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.
