Brooklyn Children’s Museum

Edification value 2/5
Entertainment value 3/5
Should you go? 2/5
Time spent 100 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned The museum includes a small exhibit on homes in Brooklyn. I liked this model townhouse showing how it evolved over the 170 years since it was built.Brownstone history at Brooklyn Children's Museum

Founded in 1899, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum claims to be the oldest children’s museum in the world. However, it hides its age well, and the casual visitor would probably have no idea. Clad in bright yellow tile, the building’s very modern (and somewhat anonymous and uninviting) facade doesn’t give much away in terms of what’s going on inside.

Rafael Viñoly Architects designed the building, an expansion that opened in 2008, making it one of two New York City children’s museums with starchitect cred. (David Adjaye’s Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling is the other.)

Brooklyn Children's Museum - Facade

Inside Out

It turns out that’s going on inside is a shrunk down, semi-educational version of what’s going on outside. A significant part of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum recreates an eclectic, idealized Brooklyn shopping street, with various hands-on activities to keep young folk engaged, while preparing them for future careers in retail.

Brooklyn Children's Museum - Streetscape

There’s an African market, a pizzeria, a Caribbean travel agency, a grocery store… all providing opportunities for roleplaying and, possibly, absorbing points about the diverse cultures that comprise the rich tapestry that is Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Children's Museum
Let’s go shopping

 

Fake Waterfront; Real Loud

Another section has a small display of live, bored-looking reptiles and other small critters. Continuing onward, a third part featured a fake waterfront, with a fake boat, fake pilings, and real sand.

Brooklyn Children's Museum - fake beach

Elsewhere in the museum was an exhibit called Sound Field. This boasted a ginormous and overwhelmingly cacophonous looking contraption. Never have I been happier to see a hands-on display be hands-off and closed for repairs. This museum was plenty loud even without that.

Brooklyn Children's Museum sound display
Cacophony rendered concrete

Possibly the best part of the Viñoly building is the roof, which features wide open outdoor space with a soaring canopy. It lacks the playground of the Staten Island Children’s Museum, but as a place for adults to possibly find some respite from being in close quarters with zillions of noisy little monsters, I appreciated it.

Brooklyn Children's Museum - Terrace

Should you visit the Brooklyn Children’s Museum?

Discussing this museum with friends, my joke was, “It could be a great museum, it’s just a shame there are all those kids in it.” But upon consideration, I actually think it could be a great museum, it’s just a shame there’s all that Brooklyn in it.

While its emphatic Brooklyn-ness is charming, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum feels like a missed opportunity. I think that the best kids’ museums transport their young clients to new worlds: places they have dreamed about or seen on television or never even heard of before. The museum’s website talks about a collection that encompasses “30,000 natural history and cultural objects ranging from Paleolithic to ancient to modern day, making the collection an encyclopedia of cultures across the globe.” But I didn’t see much of that. I’m guessing it’s mostly in storage for lack of alignment with contemporary Brooklyn’s cultures and values. What is on display, like the African art below, seems perfunctory and jumbled together and not particularly kid-friendly in its curation.

Brooklyn Children's Museum

That’s not to say it’s not fun. The kids I attended with had a great time, running from one storefront activity to the next. I’m not sure any of the intended diversity, tolerance, or other messages had a chance to sink in, but fun was had. However, if you want to engage and inspire the kids in your care, there are better museums in New York.

For Reference:

Address 145 Brooklyn Avenue, Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Website https://www.brooklynkids.org/
Cost General Admission:  $13. Kids pay the same price as grown-ups; grandparents get to save a buck.
Other Relevant Links

 

Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts

Edification value 2/5
Entertainment value 3/5
Should you go? 2/5
Time spent 34 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned
Salt-n-Pepa

This 1987 Janette Beckman photograph of Salt-n-Pepa, because it’s awesome and because I’d kind of forgotten about them and was happy to be reminded.

