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Ninety-seven Orchard is a five-story brick building decorated with “Italianate-style” architectural elements. The brownstone ornamentation is largely composed of stock elements which can be found on numerous other tenement buildings. Like many tenements of its time, its architect was never recorded. But the structure of the building is quite simple: two brick-masonry walls, spanned by wooden beams, twelve or sixteen inches thick, stand upon a foundation of stone, two feet thick.

When 97 Orchard Street was built, it had twenty apartments and two basement-level storefronts. Each floor had four three-room apartments, two in the front and two in the back of the building. When it was constructed, 97 Orchard Street had no indoor plumbing, no gas, and only one room in each apartment benefited from direct sunlight. Each apartment was, however, equipped with two fireplaces. Originally, the doors in the main hallway of 97 Orchard Street, both front and back, did not have glass or “glazing” to let in light

97 Orchard Street also originally had an iron fire escape affixed to the front of the building. In back, a party balcony was constructed for the northwest apartments and a standard fire escape for the southwest apartments, which was located where the stair tower is today. Although 97 Orchard Street was built before the advent of housing laws in New York City and the United States, building laws that ensured fire safety required Lucas Glockner to provide his first tenants with a safe way to exit the building in case of fire. In an era when poor enforcement of such regulations was all too common, he likely did so because he was also among the first residents of 97 Orchard Street, and would have wanted to ensure the safety of his own family.

Few structural changes were made to the building during the nineteenth century. While sewer lines were dug under Orchard Street before the building was built, the landlord of 97 Orchard wasn’t charged for connection to the system until 1899. The school sink (outhouses) located in the rear yard was probably connected to the sewers when 97 Orchard Street was built. Gas lines were brought into neighborhood by the 1880s, but there were no housing laws requiring a landlord to install either indoor plumbing or gas before 1901. Therefore, it is unlikely they were installed in 97 Orchard before the twentieth century. Electricity wasn’t available in the building until around 1924.
The first major alterations to the building probably came in the wake of the 1901 Housing Law (see appendix D). Otto Reissman, an architect, filed papers with the City to make most of the changes required by this new law to the building in 1905. A skylight was installed at the top of the stairway, an air shaft on one side of the building, two water-closets off the hallway on each floor (and ventilated by the air shaft), and sash windows in all of the interior walls. Sash windows were meant to bring light and air from the outer to inner rooms of the apartments.

In order to install the toilet facilities, a space was “stolen” in the 2 neighboring apartments. The loss of space in the affected apartments required the walls between kitchens and bedrooms to be moved. The toilet rooms and shaft occupied a substantial part of the old bedrooms of 97 Orchard Street and similar buildings, making these inner rooms uninhabitable. To alleviate this problem, but keep a three-room arrangement in each apartment, the partitions between the kitchen and bedroom in all of the south apartments at 97 Orchard Street were rearranged. Each of the new inner bedrooms was provided with a window onto the new shaft. This work was undertaken by architect Otto Reissmann. Little is known about Reissmann except that he established his office in about 1897 and continued in practice until at least 1930. Reissmann was one of a number of architects who specialized in tenement work and whose offices were on the Lower East Side. He was the architect most active on Orchard Street in undertaking the required alterations to accommodate water closets. Of the 44 buildings on Orchard Street for which water-closet documentation has been found, ten were altered by Reissmann between 1904 and 1908. The work of reconfiguring the apartments impacted by the addition of toilets was done as inexpensively as possible and a great deal of woodwork and other old material was reused in the reconstruction.

The residents of 97 Orchard Street do not appear to have nailed shut the windows that open onto the toilet airshaft, though this seems to have been a method employed by residents of other tenements to deal with the foul-smelling air emanating from the air shaft. Entirely enclosed on all four sides and rising the full height of the building, these air shafts seldom met their ostensible purpose of providing light and air to the toilets and inside rooms. Tenement dwellers on the upper floors sometimes threw their garbage down into the shafts, where it was left to rot.

