The Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side is in the process of raising $8 million to expand. Tourists from inside and outside the city limits just can’t get enough of the place, which tells the story of how three families — one German, one Jewish and one Italian — lived in the building from the late 19th century until the mid-20th.
Visitors are struck by the smallest details of cookery, but also by just how many people managed to exist in such a small space. The museum draws 200,000 visitors a year and has to turn away another 20,000.
To be sure, many of those flocking to the museum want to see how their own ancestors lived, but others are attracted by the vision of multigenerational living presented there. It’s not that we want to exist in those difficult, often unsanitary, conditions, but “we romanticize that vision of living with a large family,” says Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association. As “the old ethnic groups leave New York,” she says, “the multigenerational homes can seem more attractive.”
In fact, such living arrangements are on the rise. According to a recent New York Times piece on the subject, “Between the 2000 Census and the 2009-2011 American Community Survey figures, the number of [multigenerational] households in New York increased by 5 percent. The increases are especially large in Staten Island (up 21 percent) and Queens (up 8 percent).”
Some would say this is driven by the recession. Less money and fewer jobs means that young adults stay at home and older people are forced to move in with their adult children. But, as Vitullo-Martin notes, the “practical aspects of such arrangements are immense.”
In an era where working parents struggle to get childcare for young children and find themselves trying to juggle too many responsibilities at once, the “Everybody Loves Raymond” model can seem like a welcome relief. (Sure, Ray and his parents technically had two households, but his mother didn’t seem to notice that.)
Of course, most cities work hard to limit the number of multigenerational households and have done so for years, using zoning laws to make it much harder for Grandma and Grandpa to live downstairs. Such arrangements seemed old-world. American families were supposed to be nuclear families and neighbors would complain if too many people were living in the home next door.
While some of those restrictions have been lifted, New York still seems to be pushing people away from multigenerational living. For example, the “micro-apartments,” on which construction is supposed to begin shortly, have been touted by the Bloomberg administration and the city’s elites as the solution to the city’s housing crunch, particularly for young singles.
These sleek sub-400-square-foot abodes contain none of the clutter of the old tenements, of course.
They are a product more of the “live simply” mantra that dominates anti-consumerist screeds and environmentalist manifestoes. But Virginia Postrel says she thinks the modern-day simple living movement is “less ascetic than aesthetic.” Postrel, the author of “The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion,” writes, “Glamorous photos of micro-apartments and tiny houses with a place for everything and everything in its place lead audiences to imagine that a small space offers an escape to a tranquil and orderly life. (The Container Store has a similar appeal.)”
Of course, the tranquil and orderly life is much easier when you don’t have difficult in-laws living on top of you or small children flinging Cheerios everywhere (says the woman who just unpacked the minivan from a weekend on the road).
Indeed, more of us are living alone, never marrying, getting divorced and having fewer children or no children. All of this could result in greater tranquility. But we may be missing out on something more important.