Decades-Old Trash is Archived at Tenement Museum in New York City

In the basement of the Tenement Museum in New York City, two buildings that for decades saw some 7,000 immigrant occupants, workers have collected a sizeable archive of antique garbage, from a half-eaten bagel to an old box of cigarettes to a doll’s head.

Museum workers have done their best to catalog and preserve the items to keep them from deteriorating further. Items have been collected throughout the process of converting the two buildings into a museum, which first opened to the public in the mid-1990s.

Atlas Obscura has more information:

Like everything else in this basement storage space on New York’s Lower East Side, the perfumes were once trash—forgotten, left behind, or tossed away. The museum is known for having preserved or restored a handful of cramped living spaces and businesses in two tenement buildings—the kind that typified the neighborhood throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was a dense immigrant enclave. Today, its tours give visitors some sense of what life was like for Kosher butchers, Puerto Rican garment workers, and more. As the museum combed through these cramped, dilapidated apartments and storefronts, they exhumed plenty of debris that generations of residents had left behind.

The museum’s archive of antique garbage and cast-offs is off-limits to visitors. The trove, some 6,000 items, is south of the visitors’ center, down two flights of stairs, past a darkened room full of whirring servers, and beyond cabinets stacked with printer cartridges. A few pieces are on display in the museum’s restored apartments, but the vast majority of it lives down here—cleaned, catalogued, preserved, then tucked away.

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