Shop Extends Mission of Tenement Museum

New York City's Lower East Side Tenement Museum provides visitors with a look at the experiences of the many different immigrant groups who once settled in the surrounding neighborhood. Through guided tours of restored apartments at 97 Orchard Street and area walking tours, the museum strives to promote tolerance and a better understanding of the immigrant experience. The Tenement Museum Shop complements these efforts through a carefully selected inventory of 1,500 titles and a growing series of special events. "Even though we're attached to the museum," said Helene Silver, vice president, director of the Visitors Center & Museum Shop, "we'd still like to be considered one of the best bookshops in New York."

Museum tours lead visitors into apartments in the historic tenement building that have been recreated to reflect the lives of its residents from 1874 through 1935. "[The museum] uses the stories of the people who actually lived there as a jumping off point to explain what the times were like," said Silver. "How people lived, worked, struggled, and survived."

The shop extends that focus through a range of titles written during and about the late 19th- to mid 20th-century time period that the museum represents. Since 74 different immigrant groups actually lived in the one building, the shop can easily cover a broad range. "It permits us to have a section on Jewish interest, Irish interest, Italian interest, Scandinavian interest, German interest...," said Silver. "People come here to learn a little more about their roots."

And as the museum also seeks to reflect the experiences of today's immigrants, so does the museum shop, through a collection of contemporary nonfiction and fiction written by and about immigrants.

Among the titles it carries in its 2,000-square-foot space are The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini, both Riverhead); Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri, both Houghton Mifflin); Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides, Picador); The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Michael Chabon, Random House, HarperCollins); and everything by Frank McCourt, Pete Hamill, and Kevin Baker.

The store has a large children's section that caters to the school groups that visit every morning when the museum is closed to the public. It also stocks many of the toys that were popular during the period when 97 Orchard Street was home to various immigrant groups -- harmonicas, yo-yos, Slinkys, kazoos, and puzzles. Inventory also includes New York maps and notebooks and sidelines from Fishs Eddy, among them, the Heroes From the Torah series of glasses and a bag imprinted with a sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge and surrounding buildings.

Since its "editorial vision is so clear," the store does very well, said Silver. "If someone is visiting here, I know what they're interested in."

The Tenement Museum Shop usually hosts two to four special events per month. A recent panel discussion featured Frank McCourt, Terry Golway, Pete Hamill, and other famous New York-based Irish-Americans. A new addition is a New York Trivia Night at a neighborhood bar. "It goes with the theme of tenement life," Silver said. "People hung out at a saloon. On the Lower East Side many still have that ambience."

To help develop additional events, The Tenement Museum Shop is enlisting Amanda Lydon, formerly of Good Yarns Bookshop in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. As of June 29, Lydon will be the assistant director of the Visitors Center & Museum Shop. "We're very excited to have Amanda," said Silver. "She's the first real book person we've had. She'll be doing our events and certainly helping to run our retail operation that's growing by double digits."

Although sad to be leaving Good Yarns, Lydon said she was looking forward to working closely with Silver and was "very excited about expanding the event series," as well as about "the social and political element that is inherent in the museum."

Silver underlined that the social and political element that the museum speaks to remains just as fraught as ever. "Immigrant's stories should not be lost," she said. "When we have kids groups come through here they fall into such extremes. Some say they can't imagine living that way, and some say this is how they live today. We truly see the whole gamut of society." --Karen Schechner