Tenement Museum

The experience

97 Orchard Street was put up in 1863 by a Prussian-born immigrant, Lukas Glockner, with 22 apartments over a basement saloon. An estimated 15,000 people from more than 20 nations passed through it and 103 Orchard Street next door before the buildings emptied out. In 1935 the landlord evicted his tenants and sealed the upper floors rather than pay for new fire codes, and nobody went back in until Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson founded the museum in 1988. Restored apartments in both buildings are now shown as furnished period rooms, and every visit starts at the 103 Orchard visitor centre.

Two tenements whose apartments sat sealed for fifty years, now opened one family at a time.

What a membership adds.

Everything above is free: the name, the photo, the rating, the exact spot. What members get is the part you can't Google: the sourced insider tip for this place (what to order, when to go, what to skip), every day of your trips unlocked in full with the insider tip on every researched stop, and the concierge at full strength, answering with your own insider tips, no daily meter.