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Host Dinah Cardin: At the turn of the century, two intrepid explorers set up camp at the end of the world.

Nigel Watson: There, in a little area tucked away, is this tiny little building. As you approach it, you see the stables, you see the wheel from the first vehicle ever used in the Antarctic. As you enter that door, it's all before you. The picture of the King and Queen of England, the ham still hangs on the wall.

Host Chip Van Dyke: That's Nigel Watson, executive director at the Antarctic Heritage Trust, speaking with the BBC about a recent effort to preserve an important piece of early 20th-century history, a series of buildings, cabins really, built in Antarctica by legendary explorers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott.

Nigel: Through our conservation work, we've had some magnificent discoveries, probably the most famous of which has been the whiskey that was left behind by Shackleton and his crew underneath the wooden floors.

Dinah: Despite its remote location, the site is attracting a lot of attention from tourists. Those with the fortitude to endure the three-, sometimes four-week journey from New Zealand to Antarctica will see firsthand this unique collection of 100-year-old wooden huts, the first to be built on the world's last uncharted continent.

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Chip: Welcome to the "PEMcast," conversations and stories for the culturally curious. From the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, I'm Chip Van Dyke.

Dinah: I'm Dinah Cardin. This is the second episode in a series about our Historic House Crush campaign. We're looking at historic buildings from different angles and asking our listeners to share architectural finds on Instagram, and the like, with #historichousecrush.

Chip: If people are spending four weeks on a boat to visit a bunch of cabins in a barren wasteland, then it's pretty clear that there's some kind of draw to buildings that can tell stories.

In this episode, we talk with people who are pushing the envelope -- to use a building term -- on presenting historic houses to the public. They're changing the way these houses are run and the way we experience them.

Dinah: You'll hear unexpected stories about cocktails, chamber pots, and one-night stands.

Chip: It's not what you think, but stick around.

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Joel Lefever: I've thought, for a long time, a beautifully done house museum is like a Merchant Ivory movie set, but we don't have the storyline that's written in a way that a movie script is written because it doesn't have that emotion. All good movies seem to be about emotion.

Dinah: Joel Lefever is the director of the Museums of Old York, a collection of historic buildings and properties in York, Maine.

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Chip: This is a very busy road for...

Joel: Oh, they're all going to York Beach. It's what people do here in the summer. [laughs]

Chip: Before he took the job in York, Joel was a consultant for historic house museums.

Joel: I think a big part of the move in museums now, house museums, is to create experiences. A lot of times that is food, or it's music, or it's having a different perspective on the tour.

Chip: He told me about his recent work with a museum that was in danger of being shut down, the Alexander Ramsey House in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Joel: It's beautifully maintained, all original collection, on a beautiful Victorian park in a city, but it was completely disconnected from the neighborhood. They really needed to start having an interpretation that wasn't about Victorian domestic life.

Dinah: Joel worked with the museum to imagine what a reinterpretation might look like.

Joel: They started doing something they called History Happy Hour. It was about daily challenges of life, then and now.

Chip: History Happy Hour covers any topic from the time when the family lived in the house, the late 1800s to the 1960s, Prohibition, the sexual revolution. This October, they're discussing the history of horror movies.

Joel: They have guest speakers come in and give a lecture, and they have a drink. It's been extremely popular. It sells out because now the interpretation isn't about, sorry but, lace underwear and sugar cookies. People enjoy it, and it's more relevant.

Chip: I asked Joel if there were any other historic house museums we should visit that have adopted this approach to connecting with people.

Joel: There are places that I know, that I've been that seem to be more about the emotion. One is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York.

A lot of what's in their collection comes from eBay because they're creating very working-class interiors. Very little is precious. It's more about the emotion that the story of the people is telling than it is, "We have their chair."

Chip: We wanted to learn more about the Tenement Museum firsthand, so we sent Dinah on assignment to New York.

Dinah: It was a humid summer day in the Lower East Side of Manhattan when I joined up with my tour group.

Tour Guide: Would anyone like a fan before we go on? We call this old-school air conditioning. Come on in if you like. You're welcome to sit. You can sit on anything that does not look historic.

Dinah: The Tenement Museum is housed in an old tenement building at 97 Orchard Street in Manhattan. Between 1863 and 1935, the building was home to nearly 7,000 poor and working-class immigrants.

