History
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At 97 Orchard Street, an archaeological dig uncovered the building's original toilet: a backyard outdoor privy with multiple seats. Instead of a privy pit, this outhouse had an underground vault that drained into the public sewer under Orchard Street and could occasionally be flushed with rainwater or perhaps water from a nearby spigot. Although it initially exceeded city requirements, this shared privy remained the only sanitation for the building's twenty apartments from 1864 to 1905, when two toilets were installed in the hallway of each floor. Between 1864 and 1935, 97 Orchard Street housed nearly 7,000 people, mainly immigrants and their descendants, and it has been home to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum since 1988.
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