Imagine living in a small studio apartment with more than three families and only having one window. This was the life for many immigrant families who came to New York during the 1800’s, hoping to find success and create new beginnings. Hackley sophomores had the opportunity to walk through these historic communities and learn about what life was like for immigrants, who were the backbone of America’s industrialization.
After a busy and stressful week of exams, the sophomore class ventured into the city for their U.S. History field trip. They braved the cold, visited the Tenement Museum, and took a Big Onion walking tour. The day was spent exploring the layers of lower Manhattan immigrant communities.
This annual trip, which began in the 2023-2024 school year, was originally a two-day trip and took place in March. However, with the changes to the exam schedule, the trip was moved so that it would still follow the end of the exam season. While most of the New York City portion of the trip remained constant, the day when the tenth-grade class traveled to Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow was cut due to the Manor being closed during the winter months.
The 10th-grade history curriculum here at Hackley focuses on U.S. History leading up to the 1900s, covering major events such as the American and Market Revolution and discussing how each event serves as a building block toward the current state of the country. History Department Chair Chris Loomis explained in an email to parents and students that the goal of the trip is to “use New York City’s history as a lens through which to enrich our students’ understanding of the nation’s past and to inspire them for the spring research paper.”
On Thursday, February 20th, sophomores gathered in the Lindsay Room, where they were treated to breakfast and received an overview of the day. Before getting on the buses and heading to the city, Mr. Loomis assigned students to the four different tour groups: 100 Years Apart, Life After the Famine, Family Owned Businesses, and Tenement Women.
In order to allow students to explore their own interests, prior to the trip Mr. Loomis had sent out a form giving people the option to choose which segment of the museum they would like to visit. All the tours were about immigrant life in lower Manhattan from the 1820s to the 1980s, but each focused on a different group of people. While the Tenement Museum may sound like a name or historical site, it is actually just the name for the collection of single-family apartments within a building, of which the museum owns multiple.
The 100 Years Apart tour explored the perspectives of a tenement family, first looking at an Asian family in the 1970s before traveling down a building and back 100 years to the 1870s with a German family. The interactive segment of the tour allowed students to take a deeper dive into the lives of Asian immigrants. There were different objects often seen within tenement homes, like a rice cooker, pots, and a sewing machine that had been preserved. There was a button that could be clicked on each object, which allowed students to hear the stories of different immigrants who had moved to the United States from a variation of Asian nations.
While looking into the lives of Asian immigrants, students were able to dive deeper into their daily lives by picking up different objects commonly seen within tenement homes, such as rice cookers, pots, and small telephones, as well as daily objects such as sewing machines. These objects, recovered and preserved by the museum, were recreated into speakers and screens to allow others to hear the stories of what it was like to live in the United States during their respective time periods.
Another possible tour option focused on life after the Irish potato famine, where sophomores heard the story of Joseph and Bridget Moore, who came to the growing and diverse tenement neighborhoods during the years following the Civil War. The group followed their lives, eventually ending in the museum’s 97 Orchard property, considered then to be one of the nicer tenement buildings, sparking student interests and showing differing perspectives.
“The Tenement Museum gave me a very interesting perspective on the hardships that Irish Immigrants faced,” said sophomore Cooper Ho.
The family-owned tour explored the history of the German Saloons and how Germans were able to bring pieces of their culture with them to America. Students got to sit in Schneider’s Saloon, run by John and Caroline Schneider, which was later transformed in the 1930s into Max Marcus’ auction house. The tour had an interactive feature where a student could scan an artifact and then read and listen to the use and importance of that object in Marcus’ life.
The final group was about tenement women and Jewish families. Students heard the stories of two Jewish families, especially emphasizing the role of women in events like the 1902 Kosher Meat Boycott. They were also able to tour the apartments of the Jewish families and saw some parts that were untouched except for the actual wood, but the others were recreated and with a tailoring business at home.
After each group had finished their tenement tours, everyone was given a 45-minute lunch break. To highlight the plethora of immigrant communities in lower Manhattan, there were a variety of different food options to choose from, like empanadas, dumplings, pizza, and tamales.
After lunch, sophomores split up based on their history classes and went on a walking tour of lower Manhattan in Chinatown and Little Italy. Even though it was cold and windy, sophomores powered through their 2-hour walking tour, they saw different tenements where immigrants lived when they moved to the US. Tour guides also stopped at different historical locations on the walk from the historic Essex Market down to Chatham Square near City Hall. To add depth to lessons of cultural history, students were treated to freshly filled cannolis from the famous Little Italy bakery La Bella Ferrara. Later on the tour, guides took students to the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, where the groups got to try scoops of exotic ice cream flavors such as taro/ube, and pandan, a tropical plant used to flavor many Asian dishes.
“While it was cold, I really enjoyed the Big Onion walking tour,” said sophomore Annabella Mancini.
To end their trip, groups traveled down the storied Doyer Street, claimed to be the birthplace of Chinatown, on their way back to Chatham Square, where the fun and exciting day concluded with historians boarding their respective buses back to the hilltop ready to return to school the next day.