The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, inevitably acronymed into “MoCADA,” occupies a very small exhibition space on the ground floor of the James E. Davis Arts Building in downtown Brooklyn. Not Mmuseumm small, but still, quite small. Perhaps 1,500 square feet of interior, ground-floor space with no natural light, MoCADA has a makeshift, improvised feel to it.

The institution is twenty years old in 2019, and started out of its founder’s NYU graduate thesis.  So, happy birthday, MoCADA! Its location is critical to its raison d’etre, for Laurie Angela Cumbo’s thesis held that a museum of its type in Central Brooklyn could help the community economically, socially, and aesthetically.

Fashion and Resistance

The exhibition I saw at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts was called “Styles of Resistance: From the Corner to the Catwalk,” and looked at African American street fashion from the 1980s until roughly today. Given the tiny space, the show was necessarily a very, very, very broad overview of hip hop fashion, along with associated art, personalities, and protest. Very multimedia, it went beyond clothes to include video, paintings, photographs, a couple of sculptures or assemblages, and t-shirts.

One thing that puzzled me about the show was the mannequins, many of which were beat-up and decidedly the wrong color. I suppose it was a curatorial nod to a makeshift, repurposing ethos. 

Words on a Wall

In reviewing nearly 200 museums for this project I honestly thought I’d seen it all in museums, But I don’t believe I’ve been to another museum that features hand-written wall texts.  It was surprising how personal I found it. Given how much I have thought about wall texts in the course of my museum adventure, it was refreshing to see a different approach.

On the other hand, the handwritten texts meant there weren’t many texts at all, which left me lost.  On the positive side, I’m open to an exhibition that errs on the side of showing not telling. But as someone who doesn’t know much about hip hop fashion or its role in African American political and cultural discourse I felt lost.

Other good stuff

I really appreciated the exhibition soundtrack – a compilation of hip hop and news broadcasts that ranged from agita over hoodies to 9/11 to the election of Barack Obama.  It effectively established a mood and contextualized the works on display.

I did not see a single “do not touch” sign in the whole space. Not that I think touching was encouraged. But, as with the handwritten signage, it reinforced the sort of intimacy MoCADA encourages with the subject it covers and the objects it displays.

And I liked some aspects of the makeshift space. Wall panels mounted on wheels and hinges could swing out from the walls of the room to flexibly define or redefine the space as needed–a clever touch.

The Reach and the Grasp

Alas, Styles of Resistance had a reach that far exceeded its grasp.  The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts’s small space severely limits what it can—or should—do.  It might have pulled off a show on the origins of hip hop fashion.  Trying to cover from the 1980s to the present required that it ignore and omit much.  I saw some sample outfits, and some good fashion photography, but I don’t know much more than I did before my visit.  It made me long for a place like the thoughtful, super-comprehensive Museum at FIT to cover this topic.

The museum’s limited space and resources also meant it ducked some of the things that this topic needs to address. For example, it’s hard to think about African American fashion or culture without talking about influences or appropriation. 

There was a kimono by Studio 189 included among the garments on display.  Why a kimono?  And is that okay?  The exhibit made me think about that, but it certainly didn’t give me context or information or a point of view. Similarly, it had nothing to say about white designers borrowing from street fashion — nor street fashion’s love of high-end designer logos and labels.

I left wanting more.

Should you visit the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts? 

MoCADA has a distinct voice to it, but at the moment a very small space. It also feels like it has a shoestring budget.  If you are completest visiting all the African-American-focused museums in the City, by all means go.  If you like your museums scrappy then it should also be on your list.

But I’m not sure.  It’s scrappy, but possibly too scrappy? 

Of the African-American-focused museums of New York City, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Louis Armstrong House, Lewis Lattimer House, the Schomburg Center, Weeksville Heritage Center, and the somber African Burial Ground are all more must-visit institutions than this.

That may change. MoCADA is set to move to a fancy new space in a fancy new building in the near future. Gentrification silver lining or a co-opting of a community institution by wealthy real estate forces? You decide. This museum covers an important topic, though I don’t expect it will ever compete with better established institutions with similar mission statements. For now I wouldn’t recommend MoCADA unless you’ve got a very pressing reason to see the place or a specific show there.

