culture Archives - GothamJoe

July 17, 2023July 17, 2023

Museum of Broadway

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	137 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The “Oklahoma!” exhibit contains a small, framed, handwritten scrap of paper that contains every rhyme Oscar Hammerstein could think of for “surry,” including “occur he,” “furry,” “chauffeur-y,” and “arbitrury” [sic]. It’s not my favorite song but the peek it provides into his songwriting process delights me.

When I discovered New York was getting a Museum of Broadway my first reaction was “Wait, why don’t we have one of those already?” It seems an obvious and overdue subject for a New York museum. I felt a little on the fence about it given my aversion to “museum in name only” experiential entertainment offerings. If they hand out flyers for it in Times Square, and charge $69 for “daily anytime entry,” can it be a legitimate museum? But, I figured I should take a look.

The Museum of Broadway is appropriately on West 45th Street between 6th Avenue and Broadway. It would be amazing if it were in a defunct theater, but instead it occupies four windowless floors of what I’d guess used to be office space. Very friendly staff greet visitors on the ground floor, then send them up three flights of stairs (there’s an elevator if needed) to start the museum experience.

Ease on down the exhaustive wall timeline

Like an IKEA, visitors to the Museum of Broadway follow a very directed journey. While people can meander at their own pace, there’s only ever one way to go. Instead of a series of gallery spaces, the bulk of a Museum of Broadway visit consists of a sequence of rooms and hallways that offer a chronological tour of the New York theater scene from its earliest days to the present.

Visitors arrive at the top floor and spend a quick minute getting a welcome from a docent and a quick quiz: What makes a Broadway theater a Broadway theater? That’s followed by a welcome video promoting the awesomeness of live theater, and then visitors are turned loose at the start of the timeline, in about 1890.

The earliest history of theater/theatre in New York City The timeline panels are text heavy and extremely detailed. Some of the early ones distinguish between plays and musicals, but later panels tend to run together, as though the curators realized they were running out of both time and space. No sane visitor has a prayer of reading all of them. Rather, I suppose, you just look for things that catch your eye, favorite shows or stars, or key moments in Broadway history. Frank Langella in Seascape, 1975, at the Museum of Broadway

For example, in the midst of a busy panel covering the mid-1970s I was stopped in my tracks by a picture of Frank Langella and Maureen Ackerman dressed as giant lizards (!) in a 1975 Edward Albee (!!) play called “Seascape” that somehow won the Pulitzer Prize (!!!). If more Broadway shows had giant lizards in them, I’d probably see more Broadway shows. “Godzilla: The Musical,” anyone?

Timeline sections are very smartly punctuated by installations related to specific shows or (in a few cases) people. These feature specially commissioned art, actual costumes, props, or other artifacts, and occasionally video interviews and interactive features. And, perhaps inevitably, prompts that this spot or that spot would be great opportunities to take a selfie.

Stars of the show

These show-focused installations were generally fantastic. I won’t spoil them all, but will share a few personal highlights.

Museum of Broadway: Sondheim wordplay

An anagram crossword puzzle that makes a fitting tribute to Stephen Sondheim.
A couple of Julie Taymor’s fantastic puppets from “The Lion King.”
In honor of the longest-running show in Broadway history, an art piece consisting of 13,981 crystals (one for each performance!) suspended in such a way that if you stand in the exact right spot they form the Phantom of the Opera’s mask. As obsessive and magical as Andrew Lloyd Webber himself.

Museum of Broadway: the Phantom in crystals

Acts II and III

Museum of Broadway: Hamilton swag The timeline sequence is quite long, taking up the first two floors of the museum. Eventually visitors arrive at the present, which features a model set for “Wicked” and a couple of costumes from “Hamilton.” That makes this the most self-referential entry yet on the Hamilton Museum Tour of NYC. (Other notable stops include Hamilton Grange, the Morris-Jumel Mansion, and Trinity Church.)

The timeline ends with a few empty columns for 2023, 2024, and 2025, suggesting that either the museum, Broadway, New York City, humanity, or the planet only has a few years to go. We’ll see.

I wonder about the amount of time and space spent on Broadway’s relatively ancient history. Broadway’s post-90s, post-Disney renaissance felt rushed, which I found odd given that’s the era most visitors are most likely to know and connect with.

