"We were taken to a basement room with folding chairs and a tv. Half of the group went upstairs to visit the Living History
exhibit, the other half (of which I was a part of) stayed in the room. We watched this really cool video called Heaven Will Save the Working Girl which was about the 1909 strike of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory girls. They, like our beloved newsies, for all their work, on received a partial victory, but they ushered in a trend of successful strikes and the beginning of labor reform, which the newsies strike failed to do.
After the film, we traded places with the other group and went upstairs to a real tenement that had been preserved since the 1860’s. It was incredibly cool. We were asked to pretend as if we are a real immigrant family from Poland and that we had just moved here. We got to go into a real apartment and chat with Victoria Confino, or at least the actress who portrayed her. All and all, it was very interesting and very well-done."
~Alicia
"The Tenement Museum was really cool. I thought it was great that it was interactive, that you could sit on the bed and walk through the rooms and talk to an "immigrant" about her experiences. In my opinion, I learned a lot more that way than I would have if I had just looked at some exhibits and read some articles. It really helped me to understand what life would have been like for families like the Jacobs' at the turn of the century."