| Edification value |  |
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| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 25 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | In an era when museums (including this one) are full of touch screens, I was happy to see an old-school board game version of the Battle of Brooklyn. Uh-oh, you drew a Hessian card! Except you’re the British, so that’s awesome for you!
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The Old Stone House isn’t actually all that old. And it’s not properly a house, though it is at least partially constructed from stone. Today’s Old Stone House replicates the Vechte-Cortelyou House, dating to 1699. The original’s history touches on Brooklyn’s earliest days, the Revolutionary War, and the dawn of the Brooklyn Dodgers. However, the house was demolished in the late 1800s.
That would’ve been that except that in 1934 the omnipresent (and nigh omnipotent) Robert Moses reconstructed it, mainly to serve as restrooms for Washington Park. The reconstruction used at least some of the stones from the original building, but unlike many of the house museums of the city, there’s nothing historic about the interior rooms or furnishings. Rather, the building contains a small museum focused mainly on the Battle of Brooklyn, with a little about the Vechte family.
Audience and Program
Mainly a kids museum, the displays are geared to the interests, attention span, and average height of the younger set. And yet, as a gathering place for the neighborhood, it aims at older people too. They show contemporary art in an upstairs space, and host theater and events with intriguing names like “Gin in June.”
The Battle of Brooklyn took place literally in the front garden, as a teeny but fairly dramatic diorama attests. 400 self-sacrificing Marylanders–like the Spartans only one-third more of them–kept a couple thousand redcoats busy long enough for Washington and his troops to slink away to Upper Manhattan, thence to base himself at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, and eventually abandon New York for the rest of the war.
In museumological terms, the Old Stone House is rather straightforward. Its displays deploy a mix of technologies, culminating in a touchscreen-based day-by-day review of the Battle of Brooklyn, which I found hard to follow.
A family tree shows how the Revolution divided families between loyalists and revolutionaries. It also names some of the slaves who worked for the Vechte family, though of course no one bothered to record how they felt about independence, or anything else about their thoughts and beliefs. Still, I like that they don’t sweep the Vechte’s slaves under the historic rug. Another brief display on slavery observes how surprisingly prevalent it was in revolutionary Brooklyn. One in three Kings County residents was a slave, and half of Dutch households owned them.
There’s little to see about the Dodgers, but the original Old Stone House served as the team’s clubhouse in the late 1800s. Their first ballpark, long since gone, was in Washington Park, before they moved to the legendary (and also long-gone) Ebbets Field.
Moving upstairs, the current contemporary art show, titled “Multilocational,” featured work by two artists touching on themes of migration and acculturation. Sort of a smaller riff on Lehman College’s Alien Nations show.
Who should visit? The Old Stone House is a quintessential local museum. It programs for its community, and that’s sufficient. Coming from Manhattan made me something of an exotic visitor to their parts. You might consider going if you are a huge fan of the Battle of Brooklyn or the history of baseball. Otherwise, plenty of other museums offer a better view of Brooklyn and New York City history.
For Reference:
| Address | 336 Third Street, Brooklyn |
|---|---|
| Website | theoldstonehouse.org |
| Cost | Free |
The mansion’s vast land holdings at one point stretched the (albeit pretty narrow that far north) width of Manhattan. All that land is now Washington Heights, of course. And yet, its commanding hilltop location, surrounded by tiny, lovely Roger Morris Park, offers a taste of the country to this day. The grounds burst with rosebushes and even include a small sunken garden. I could easily see going back just to sit there and read a book.
A juxtaposition of two pieces: My Egypt, by Charles Demuth, and Pittsburgh, by Elsie Driggs. Both from 1927, they present similar and yet extremely divergent visions of industrialized landscapes. One is clearly prettier than the other, and yet, as Driggs said of her grey smokestacks and pipes, “This shouldn’t be beautiful. But it is.”
BLDG 92 is the vowel-challenged, fascinating, historical center of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It tells the story of the Navy Yard through artifacts, an interactive tabletop, and a comprehensive timeline. 
Kaisik Wong’s spacey, glam 1970s fashions look like costumes from a very trippy sci-fi film. The opposite of most of the counterculture fashion on display, and yet they fit in somehow, too.
New York City is lucky to boast not one but two extremely fine design museums — the Museum of Arts and Design and the 
The publisher Harper Brothers proposed to seal Mark Twain’s memoirs until 2000. Then they would be published by subscription (quoting the exhibit’s text) “in whatever mode should then be prevalent, that is by printing as at present, or by use of phonographic cylinders, or by electrical methods or by any other method which may then be in use.” The show has Twain’s 1900 letter agreeing to these terms. No doubt he didn’t want his meeting with the crew of the Starship Enterprise to mess with the timeline too much.
The Harper brothers started out as printers, but with their 1817 publication of an edition of Seneca’s Morals, they launched one of the most famous publishing concerns in American history.
The octagonal gallery had an exhibit documenting the history of gay student life at Columbia, from the time when homosexuality violated the law, through the AIDS crisis, to today. I’m proud to say Columbia was home to the first gay student group on a college campus — the Student Homophile League — dating to 1967. Second most interesting thing I learned there.
Maxine Henryson’s beautiful, long, accordion-folded photobooks. Stretched out on a table, they reward much slow, close viewing.
I’m not sure Art in General belongs on a list of museums. It’s really an art gallery (in the sense of a place to buy art), albeit a nonprofit one. I’ve been giving nonprofits a pass so far, so there I went.
When they laid the cornerstone for the Music Hall, Andrew Carnegie himself said that “here all good causes may find a platform.” Remarkably, that statement evolved into a policy of openness to anyone who wanted to take the stage (and could afford to rent it). So even in times when many venues were closed to, say, African American performers, Carnegie was open.
The Rose Museum is a small space telling the story of Carnegie Hall, twice actually: once from a building/Carnegie perspective, the other more from an artistic perspective. But they run together and get a little redundant. It is indeed between the auditorium and the First Tier restrooms, as well as the patrons’ lounge.
The Cooper Hewitt Museum is the Smithsonian Institution’s branch devoted to design. It started out under the guardianship of Cooper Union, which closed it in the 1960s. The Smithsonian then adopted it and it opened in its current location in the 1970s. (There’s a second Smithsonian branch in New York: the Museum of the American Indian, in Lower Manhattan.) 
The digital tables appeal, too, inviting visitors to “grab” random objects with their pens and trace their way through the museum’s collection by material, theme, function, or era. Visitors can also use the pen to take a stab at designing something of their own.
