Working–class heritage and the marketization of difference – the limits of new museology at Manhattan's Tenement Museum

ABSTRACT

Working-class history museums face immense challenges in trying to reconcile being socially progressive and class-oriented while also maintaining relevance and success in gentrifying areas. Museums are embedded within political economic structures of power, and thus face considerable limitations in their efforts to act as meaningful sites of political or ideological contestation. This article examines Manhattan’s Tenement Museum as a case study to explore the inherent tensions that exist in the representation of working-class heritage in a capitalist, gentrifying city. Synthesising research collected from extensive fieldwork between 2009 and 2017, as well as public records and published media, ethnographic analyses of museum space and exhibitions are performed in an effort to understand how the museum constructs and disseminates working-class history. Although the museum is careful to emphasise the socio-political agency of the people it represents, it largely downplays the Lower East Side’s activist, labour-oriented past and present. In order to more fully delve into questions of economic power and cultural production, the political economy of communication is used as an analytic lens to explore questions of identity politics and cultural struggle, urban sustainability, and finally, the precarious labour of the museum’s own workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Tenement Museum
• working class heritage
• gentrification
• museum corporatism
• labour

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Tenement Museum has a strict no photography policy; however, in December 2014 the museum held a charity event in which visitors were permitted to take and share photos on social media using the hashtag #tenementsnaps. Photographer Tom Seelie’s images from the event can be accessed via the weblog Gothamist (see “Photos: Inside the Tenement Museum” 2014).

2. In 1996, Joel Kaplan, Executive Director of the United Jewish Council, wrote to Abram informing her his organisation would only be willing to assist the museum ‘if and when you make a decision to commit the necessary resources to chronical the “predominant” culture of the Lower East Side – the Orthodox Jewish community and its myriad of synagogues, shtibels, charitable and “self help” organizations’ (as quoted in Abram 2002).

3. Discounted admission fees for select groups were reinstated in 2019.

4. Admission fees for students and seniors are 22 USD. Children do not receive discounted admission.

5. As per the museum’s training manual, guides are explicitly forbidden from discussing the eminent domain controversy – instructions to direct any questions on the issue to the museum’s PR department appear twice in the twenty page document (“The Educator Manual” n.d.).

6. In 2007, the museum purchased 103 Orchard Street for 7 USD million. Work to convert the building into additional exhibition space began in 2016 (Sayer 2016).

7. U.A.W. Local 2110 is an amalgamated union with thirty contracts covering over 3000 technical, office, and professional workers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Davina M. DesRoches

Davina M. DesRoches is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. She has previously published on the rise of museum corporatism. Her current research project explores how museum workers are responding to changes in museum workplace organisation, and documents the strategies that workers and their unions use to expose and resist increasingly insecure employment, declining levels of compensation, and shrinking labour protections.