Tour Guide: Friends, now we are actually looking at an apartment. Note, we've got three rooms. We've got a bedroom, the kitchen, and then the parlor. All together, these three rooms are about 325 square feet, or 31 square meters.

Chip: Dina, I'm terrible at imagining rooms in square feet. How big is that?

Dinah: If we're looking at a 325-square-foot living room, you might say, "That's a comfortable living room." Now, divide that into three rooms.

Tour Guide: How many people do you feel like you would be able to live with comfortably in an apartment this size before someone needed to move out?

Tour Attendee: Six.

Tour Guide: You could live with six here?

Tour Attendee: Yes.

Tour Guide: All right, sir. I love it.

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Dinah: On average, there were about six people for every three-room apartment. At its most crowded, there were as many as 12.

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Dinah: I was struck by how the Tenement Museum is exactly as it was left when the tenants were evicted. Here in Salem, many historic homes are fancy. PEM's Gardner-Pingree House, for instance, boasts carved mantel pieces, a grand staircase, and plush canopy beds. The life of one wealthy family.

While the Tenement Museum, with its peeled wallpaper, cramped living quarters, and humble furnishings, celebrates the lives of many families struggling to get by in a new country.

Dave Favaloro: One would be hard-pressed to describe this particular building or any of the architectural details as indicative of a particular architectural movement. In fact, we don't know who the architect for this building was.

Dinah: This is Dave Favaloro, director of curatorial affairs. Dave started at the Tenement Museum in 2004 and had a chance to work with one of the founders, Ruth Abram.

Dave: Ruth in particular talked about how she envisioned a place where Americans of a variety of backgrounds could come together and understand the ways in which their ancestors contributed to this being a nation of immigrants.

Dinah: He told me about the moment the founders of the Tenement Museum first discovered the building at 97 Orchard Street.

Dave: They weren't able to find a building and decided, instead, they were going to look for leasable storefront space while they searched for the appropriate building.

Dinah: They were searching for a building that had a long history of housing immigrants.

Dave: There was a for-rent sign in one of the storefronts here at 97 Orchard Street, and came to look at the space, and was led out into the main entry hallway of the building, which really, even at that point, was left in the state it was in when all of the tenants were evicted in 1935.

Dinah: They had found their tenement and, within it, the evidence of those who had lived there.

Dave: We found things like tickets to a nearby synagogue that no longer exists for High Holiday services, advertisements for English classes that are written in Yiddish.

One of my favorites is what, at the time, was called a premium coupon. I grew up in the 1980s. They were the proofs of purchase from cereal boxes, which were written in Italian and English, and you could exchange them for a set of drinking glasses.

Chip: The Tenement Museum connects the past to the present and helps visitors appreciate the continued role immigration has played in shaping America's identity.

Dinah: They also offer teachers innovative ways to introduce students to the complex issues surrounding immigration.

Dave: I've been struck by some of the comments and perspectives of our international visitors. In places like Europe, they're just beginning to grapple with immigration and what that means and for their own countries and societies.

There was immigration debates when I started here in 2004, and they've reached a pitch now. I think people want to talk about these things. They want to talk about the role of immigration in the United States today.

We, I think, have long felt that a reference to the past in a space that evokes those stories of immigrants 100 years ago or more really helps to create a safe space for having those kinds of conversations.

Georgina Acevedo: We used to come here all the time with my mother. She used to give us a treat. We used to go to Katz. She used to buy hot dogs and divide it in two, and knish. [laughs] That was an amazing treat.

Dinah: At the Katz's Deli down the street?

Georgina: Yes.

Dinah: This is Georgina.

Georgina: Let me say it in Spanish better. Georgina Acevedo Babilonia.

Dinah: She works at the Tenement Museum...

Georgina: I'm the financial administrative manager.

Dinah: ...and has lived in the neighborhood her whole life.

Georgina: The locals were the locals. If you were Jewish, they would have Jewish culture. Then in the 60s, I think, as to what I recall, it started to slowly change. Then we had a lot of delis that were called bodegas. That was Latino's bodega.

Every immigrant that comes to the city, especially this big city, they try to always go to an area that will have their food, their culture, their language, the people. Then, the museum, it has all of that because it represents all immigrants.

Georgina: It's nice to talk to somebody who grew up here. Thank you.

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Dinah: After leaving the Tenement Museum, I headed out onto the streets of lower Manhattan to meet up with Frank Vagnone.

