The Museum Project Posts

Finally it’s time to establish the ground rules for this project.  What am I doing and what am I going to get out of it, and what do I need to track?

Let’s start with the point of a museum in the first place.  There are two threads going back to their earliest days.  

Entertainment.  Think Barnum’s American Museum, the ancestor of Madame Tussaud’s.  The “dime museum” tradition.  

 

Edification. Giving the huddled masses a chance to see beautiful or interesting things and learn about the wider world was viewed as a civic good by many of the industrialists whose collections and money launched the great museums of the city in the mid-nineteenth century. The Met was founded on the idea that a museum should (quoting the Encyclopedia of the City of New York’s entry on museums) “promote education and social and moral betterment.”

I’ll avoid the arguments ongoing about how museums are changing their missions and programming in reckless pursuit of a shifting balance between entertainment and edification.  In an ideal world a museum should do both.

So my plan is to offer a brief summary of my experience with each place I visit here, with a standardized rating system of from zero to five Old Met Logo Pins assessing (in my opinion):

• How edifying the museum is — how much better am I as a person for visiting;
• How entertaining it is — how much fun I had; and
• How much I think everyone should visit.I considered other more complicated rubrics but that seems sufficient.  And I’m going to try not to judge museums against one another.  It’s not like the Met is the Platonic Ideal and all others can get at most 4 stars. I’ll try to assess each against its own mission statement, large or small.

  I’ll also note how much time I spent at each place, and list the single best thing I saw or learned.  And anything else noteworthy that happened along the way.

  I’ve also given some thought to order. As I was first thinking about doing this, the most OCD part of my brain thought that it should be done in alphabetical order.  That is emphatically not going to happen.  It won’t even be alphabetical by borough.  I am putting together a project plan that groups museums by proximity, opening hours/times, and likely visit durations to make things more efficient and give me roadmap.  For my own interest and sanity, I’ll mix it up a bit. Do some of the far-flung ones, but follow that up with a chunk of Manhattan.  I’ll tag posts by borough, neighborhood, and type of museum for sort-ability.

  One more thing.  After much thought, I have decided that if I’ve visited a museum in the past six months, I get a pass on going anew.  I’ll of course write about them here, based on my memory of the visit.

Let the games begin!

As my plans evolve, the next thing to consider is exactly how much time and money this project will entail.  I’m on a bit of a budget these days, and visiting all 188 (and likely a few more) museums sounds like a spendy project.

Let’s think about time first.  At a very rough guess, I expect I will spend four days a week on this project, and let’s say I can manage to visit 4-5 museums a day.  On some days, particularly in the dense zones like the “Museum Mile” stretch of Fifth Avenue I’ll probably manage more than that.  But on average, just to give myself a sense of timing, I think those are reasonable estimates.  Doing the math yields a range of 9-12 weeks.  That’s a lot, and a lot of museums in a short amount of time. But it’s not, like, a lifetime.  And I’m giving myself plenty of days off.

On the money front, I have to confess when I was doing the list cleanup last week, I didn’t pay very close attention to admission fees.  But a lot of the places on the list are free.  Happily I’m a member at most of the big institutions—the Met, the Frick, MoMA.  That will save some money.  But I do want a sense of budget.  I’m going to start with a sense that about 40% of the places on the list are free, and the remaining 60% charge an average of $8.  That’s, um, huh.  That’s about $900.  Okay.  Sometimes math is not my friend, exactly, but it’s better to have a budget up front than to be surprised at the end.  I’m going to hope I’m overestimating somehow.  And find free or pay-what-you-will days for as many places as I can.  It’ll be interesting to see how the accounting does work out.

And, in a brainstorm, I will get an IDNYC card, which includes free admission or membership to 44 cultural institutions. (It’s really a great deal, highly recommend the small amount of time investment required to anyone who lives in New York.) I just need to actually get the card in the mail and I’m good to go.

The great thing about having a spreadsheet with every museum in the city on it is it opens the door to all kinds of analysis!  At least, that’s the great thing about it if you’re me.  Museum statistics may not be your cup of tea, but I’ve culled some hopefully interesting findings from the data on where New York’s museums are and what they cover.  

My first question was, of the 188 museums and cultural institutions currently open in New York City, how many have I visited?  As of the start of the Museum Project, I had visited 62 of the of places on the list, which works out to just about one-third of them.  I feel bad about that. I wish it were higher. What have I been doing with my time in New York? But truth be told, it’s about where I expected.

I also wondered about location.  I’d expect museums to be concentrated in Manhattan, with relatively fewer in the outer boroughs.  Was I right?

The short answer is yes.  115 of the museums, or 61%, are in Manhattan.  Brooklyn has 23 and Queens has 22, almost a tie (and about 12% apiece), The Bronx has 15, and Staten Island has 12. And there’s one museum, the Filipino American Museum, that does not have permanent space, but somewhat to my surprise it DOES have an exhibit going on that one can visit.  For my next trick, I created a (daunting!) Google map, which took some time but which I decided would be invaluable for planning purposes.

The other thing that my museum statistics database facilitates is a look the types of museums the city boasts.  The Wiki list helpfully categorized them and a spot check suggests it works at least for a high level overview. 