For Reference:

Address 80 Hanson Place, Brooklyn
Website mocada.org
Cost  General Admission:  $8
Other Relevant Links
  • 300 Ashland, luxury rentals and future home of MoCADA.

 

Coney Island Museum

Edification value 3/5
Entertainment value 3/5
Should you go? 4/5
Time spent 52 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned I liked three bumper cars on display, dating from (from left to right) the 1950s, the 1930s, and the 1980s. They demonstrate that if a technology is sufficiently perfect, it won’t change much over time.

Coney Island Museum, Brooklyn
Evolution of Bumper Cars
   
   

It often goes overlooked, but New York, like Venice, is a city of islands. And not just the obvious Manhattan, Staten, and Long.  This project has taken me to many of the city’s lesser islands, including City, Governor’sLiberty, and Ellis.  There’s no museum on Roosevelt Island, I note. But now, near the end of my journey, I’ve gone to Coney.

Coney Island Museum
The View From the Museum

Coney Island. Iconic playland for New York City, and thanks to twentieth century mass media, for the entire country.  Maybe the world.  Slightly tawdry, slightly tacky, entirely fun and open to one and all, the very name evokes the image of hot summer days, boardwalks, hot dogs, and a thousand and one sticky, sunburned delights. Continue reading “Coney Island Museum”

Enrico Caruso Museum

Edification value 3/5
Entertainment value 3/5
Should you go? 3/5
Time spent 88 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned In 1997, Aldo Mancusi presided over a gala event honoring Enrico Caruso. In 2018, in the dining-room-turned-tiny-theater of the Caruso Museum, we watched selected bits on a (literal) videotape. It was downright weird to see then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani deliver a thoughtful, erudite, witty speech unveiling a proclamation in honor of Caruso and Aldo’s museum.

And it made me wonder, what made late ’90s Giuliani transform into today’s Giuliani?  They seem so different from one another.

Of all the random museums I’ve visited during this project, the Enrico Caruso Museum is surely, surely the randomest. Sorry, Mossman Lock Collection, you’re now #2. The Caruso Museum has been on my list from the very start, but I’ve kind of been saving it.  I understood that it was the project of an obsessive collector, an elderly Italian gent, who kept it in his apartment, which he opened to the public on Sundays by appointment.

That’s a little disconcerting, in the way that all obsessions–and obsessives–can be. “I’m gonna call you before I go in,” I joked to a friend. “If you don’t hear from me in an hour, alert the authorities!” Continue reading “Enrico Caruso Museum”

Weeksville Heritage Center

Edification value  3/5
Entertainment value  2/5
Should you go?  3/5
Time spent 89 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned  I have a fascination with kitchens. I loved the 1930s kitchen in the Williams House. Full of obsolete appliances and a pantry stocked with canned good brands that no longer exist.

In 1838, about a decade after New York State abolished slavery, James Weeks bought some land in central Brooklyn with the aim of creating a community of free, landowning, African Americans.

Weeksville Heritage Center

Weeksville thrived for about a century, before changing times and demographics conspired to end it as a distinct neighborhood. While local people never quite forgot Weeksville, the larger city did, as Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant absorbed and paved over it. Continue reading “Weeksville Heritage Center”

Williamsburg Art and Historical Center

Edification value  2/5
Entertainment value  3/5
Should you go?  2/5
Time spent 32 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Terrance Lindall’s “Carried Away by Night” typifies his fantastical, surreal, Bosch-ish work.Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, Brooklyn

Close to the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge, though somewhat far from the trendier parts of Williamsburg, stands the impressive, imposing Kings County Savings Bank building, which dates to 1867.Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, BrooklynSince 1996, the building, in a charmingly shabby state today, has served as the home of the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center (or “WAH Center”), a moderately sized gallery space on its second floor. Continue reading “Williamsburg Art and Historical Center”

Lefferts Historic House

 

Edification value  2/5
Entertainment value  3/5
Should you go?  2/5
Time spent 29 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned
Lefferts Historic House
Wormwood!

