Many museums offer high-quality reproductions of elegant furniture from their collections. At my new swap home I looked to a museum for decorating ideas. We are not emulating a gilded Louis the XIVth chaise or the chandelier from Versailles. No, our tips come from a more humble source: The Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
Our new apartment is in an authentic century-old tenement building just a few blocks from the unrestored turn-of-the-century building that houses the Tenement Museum. The layout of the Museum and the apartments inside it are almost identical to our own home.
The Tenement Museum has several apartments that are renovated to show how people lived during different eras in New York City history. In the apartment from the 1870's I saw a shelving unit similar to the one in my own tenement apartment. The shelves had lace doilies hanging over the lip of each shelf and lace curtains on the windows. We recreated this at our own home.
Having decor from the turn of the 19th Century helps me feel connected to the generations who lived in this home before me. Some of those long-gone inhabitants might have been my own relatives. From the 1800's through the mid-20th Century, the Lower East Side was home to waves of immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Jewish Eastern Europe.
I fell in love with the authentic New York details of this apartment the first time I laid eyes on it. I even like the fact that this building, created before anyone had indoor plumbing, has the bathtub in the kitchen. When my own mother was a teen-aged college student she lived in a similar apartment. It always sounded so exotic that her bathtub was in the kitchen.
Back in the late 1800's the Tenement Museum apartments rented for $8 per month. Half a century later, my mother paid $18 per month for her similar "cold-water flat". Today, the market rate for an almost identical apartment is only $7 per month -- for one square foot of floor space. To rent the entire 400-square foot place for one day costs more than my mother paid for an entire year's rent.
My home is definitely humble. It is small and not opulent. No one would mistake it for the Palace at Versailles. But it is my own little piece of New York City history, and I am happy to share it with other home exchangers.
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