Frank Vagnone: It's Franklin Vagnone, and I am president of my own cultural consulting firm, Twisted Preservation.

Dinah: Frank is a bit of a rebel in the historic house world. He's even written a manifesto on the subject called "The Anarchist Guide to Historic House Museums."

Frank: I feel like what we've done is we've leaned so far to the side of presenting them as art museums, curated decorative arts spaces. We've got the ropes, and everything is so curated and so clean and there's no smells, no sounds. Everything's fed to us with the tour guide, with the guided, scripted tour.

Places like the Tenement Museum can take us into that tactile realm, both physically as well as cognitively.

Chip: Frank was also the director of the Historic House Trust of New York City. He now travels the world to promote new ideas about historic house interpretation. One director of a historic house museum complimented Frank by saying, "You've derailed my understanding of what this place is about."

Dinah: Frank told me the story of when a brick was thrown through the window of a historic house in Philadelphia.

Frank: That's absolutely true. That's Grumblethorpe in Philadelphia. I went there because I wanted to figure out how to repair it and all of that. I realized very quickly that there were some issues. We thought we were doing a really good job, but clearly the neighborhood didn't think that we were doing a good job because they didn't value it as a community resource.

Dinah: Frank changed the whole idea of engagement at Grumblethorpe to reflect the house's history as an agricultural estate.

Frank: We closed it to walk-in visitors, opened it to scholars, changed the gardens into vegetable gardens, and invited neighborhood kids to start a farmers market, work out the business plan, actually run it. That's a example of how a house museum can engage the community in a very meaningful way and still be true to its narrative.

Dinah: Most recently, Frank has been blogging about visiting historic house museums when no one else is there, at night, in his pajamas. He calls them "One-Night Stands." I picture you like in your little slippers and your pajamas.

Frank: Yes, yes. Truthfully, I get in my jammies. I'll go and make tea. I'll sit in the living room, using the furniture, using the collections, experiencing the house and the spaces in the way that they were originally intended. At the Hull House up in Lancaster, New York, it's an 1810 dwelling and there's no bathroom in it, I use the chamber pot.

Dinah: Frank's not seeking to recreate an historically accurate experience. He doesn't check his contemporary life at the door.

Frank: One of the things you'll notice in my pictures is I've got my computer sitting on the desk. I've got my iPhone by my bed. The issue that I'm trying to bring up is how these historic sites can inform my contemporary life.

Chip: Frank believes that most visitors to historic homes never get a real sense of what it's like to live in that space.

Frank: You get no sense that people walked around in their bare feet, and drank coffee and tea, and went to the bathroom, and slept there. That's one of the reasons why the One-Night Stands are so important. If you read my blogs, I'm constantly struggling with conveying the tactility of the experience that I've had.

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Georgina: The nighttime is the best time. When you stand in the museum, in the middle of the museum, in the hallway, you could literally imagine going back in that time, seeing the people.

If you pay close attention -- I don't know if you're spiritual or not, but I get it all the time -- you can imagine the family, the woman, the work, the laughter, the cries. There was so many things that happened in that place that it happens nowadays.

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Chip: That's our show. Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Joel at the Museums of Old York and Dave, Georgina, Annie, and everyone over at the Tenement Museum.

Dinah: Thank you to Frank Vagnone. Find Frank and more info on his One-Night Stand series at twistedpreservation.com.

Chip: Find the show notes for this episode, along with pictures and links, on our blog, connected.pem.org.

For more on the exciting Shackleton and Scott story, check out episode 38 of "Lore," a terrific podcast from one town over in Danvers, Massachusetts. Host Aaron Mahnke uses the recent discovery of the Shackleton whiskey bottles to tee off a truly eerie true story of an unexplainable mystery in the tundra.

Dinah: Listen to the PEMcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, and pretty much anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Chip: In our next episode, we conclude our historic house crush series when we talk with some exceptional historic house crushers, those that have taken their love of historic homes to the next level. Producers for this episode are myself, Dinah Cardin, Karen Bame, and Whitney Van Dyke.

Corbett Sparks is our audio engineer. Melissa Woods was our script consultant. Tosa Two Heart was our production assistant.

Dinah: Finally, here is Frank Vagnone with an important message.

Frank: Go ahead, everybody, tweet #historichousecrush.

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