Leffert’s House has a scraggly little wormwood plant growing in its garden.  Artisanal Brooklyn absinthe, anyone?

 

Lefferts Historic HouseLeffert Pieterson, a Dutch farmer, obtained a tract of land in the village of Flatbush in 1687, and built himself a house there.  That original Lefferts homestead was burned by the Americans just before the Battle of Brooklyn, to prevent the British from seizing and using it.  However, Pieter Lefferts, in the fourth generation of a family that as some point reversed names, rebuilt a fine farmhouse for himself and his family in 1783. Continue reading “Lefferts Historic House”

Wyckoff House Museum

 

Edification value 3/5
Entertainment value 3/5
Should you go?  
Time spent 61 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Wyckoff family members lived in the Wyckoff House right through the start of the 1900s.  250 years of family history in a single domicile boggles my mind.

Before starting my project, I never realized how many historic houses exist in modern New York.  Some surprisingly old. Manhattan’s oldest, the Morris-Jumel Mansion, dates from the 1760s. The Van Cortlandt House in the Bronx was built in 1748.  Bowne House in Queens dates to the 1660s.  But in any city, there can be only one oldest house. In New York that is the Wyckoff House, located in the prosaically named Flatlands, a nondescript part of Brooklyn far from any subway line.

Wyckoff House, Canarsie, Brooklyn

And so, on the first snowy day of the year, I made my trek, over the river and through the woods, half-metaphorically and half-literally, to the Wyckoffs’ ancestral home. Continue reading “Wyckoff House Museum”

Harbor Defense Museum

Edification value  4/5
Entertainment value  3/5
Should you go?  4/5
Time spent 75 minutes, including time spent walking around in Fort Hamilton
Best thing I saw or learned

The Pattern 1844, 24-Pounder Flank Howitzer. In 1864, the Army deployed eight of these to defend Fort Hamilton. The base installed two in the caponier, ready to mow down any unfortunate infantry that tried to attack it.

Harbor Defense Museum, Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn
Howitzer

Getting to the Harbor Defense Museum requires a bit of doing and determination.  First because it sometimes keeps odd hours–definitely call before you go and make sure someone’s manning the fort (literally).

Second, because it is located in Brooklyn in the shadow of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.  By subway, it’s at the farthest end of the R train.  Its sister fort, Fort Wadsworth, situated across the Narrows in Staten Island, is run by the National Park Service.

And third, because uniquely among New York City museums, the Harbor Defense Museum stands within Fort Hamilton, New York City’s sole remaining active army base.

Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn

Continue reading “Harbor Defense Museum”

Waterfront Museum

Edification value 2/5 
Entertainment value  3/5
Should you go?  2/5
Time spent 28 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned I perused an article on the Waterfront Museum in “Hidden Places Magazine.” A bit of googling suggests it only published a single issue, consisting of the glossiest, most fashionable Red Hook promotional material ever created.

Waterfront Museum, BrooklynDavid Sharps is an adventurer, circus performer, and raconteur and seems like a very nice man. He’s certainly brave. He and his family have lived in a wooden barge, currently docked in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, since the 1980s.

It’s a life I find hard to imagine, and one that definitely affords a unique perspective on New York Harbor.

The barge itself is adorable — painted red, emblazoned with its name, “Lehigh Valley No. 79.” It dates to 1914, when longshoremen used thousands of craft like it to ferry cargo from large, deep-water ships in the harbor to railroad cars on the shallow New Jersey side of the Hudson.

Sharps discovered the dilapidated barge mired in the mud in New Jersey. Reportedly the very last of its kind, he got the Lehigh Valley floating again, and he’s been fixing it up ever since, docking in various places around the harbor. He launched the museum in 1986. Continue reading “Waterfront Museum”