Meet the families of the Tenement Museum
The families whose homes are recreated at the Tenement Museum give you specific lives to follow through New York’s immigration and migration history. An educator leads each visit through domestic rooms, using ordinary objects and shared living space to explore how people worked, raised children and adapted to the city. The household you choose shapes the experience: the Levine family’s story includes the 1902 Kosher Meat Boycott, while the Schneiders’ saloon connects home life with running a small business.
Other stories follow the Irish Moore family after the famine, the Black Moore family in 1860s and 1870s Manhattan, and the Epstein Holocaust survivors and Puerto Rican Saez Velez family in the 1950s and 1960s. The Confino experience takes a different approach: an actor portrays Victoria Confino, a real Sephardic teenager, in 1916. That visit unfolds through a character’s account of her life, while the other tours build their stories around an educator’s guidance.
