Tenement Museum Brings Memories to Life

This past February I took two of my adult children to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum during a trip to New York (“Museum Plan Hits Too Close to Home,” April 18). I wanted them to see where and how my grandparents lived and raised six children (yes, in a 350-square-foot apartment very much like the one on the tour). I remember my mother and her siblings always speaking lovingly of growing up on Orchard Street, shopping on Delancey Street, helping their mother run her poultry business and opening the fire hydrants in the summers to cool down.

Please, keep the museum as it is presently. Don’t try to enlarge it. The smallness of size and the cramped atmosphere are so evocative of what it must have been like. We were moved to tears to realize that even living like that was a gift to the newcomers to this country. The museum is a wonderful reminder of where we came from.

Harriet Braun

Newhall