Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees - GCIR

In 1863, Lucas Glockner invested $8,000 to build a tenement on a single-family lot in Lower Manhattan's East Side. He moved into one of the apartments with his family, and over the next 72 years, some 7,000 newcomers to America did the same, immigrants from 20 countries.

Since 1988, when Glockner's former home at 97 Orchard Street became the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the stories of many of these new Americans have been brought back to life in the same tiny apartments they once occupied.

When her husband Julius left for work one morning and never returned, Nathalie Gumpertz, a Jewish immigrant from Prussia, bought a sewing machine and ended up supporting three daughters by making dresses for neighbors. The Rogharshevsky family from Lithuania filled their three rooms with their six children—girls bedded in the kitchen, boys on the front couch—while father Abraham worked until his death from tuberculosis as a presser in a garment shop. The Sicilian Baldizzi family weathered the Great Depression at 97 Orchard: Adolfo, who had been a fine woodworker in Italy, walked the streets with his toolbox in search of odd jobs.