MUSEUM BRINGS TENEMENT DAYS TO LIFE : ON LOCATION.

Byline: Philip Seib Dallas Morning News

Millions of Americans, wherever they live, have ancestral ties to New York's Lower East Side. Here, in crowded tenements and pushcart-filled streets, began the Americanization of immigrants from throughout the world.

No place illustrates their struggle better than the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

This brick apartment building at 97 Orchard St., built in 1864, had been boarded up since 1935 and seemed doomed to slow decay until 1988, when some enterprising history buffs decided to open part of it to give the public an idea of what tenement life had been like.

Even today's visitor to the now-empty structure is likely to shudder as claustrophobia takes hold. With 22 apartments on six narrow floors, the noise and smell and crowding must have been overwhelming.

In its 71-year history, the building housed approximately 10,000 people from at least 20 countries. Museum researchers know who many of them were: the Schneiders from Bavaria, the Gottbergs from Poland, the Shepards from Britain, the Confinos from Greece.

In tenements, privacy was virtually unknown. Residents slept in shifts because there were not enough beds for everyone. Sweat shops operated in some of the apartments; on one door frame is a tenant's penciled record of how many jackets and dresses were made in that room.

Today, knowledgeable guides take small groups of visitors through the two floors of apartments that are structurally sound enough to be explored. In most of the building, virtually nothing has been changed since the last tenants moved out 60 years ago, and historians are discovering intriguing reminders of what tenement life was like. In one apartment, 18 layers of wallpaper have been found - evidence of different residents' efforts to make this place their own.

Restoration work lets the visitor see two furnished apartments as they looked when they were lived in: one as occupied by a German Jewish family in 1878, the other by a Sicilian Catholic family in 1935 (the building's last year as a residence).

In its storefront exhibition space across the street, the museum displays artifacts uncovered in dusty corners of the tenement: simple toys, food containers, bits of clothing. A 6-foot-high cutaway model of the tenement lets visitors peer into the lives of immigrant families who lived there.

The museum also organizes walking tours through surrounding Lower East Side neighborhoods, where the ebb and flow of immigration can be monitored in changing names and faces, nationalities and religions. Evidence of this mix is visible in many places, like the sign on the historic building that was home to the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, which in 1910 had a readership of 250,000. Today, while ``Forward'' remains emblazoned in Hebrew at the top of the building, the current owners have added a huge billboard - in Mandarin Chinese.

For information on tours of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 97 Orchard St., New York, and Lower East Side walking tours, call [phone]. Admission fees vary according to the tour selected.

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