At this time we believe the landlord also made some changes in the building that were not required by law. The landlord turned the front apartments on the first floor into commercial spaces and added two new entrances to the building on the stoop. It is also possible that the ornamentation visible in the public hallways today was added at this time. The original front of the building probably looked as 99 Orchard Street does today.

Ninety-seven Orchard functioned as a tenement until 1935. At that time, the landlord closed the apartments rather than comply with the requirements of the latest housing laws. The upper floors were closed off and used for storage, while the four storefronts (two on the ground floor and two in on the stoop level) remained in use. In 1988, 97 Orchard Street became the home of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Source: Andrew Dolkart, “97 Orchard Street: Architecture and History”

About half the people living in 97 Orchard street between 1870 and 1890 were Jewish, a higher portion than for the neighborhood as a whole. Between 1890 and the 1920 virtually all the tenants were Jewish. But while the earlier tenants had been German Jews, those after 1890 were mostly from Eastern Europe. This reflected changes in ethnic composition of the Lower East Side as a whole.

The number of tenants living in 97 Orchard Street increased steadily over time - from 77 when it was built to 111 in 1901. With the conversion of the first floor from residential to commercial use in 1905 (2 less apartments), the tenant population dropped a bit, though the population density of the building remained the same. This steady increase in density suggests the building gradually deteriorated over time. This was reflected in changing occupations of the residents: from artisans and petit bourgeois in 1870 to industrial workers by the turn of the century. The occupations of the residents at the turn of the century also reflected the prominence of the garment industry in the neighborhood at this time.

By the early 1930s, only seven families lived at 97 Orchard Street. Although the building’s vacancy rate was slightly higher than others in the neighborhood, it was nonetheless representative of overall demographic trends on the Lower East Side. Due in part to the restrictive immigration legislation of the 1920s, the extension of mass transportation and the construction of bridges during the early 20th century, and continued deteriorating living conditions, the population of the Lower East Side began to decline during the late 1920s. Between 1927 and 1928, the tenement vacancy rate averaged around 14%. Just two years later in 1930, the rate had increased some 7 percent with 22.5% of tenement apartments vacant; this included approximately 13,369 vacant units, leading one observer to comment, “Whole buildings are empty of tenants where they used to be packed like sardines.”

On the other hand, the decrease in 97 Orchard Street’s tenancy may be the result of faulty reporting by the census enumerator. The Baldizzi family, for example, is not listed in the 1930 U.S. Census, suggesting that more families lived in the building than were listed in the census.

(Source: James P. Shenton, “Biography of a Tenement”)

In any case, during the 1890s, mail was kept at local post offices and immigrant newspapers would report who had mail waiting for them. However, the mailboxes in 97 Orchard Street date from the early 20th century, perhaps the 1920s, judging from the fact that they had electric doorbells connected to them, and indicate the likelihood of regular mail delivery to 97 Orchard Street by at least the 1920s.

Residents of working-class neighborhoods like the Lower East Side were supposed to place their garbage in garbage-boxes set in front of the tenement building, but these boxes were “not at all sufficient for the people disposed to be cleanly.” Even when they were available, and they were often not, they frequently proved to be less than ideal. In 1863, the New York Tribune reported that garbage boxes were little more than receptacles of “heterogeneous filth…forming one festering, rotting, loathsome, hellish mass of air poisoning, death-breeding filth, reeking on the fierce sunshine.”

Throughout the 19th century, health agencies and reformers were periodically moved to action by the threat of great epidemics. These sudden, catastrophic events compelled both politicians and businessmen to undertake sanitary improvements to the urban environment. According to historian Steven J. Correy, “A central historical and political debate throughout the 19th century was whether garbage collection and street cleaning were best left to private enterprise, with city contracts let to private companies, or whether they should be viewed as a public responsibility-under public control and employing municipal workers.”

