Tenement
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, Blackbaud Altru API
YEAR
2024
EXTERNAL URL
Not every project starts with a blank canvas. Like my work on Anastasia and Broadway Across America, Tenement Museum was an inherited codebase — built by another agency, maintained under tight budget constraints. The work was targeted: reservation system fixes, membership data improvements, and Blackbaud Altru API stabilization for a National Historic Site serving 225,000+ annual visitors. No rebuild, just precise intervention inside an existing WordPress platform.
Managed inherited codebase improvements at Situation Interactive.
Background
A historic institution’s website needed targeted improvements — not a blank check.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum — founded in 1988 and designated a National Historic Site — operates two tenement buildings at 97 and 103 Orchard Street that were home to an estimated 15,000 people from over 20 nations between 1863 and 2015. The museum welcomes over 225,000 visitors annually through guided tours of historically recreated immigrant apartments, walking tours of the Lower East Side, and virtual programs. The existing WordPress site had been built years earlier by another agency using a modular content system with 20+ flexible content modules, integrated with Blackbaud’s Altru platform for ticketing, MailChimp for email marketing, ADP for job applications, and GiveLively for fundraising. There was no budget for a ground-up rebuild — the museum needed specific, high-impact improvements to its reservation system and membership data layer without disrupting the rest of a functioning platform.
The challenge wasn’t building something new — it was making meaningful progress inside a codebase I didn’t author, with constraints that demanded precision over ambition.
Implementation
Surgical improvements to the reservation flow and membership data layer — no rebuild required.
I inherited the full WordPress codebase and spent the first phase auditing the existing architecture — mapping the integration points with Blackbaud Altru, understanding the content module system, and identifying where the reservation and membership flows were failing visitors. The reservation system work focused on the Altru API integration: improving how tour availability synced with the frontend, tightening the booking flow to reduce abandonment, and ensuring member-specific pricing and benefits applied correctly at checkout without requiring manual intervention from staff. The membership data layer needed similar attention — account access, benefit verification, digital member cards, and event RSVPs all depended on clean data exchange between WordPress and Altru, and several of those handoffs had degraded over time. I traced the issues through the existing code, patched the integration logic, and improved the member-facing UX without refactoring the underlying architecture.
Working within someone else’s codebase is a different discipline than building from scratch — it requires reading more than writing, respecting decisions you didn’t make, and knowing where to intervene without creating new debt.
Results
A functioning platform stabilized, not replaced — and a museum that could keep selling tours.
The reservation system improvements went live without disrupting the museum’s daily tour operations — critical for an institution that sells the majority of its tickets in advance and regularly sells out. Members could access their accounts, verify benefits, and reserve tours through the website reliably for the first time in months. The membership data fixes eliminated the manual workarounds that staff had been using to compensate for broken integrations, freeing up operational time across the visitor services and development teams. The work was scoped, delivered, and deployed within the budget constraints the museum required — no scope creep, no upsell to a full rebuild.
Not every project needs to be a ground-up build to be valuable. Sometimes the most impactful work is keeping a critical system running for an institution that can’t afford downtime.
