Thu 9 May - New York City, NY

We awake to a second rainy day in a row, which we think may be a good thing because we can finally get to some famous galleries and museums.

After a lazy start we head to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in midtown..., and find the queue to get tickets winds thought the foyer then down the street (see the photo below - the people with umbrellas are queuing to get in...). And of course, everyone has an umbrella and is more or less drenched so its more crowded and grumpier on the sidewalks than usual. We don't see this as a fun way to spend our time, so we move on.

It is not a happy place on the roads of midtown Manhattan either. Traffic is gridlocked around 6th Avenue and lots of horns are being honked, although little good that does. Not easy for pedestrians to cross the streets either.

We stop for a coffee to decide our next course of action. Easy choice - we decide to not be in this part of NYC on a rainy day and so will head home and wait out the rain.

The rain does make for some good photography though. We love that the top of buildings are in clouds and the sky is grey but the neon lightens things up.

Times Square still trying to look cheerful.

It takes a while to get to our subway line as the stations in this part of town are old and sometimes you have to return to the street to get to the other side of a platform. We end up walking about 1km underground along platforms and through some tunnels before reaching a useful station for our line home.

Back in Chinatown and the sun shines and rain stops! An omen? A good call? When we check online, the weather forecast has changed and we decide to visit a small, local but very well rated museum (on TripAdvisor) later today, called the Tenement Museum. You book a tour and time online. And it is one train stop away or maybe 20 minutes walk from where we stay. Much easier and apparently with a lot smaller groups.

We do some shopping for Chinese style whole fish for dinner, and for wonton soup for lunch, then a few hours lazing before we head out again.

This is the building on Orchard St next to Delancey Street that houses the Tenement Museum. We arrive 3.30pm for our 4pm tour referred to as "Hard times". This turns out to be very beneficial as we can then see a 30 minutes film about Lower East Side including the Tenement Museum's history before the tour starts.

The reason this place is of interest to us is because it portrays the lives of a cross section of immigrants to New York between 1860 and 1935.

The building we enter as part of the tour is 97 Orchard Street. Here is a plaque outside the building.

And this is the building itself with the black fire escape.

The tour was very good, but again "No Photo". We downloaded a couple of photos from the Tenement Museum's website below.

Some rooms have been left as they were found (as the building was boarded up and not used since 1935!)

One of the tenements we visited included the story of a German immigrant family in 1880's where the husband left the wife and her 4 children and just took off so she worked as a dress maker to survive.

Some of the restoration work using batons and horsehair plaster.

Of course, the building initially being of German ownership, there was a saloon downstairs. Not sure about the guy in front though, no German ancestry there...

Another plaque across on Orchard Street explaining some of the neighborhood's history. It started with Irish and Germans and was known as Klein Deutschland, then that wave of immigration was followed by Russian Jews and Italians (until they were deemed second class citizens in 1924). Then Puerto Ricans and after 1965 Chinese people.

Well, it was all very interesting and the tour explained some of quirkier details from our Chinatown building, where we are staying. For example, there was a law introduced that forced 1 inside toilet per 2 households. Typically these tenement buildings had and have 4 apartments per floor with 2 toilets per floor. We have 4 apartments per floor and 2 extra doors per floor near the stairs in our building and we have seen that at least one of them still contains a toilet. Others are locked and one is used for storage.

 

After the tour, we find a bar in the corner of Ludlow and Stanton St with happy hour in progress so we decide that a cold one would not go astray. Hans had a Brooklyner Weisse - we know that Williamsburg further across East River and Williamsburg Bridge is now known for having many micro breweries and a road test is warranted. Di had a sangria.

 

We head towards home as it is 6pm. On the way we see this building and recognize it from the short film that we just saw ... And it is literally around the corner from our subway stop at East Broadway.

 

The building was originally the home for the "The Jewish Daily Forward" newspaper.

There is a huge clock at the top that apparently lights up at night, but we haven't seen that.. Yet.

The newspaper was very much socialistic and the building has 4 faces of famous people etched near the doorways. Apparently one is Karl Marx and the irony is that the building now is full of $1m+ apartments, with famous tenants and former tenants like one from the Versace family and Tatum O'Neal, ex wife of John McEnroe.

Home for Di's whole fish that is cooked Asian style (what else in Chinatown), with special sauce and accompanied with red wine. Very nice. All good and now good night.

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