Before 1872, responsibility for street cleaning and waste collection was assumed by a succession of public and private ventures. Political ties figured strongly in the awarding of contracts to carting operations, and the city often took over for contractors who performed inadequately. Waste collection and street cleaning were handled by the Metropolitan Board of Police from 1872 until the Department of Street Cleaning was formed in 1881. Political patronage and corruption, however, remained an obstacle to effective service until 1895, when George Waring Jr. was appointed commissioner. He reorganized the department along military lines, minimized political influence in employing workers, stressed sweeping by hand rather than with machines, and dressed street sweepers in white duck uniforms, earning them the nickname “whitewings.”

For most of the 19th century, waste collected from the streets of New York City was dumped into the ocean. Waring also revolutionized waste disposal and temporarily suspended ocean dumping. Although experiments with incineration and the landfilling of garbage had been conducted as early as 1870, only in 1896 did Waring implement a system of salvaging solid waste: garbage was boiled down for greases and fertilizers by a private firm on Barren Island, ash and street sweepings were used as infill in dumps and low-lying areas, and rubbish (wood, paper, rags, bottles, and metals) was reclaimed by scavengers for a fee paid to the city.

Located in the rear yard of 97 Orchard Street, a wooden-frame building flush against the north wall of the yard held the building’s privy facilities. Positioned in a row, it contained three compartments, roughly 2 feet 6 inches wide by 3 feet 9 inches deep, divided by wooden partitions. Each compartment had door with a small hole and a lock. The floors, seats, and casing between the floors and seats in each compartment were likewise made of wood. Below this structure, underground, sat a narrow, rectangular, mortared brick vault, 12 feet long and 41/2 feet wide, filled with water. Each compartment of the privy had a funnel connecting the seat with the vault below, allowing waste to fall into the water-filled vault. The brick vault had a drain on the east end, which connected to the sewer system. The drain was stopped with an iron cylindrical hollow plug, about 1 foot in height, and a bar and rod used to lift it out of the drain. There was also a pipe that was connected to the vault, which provided water from the Croton Aqueduct to periodically flush out the school sink privies.2

Before the development of the sewer system, New Yorkers did not have toilets with pipes to carry away their waste. Instead, they used privies, also called outhouses, backhouses, loos, necessaries, houses of office and many other names. These were small shacks located in the yards outside people’s homes. They had one or more seats inside and a pit or cesspool in the ground below. In crowded neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, privies were often shared by multiple families. Early cesspools and pits underneath privies were not lined or watertight. The waste deposited and stored there easily seeped into the ground and contaminated the water supply.3

To make waste disposal more sanitary, privies were required by municipal regulation to have pits that were “constructed of brick or stone, and at least ten feet in depth from the surface of the ground.” Allowing the contents to rise more than two feet above the surface could bring a twenty-five-dollar fine to the owner or occupants of a particular building. Tenement landlords could hire companies to empty privy pits and transport the contents to four designated piers, where the waste would be dumped into a nearby river. At nightfall, these laborers, known as night soil men, used buckets to empty privy pits and then poured the contents into open carts. Whenever these carts appeared, New Yorkers frequently closed their windows, even during the hot summer months.4

By the 1860s, many tenements had adopted sewer-connected outhouses, sometimes called school sinks, privy vaults with sewer connection, and privy sinks. Considered more sanitary than privies with pits or cesspools, they did not contaminate drinking water and did not require carting companies to empty them. Health inspector Roger Tracy reported that “school sinks, which are shallow metallic troughs, with a plug to keep them full of water, and…allow…frequent cleansing, have found great favor where it was desirable to leave as little possible to the care and faithfulness of tenants.”5

In the days when toilets were located outside, chamber pots were a familiar site in most American households. Chamber pots were used as an alternative to going outside during the night or bad weather. In urban areas, people often used them to avoid filthy outhouses or trekking down several flights of stairs. Sometimes they threw the contents of their chamber pot out of the window or didn’t empty them at all. Sanitary covers could be purchased to prevent the escape of odors from chamber pots. An 1899, law made leaving waste in a chamber pot or anywhere in an apartment for a lengthy period of time illegal.6

