, an edited work by scholar Nancy Foner about new immigrant communities in the changing mosaic that is contemporary New York. The writer/journalist Suketu Mehta used the term “inter-local” as that which, more than terms like “transnational” or “American,” might best characterize immigrants today: people who are equally at home in the city of their birth and the city they currently live in, who are no longer anguished about identity and belonging since they wish to belong to several constituencies at once. Race and nation are less significant today, Mehta asserted, as one puts aside ancient tribal hatreds in a new urban landscape like New York, and learns to live peaceably with a neighbor who may have been an “enemy” in a former setting.

Earlier that afternoon, we experience three time periods inside a preserved tenement building: the 1860s, 1890s and 1930s, roughly indicative of German, eastern Europe Jewish, and Italian settlement. The guide takes us into a narrow hallway and up a flight of stairs into three small rooms, one opening onto the next. She defines a ‘tenement’ as a building that accommodated three separate families. The rooms are very small and mostly empty except for objects or artifacts from the time signifying kitchen, bedroom, or work room. We learn the occupants’ stories and try to imagine the neighborhood as it may have been in that era.

Outside, it is a typical and familiar New York ambience, so we walk to some of the other sites of buildings and parks that are old, and have or are acquiring new identities.

If history is about continuity, New York is not: no ghosts from its immigrant past haunt me, for the city seems to engulf all histories into an endless present. Now it is the South Asians and the Chinese, the Liberians and Dominicans, the Egyptians and Nigerians who are the “new immigrants” settling in the regions of New York and New Jersey.  Do the faces change and the stories remain the same?