Lower East Side Tenement Museum is a Manhattan history museum founded in 1988 by historian Ruth Abram and social activist Anita Jacobson, who uncovered a shuttered tenement building on the Lower East Side that had stood empty for decades. Restoring its apartments, the museum preserves and interprets the lives of immigrant families, from more than 20 nations, who lived there between 1863 and 1935, later adding a second historic tenement to extend the story into the 2010s. Its mission is to preserve immigration history through personal narratives and forge connections between visitors and the immigrant experience, past and present. Programming includes guided tours of the restored apartments, neighborhood walking tours, costumed interpreter programs, and food-history tastings, alongside exhibitions documenting groups from Holocaust refugees to Chinese and Puerto Rican New Yorkers.