In short, art.  Lots of art.  70, or about 37%, of the museums in New York City deal with art.  (that includes the 2-3 “encyclopedic” museums, most notably Brooklyn and the Met).  

History comes next.  I’ll be visiting 27 historic houses or other buildings, and  the list encompasses 21 history museums of other sorts.  Cumulatively, that’s about 25% of the total.  

Not exclusive with either art or history, this project will also be good for my knowledge of Jewish art and culture.  Having lived in this city for more than half my life, I like to think I’m just a little bit Jewish by osmosis, but the 9 Jewish museums in New York will be a good reinforcement of that.  

One sobering note, for me at least, is the paucity of science museums.  My database categorizes only 4 museums in New York as either “science” or “natural history.”  One might count the Intrepid or some of the maritime museums in the science category. And of course the American Museum of Natural History is so good at what it does, it could count for 5 “normal” science museums. 

But the market might well support five normal science museums, where we have only one AMNH. Now I understand why the crowds descend on weekends. I believe there’s a market opportunity if anyone wants to open another science museum.  As opposed to another gallery or art museum, of which we have more than plenty.

Finally, jumping back to other cultural institutions, I note that New York City has specialist museums devoted to the following cultures:
African and African American:  7
Hispanic/Latino:  4
Tibetan: 3
Ukrainian: 2
Korean: 2
Chinese: 2
Italian: 2
Japan: 1
Germany: 1
Czech: 1
Swiss: 1
Scandinavian: 1
Native American: 1
Filipino American:  1

Rather than rattle down any more numbers, I’ll close this post by posing myself two questions (and then answering them):

What am I most excited about? 

What am I least excited about?

As a slightly dark individual, I do love the opportunity to visit what you might call the goth museum trifecta:  Green-Wood Cemetery, the Edgar Allan Poe House and the Morbid Anatomy Museum.  But I’ve been to all of them.

In terms of places I’ve never been, I have been meaning to go see the Hall of Fame of Great Americans in the Bronx for ages, and the Hispanic Society probably has the most important art collection of the places on the list that I’ve never been to. Somehow I’ve never been to Gracie Mansion, it will be good to finally take that tour.  And Louis Armstrong’s house!  The Nicolas Roerich Museum is literally three blocks from me, and I’ve never been there.  In short, there’s a lot I’m really looking forward to.

In terms of the “dread” end of the spectrum, well, the Times Square museums rank pretty low for me.  I’ve avoided Madame Tussaud’s and Ripley’s Believe it or Not for years, but their day will come during this project.  I’m not super excited about the Caruso Museum, though I expect it will be charming and I do like opera.  And I can’t say I’m looking forward to the City’s three museums devoted to 9/11.  They are hard places to visit, emotionally.

There are eight million stories in the naked city.  How many museums are there?  Counting museums posed some challenges, largely related to locating online lists and assessing their accuracy.

I started with NY.com, a central tourist reference for all things related to the city.  It lists 91 as of mid-February 2017.  That is, I was sure, way too low.

Yelp, when I searched for “museum” and New York, NY, generated a list of 774 entries.  I worried for a moment that perhaps I’d bitten off more than I can chew. But a quick scan of some of their results shows museums in Montclair and Jersey City, and my first rule here is New York only.  And it also showed a lot of commercial art galleries. The line between a gallery and a museum is   blurry, I’ll admit.  But just about all commercial galleries are outside my project.  Having no practical way to weed down 774 entries, I decided to look elsewhere.

Foursquare listed a disappointing 90 total, which I realized was even more disappointing than it sounded, since individual bits of the American Museum of Natural History got listed separately, like the Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites and the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples.  So that’s hardly an accurate count.

Finally, with reluctance, I turned to the place I probably should have looked first, Wikipedia.  Wikipedia’s “List of Museums and Cultural Institutions in New York City” had 213 institutions listed on it as of mid-February 2017.  That seemed reasonable, and “felt” like a good number, at least to start with.

But as with so much on Wikipedia, I knew I couldn’t just take this list at face value.  I’d have to clean it up, remove places that have closed or where never really exhibit spaces, and (harder task) add any that I could catch that were missing.  So that’s what I spent a chunk of a day doing. 

27 museums on Wikipedia’s list aren’t currently open for business.  

• Some, like the Mets Museum (not to be confused with the Met Museum) and Governor’s Island are open at certain times of the year (like baseball season).  
• Some are closed in between exhibitions, they’ll be open again at some point.  
• Some are defunct, including, sadly, Staten Island’s Tattoo Museum, which I was excited about.
• Some were never really museums, being more performing arts spaces, or curators of educational materials that get lent out or travel around, like the Toy Museum (another one I’m bummed about removing from the list).
• And some are from the future, like the Culture Shed, which is scheduled to open in 2019.

I opted to err on the side of leaving places on the list, even if I wasn’t 100% sure they should count.  For example, I’ve left the two botanical gardens, and Green-Wood Cemetery (though Woodlawn’s not on the list, and I didn’t add it). On the other hand, I have added two museum to the Wikipedia list.  First, the Met:Breuer.  The Met’s takeover of the former Whitney Building is terrific, and if the Cloisters counts separately, so should the Breuer. And second, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling in Harlem.

Adding and subtracting gives the answer to the question.  At the moment, there are 188 museums in the naked city.  And I’m making it my mission to visit all of them.