John Reuter manipulated his photographs to show ghostly images from the past superimposed in the unrestored apartments and hallways. Harvey Stein spent his time at the Museum photographing former residents while Klaus Schnitzer and Robert Sennhauser detailed the empty rooms with a perfect mix of sadness and hope. As one of our first major exhibits at the Tenement Museum, it is still remembered as one of the best. The proof is on the walls of our office, Visitor Center, and tenement building, where many of the prints hang to this day, still as beautiful and haunting as ever.

Although the nation has salvaged, preserved, and interpreted scores of rural cabins and farmhouses, as well as mansions - symbols of our rural heritage and our gentry - the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is the first to preserve a tenement, the quintessential symbol of the urban working class and poor experience. 97 Orchard Street, which housed 7,000 immigrants from over 20 nations between 1863 and 1935, is symbolic of the first American experience for the vast majority of Americans.

The United States is a nation with more citizens who have roots in the urban environment than in the rural and more descended from the working class than from the gentry. When the physical evidence of history is systematically destroyed, as was the case in the destruction of neighborhoods in urban centers across the nation, the unwitting message is that the inhabitants and their experiences are unworthy of inclusion in the historical record. This Polaroid-sponsored collection is quite unique in documenting the life that took place inside this tenement. The collection designates the experiences of the residents of 97 Orchard Street and other such urban neighborhoods as significant and essential elements of American History. We are most grateful to Polaroid for bringing this story to the American public.

Ruth J. Abram
President & Founder
Lower East Side Tenement Museum