The Tenement Soup Museum

Our friend The Great Fatenik just told me this morning that there is a Tenement Museum on Delancy and Orchard on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A Tenement Museum. Fatenik even stayed in a fairly fancy hotel on Orchard Street, which was a renovated old-law tenement. Orchard Street, where Jews came to simmer in the summertime broth, was never more than unky. It couldn't even afford the f.

Some things are easier than others for The Great Plotnik to grok. Neighborhoods changing, of course. People spending huge sums to live on Avenue C, well, OK. But a Tenement Museum? Will anybody who goes into that museum understand how miserable those old dark, stinking, one-bathroom-per floor, cold water flats with six kids sleeping on a mattress, really were?

And the other side: that these hell holes were somehow far better than what the immigrants had had in the old country? Is this story beginning to sound familiar?

If they'd asked Plotnik, he'd have said: "I want to make a Tenement Soup Museum. In each room of my museum, I want an old lady in black, wearing a babushka and an apron, stirring soup on a wood stove in the corner. Each room: different soup. The Hall of Minestrone. The Gallery of Cream of Chicken. The Beef Barley Exhibition Space. The Great Salon of Sancocho. Today's film: The Borscht Whisperer.

A Tenement Soup Museum -- that's one The Great Plotnik would stand in line for.