Beals took some strong pictures of immigrant and tenement life, but these are not on display.

He sold it to immigrants cheap, an evening reward for the indignity of tenement life and fractured English.

The 1972 "Study for Block II" is a small mural about tenement life.

It was not until Franklin Roosevelt's second term that public housing emerged as the leading response to the horrors and crowding of tenement life.

You can see the places where the old floors used to fit, and all the nicks and scars of tenement life.

This meant the end to tenement life.

"The only entertainment, the only escape from tenement life, was the movies, which I started going to when I was 5 or 6."

People hung out the windows of the upper stories, talking back and forth: an exotic tenement life.

"All our research has consistently challenged notions of what tenement life was like," said Renee Epps, the museum's vice president.

(Jacob Riis's photographs of tenement life came out around 1890.)