97 Orchard

I just finished reading 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman and just finished visiting the Tenement Museum on Saturday when we visited Penny. So I sent a book review of it off to the first floor:
Ziegelman uses five families that lived in the tenement at 97 Orchard Street in Manhattan (now the Tenement Museum) to tell the history of immigrant foodways between 1863 (when the tenement was built) and 1935 (when it was no longer used for residences). It is a very easy and interesting read since it gives a broad and entertaining history of food and social conditions in New York City during each period. Ziegelman begins with the Glockner family in the 1860s, a German family that built the tenement. Then come the Moore family from Ireland, the German Jewish Gompertz family from Prussia in the 1870s, the Russian Jewish Rogarshevsky family in the early 1900s, and finally the Italian Baldizzi family in the 1920-30s. Ziegelman describes the living conditions that each immigrant group experienced and the type of food they would have commonly eaten. The book gave me the final impetus I needed to visit the Tenement Museum (http://www.tenement.org/) on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, a followup that I would highly recommend to everyone, especially during this current era of anti-immigrant feeling. These immigrants came over during a period when immigration (except for the Chinese) was not curtailed.