The Tenement Museum has been named one of three finalists for the 2005 Sustainable Tourism Award

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum has been named one of three finalists for the 2005 Sustainable Tourism Award for Preservation by Smithsonian magazine and Tourism Cares for Tomorrow. A monument to the American immigrant experience, the downtown museum is competing against the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum in Baltimore, MD, and the Louisa May Alcott Orchard House in Concord, MA. The $20,000 final prize will go to the museum that receives the most votes on the award's website by October 31.

The Sustainable Tourism Award is given each year to a model tourism project that supports the preservation of historically or culturally significant entities. The Tenement Museum, located in a landmark building at 97 Orchard Street, traces the history of the millions of native-born and immigrant Americans who began their lives in this country in tenement buildings like those that lined Lower Manhattan's streets.

The only site of its kind in the nation to be preserved and interpreted, the Tenement Museum is housed in a five-story building with four apartments on each floor dating back to 1864. Led by tour guides dressed in period costume who assume the characters of the building's early inhabitants, visitors to the museum are guided through rooms preserved exactly as they originally were when home to immigrant families in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

In an effort to garner as many votes as possible and win the Sustainable Tourism Award, museum officials are urging all who value the museum and its role in Lower Manhattan to visit the award website and cast their votes. A vote for the museum, they suggest, would affirm the following:

• The important role that cultural sites like the Tenement Museum and its fellow members of the Museums of Lower Manhattan have played in the recovery of downtown New York in the aftermath of 9-11;
• The important role that cultural heritage tourists have played in support the economy of New York City;
• That cultural institutions such as the Tenement Museum can serve as economic and cultural anchors to working class and poor urban neighborhoods;
• That historic sites can be active centers of civic engagement, providing perspective on pressing social issues, and
• That the stories of America's urban working class and poor immigrants are worthy of preservation.

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