Despite the presence of relatively healthy sanitary conditions in this part of New York in the 1860s, successive waves of immigrants pushed the limits of sanitation on the Lower East Side as the century wore on. A crowded street was not usually a clean one. At the turn of the century, pushcarts, roaming animals and piles of trash dominated this block. Waste disposal was a major problem and the placement of overflowing privies next to water sources contributed vastly to diseases and terrible epidemics: cholera, yellow fever, diphtheria, and common diarrhea. Partly as a result, the infant mortality rate was as high as 40%. 7

The connection between contaminated water and disease was not discovered until the late nineteenth century. Even then, “germ theory” was not widely accepted. Instead, medical professionals attributed cholera and similar diseases to “intemperance” in eating and drinking, lustful and lewd behavior, as well as dirt and fermenting garbage on the streets of the city. In the first half of the nineteenth century, cholera was also perceived in spiritual terms, as a pestilence employed by God to cleanse the human race of its sins.8

Although many native New Yorkers blamed immigrants for disease, they knew they themselves were not immune to epidemics. As they began to realize that the living conditions of immigrants threatened the health of their own families, many became involved in tenement and sanitary reform. In 1864, a year after 97 Orchard Street was constructed, wealthy New Yorkers including banker August Belmont and millionaire industrialist Peter Cooper formed the Citizen’s Association to reform municipal government and force it to actively involve itself in the tenement house “problem.” The Citizen’s Association put together a Council of Hygiene and Public Health to survey and report on the sanitary conditions of the city. Completed in 1865, the Report of the Citizen’s Association of New York upon the Sanitary of Conditions of the City consisted of over three hundred pages, much of it describing the filthy tenement neighborhoods with their lack of adequate bathroom facilities. It concluded that the city’s sanitary policies needed a major overhaul if future crises were to be avoided.9

With the threat of another cholera outbreak on the horizon, and influenced by the 1865 sanitary report, the New York State legislature passed a health bill establishing the Metropolitan Board of Health in February 1866. Larger, better organized, and equipped with greater power than its municipal predecessor, the Metropolitan Board of Health devoted most of its time and energy to inspecting the yards and interiors of tenement houses. By the end of 1866, health inspectors claimed to have emptied and disinfected more than 15,000 privies in Manhattan.10

Lead paint was used at 97 Orchard Street beginning in the mid-1870s, replacing calcimine, up until the building was closed in 1935. It does not pose a danger to visitors, unless s/he ingested a considerable amount orally.

Phillip and Olga Chereska live here with their daughter, Annie (age: 18 months), and four boarders. Samuel Maronschick, one of the boarders, is ill. At a time of rampant tuberculosis he’ll be lucky if his problem is a terrible cold. Remedy? Olga will try “cupping.” Cupping, a therapeutic practice used to draw blood from the surface of the skin, was widely followed by doctors and barbers. Meanwhile, Annie is drawn to the glittering of the razor blade which has been put down on the table by another boarder who is shaving. Adam Pukach, a boarder, spills his coffee as he attempts to keep her from harm. Albert Rosenblatt, owner of 97 Orchard Street in 1915, is seen talking with Phillip in the front room.

Harry (age 29) and Rosie (age 28), both from Russia, live here with their boarders, Herman Janovitz (age 26), Couple Kopokovsky (age 30) and Hirsch Klatter (age 45). Tonight, they probably will be going to a relative’s Seder (ceremonial meal during the Jewish holiday of Passover). This allows them to labor in their personal home sweatshop until the last possible moment. Rosie is yelling at her husband to stop work as she sees more “piece work” being delivered by a young neighborhood boy. Harry burns his hand as he turns around to respond. To make matters worse, the Tenement Inspector is here to check out the apartment for violations. Meanwhile, Hirsch Klatter is writing a letter home to Austria.