Lower East Side Tenement Museum

The history of immigrants coming and settling in New York is among its most interesting, and at times disturbing, chapters as far as I am concerned. So the tours of this former tenement, built in 1863, bring the past to life and explain in a larger sense the immigrant wave that made the urban landscape what it is today. I highly recommend the walking tours of the neighborhood that the museum organizes - it is quite amazing to think that this hip, increasingly gentrified area was once made up of often very poor first generation arrivals looking for the American Dream. It is also a great destination to put in context the very vocal American political discourse on current immigrants and their rights.