Museum of Broadway: props. Specifically, sausages — Prop sausages

The floor below the timeline sections shifts gears. It combines multimedia, interactive displays, and artifacts to break down all the behind-the-scenes parts of a production. Different sections illuminate writing, props, costumes, scenery, lighting, and all the rest of the many pieces that make up a theatrical production.

For those who dream of producing, directing, or even marketing (yep, marketers get love, too) a show, this section provides provides immense, even overwhelming, amounts of information on how the sausage gets made. Museum of Broadway: all about costume designers

Visitors then descend one final staircase to the ground floor and exit through an inevitable gift shop.

Museum of Broadway: Exit through the gift shop

Should you visit the Museum of Broadway?

Museum of Broadway: all the roles that go into making a theater production The Museum of Broadway was created with passion and love — obsession may not be too strong a word — for its subject. This is a place geared for people who love the theater, and who already know something about it. On the other hand, total novices may be bewildered or bored. Moreover, although worlds better than those cynical, experiential quasi-museums that separate tourists from their money, this is unquestionably one of New York’s most expensive museums.

Nonetheless, the Museum of Broadway delivers a mix of erudition, surprises and delights, and showbiz pizazz. I’m not the biggest Broadway fan and still spent over two engaging hours there. Anyone who was a theater kid in high school, who gets excited when they get tickets to a show, or who has a shoebox full of old Playbills, will find a visit worthwhile.

That said, I do mean “a visit.” The biggest downside to the timeline layout is it makes for a fairly static experience. There is a small space for temporary exhibits. Currently it features “Chicago,” which at 26 years is (post-Phantom) Broadway’s longest running show. But unless the curators find ways to change things up periodically, I’m not sure that even big Broadway fans will feel much need to see this show a second time.

Museum of Broadway: Lifecycle of a Broadway Show

For Reference:

Address	145 West 45th Street, Manhattan
Website	https://www.themuseumofbroadway.com/
Cost	General Admission: $34-$41 or more (!!) My advice: take advantage of the discount on Tuesdays and avoid the service charge by not buying tickets in advance.
Other Relevant Links	“The Surrey with the Fringe on Top“

July 9, 2023July 9, 2023

Hispanic Society of America

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	60 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Sorolla’s entire mural series (which I write about below) was easily the best thing. However if I had to pick just one panel, I’d go with Seville/The Dance, which evokes Carmen… the happy, carefree parts, not the stabby misogynistic ones. My little internet photo does not do it justice!

Note: I first visited the Hispanic Society in May of 2022. I revised my review in July 2023 as the Society has continued its reopening. The original review is here.

Iberian Dreams…

Like many other institutions around New York City, the Hispanic Society of America was founded by a rich guy who became obsessed with something. Think Gustav Heye and what is now the New York branch of the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian, or Mr. Frick’s collection or Mr. Morgan’s library… Occasionally it was an obsessed rich woman, like Jacques Marchais’s thing for Tibetan Art or the artistic passions of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

In the case of the Hispanic Society, the rich dude was Archer Milton Huntington. And the obsession was the art of the Iberian peninsula. Archer Milton Huntington opened his Spanish Museum in 1908, though he’d dreamed of having a museum of some kind since he was a boy. Born very rich, the story goes that as a young man Huntington fell in love with Hispanic art on a visit to Mexico, which sparked many trips to Spain, learning Spanish as well as Arabic, and becoming both a connoisseur of and an expert in the art and culture.

Hispanic Society Museum and Library, Exterior, New York

The Hispanic Society is located in a splendid Beaux-Arts building in Harlem, part of the Audubon Terrace campus. It’s an interesting quirk of fate that Spanish is much more likely to be spoken in the museum’s neighborhood today than when it opened there over a century ago. The beautiful old building is a blessing and a curse: the museum closed for a massive renovation shortly before I started my museum project back in 2017, and remained closed until 2022.

Recently, the Hispanic Society entered the second phase of its reopening, following the teaser “we’re back” exhibition that I saw in its basement last year.

Hispanic Society Main Entrance (under construction)

Soto and Sorolla

The Hispanic Society has now reopened two spaces: its Main Court and the Sorolla Room. The Main Court has two levels (though only the ground floor is currently open) and is something like a roofed-over medieval cloister, featuring an open space surrounded by ornate archways and a small corridor running around the perimeter under the mezzanine. It is an exciting space, though its relatively small size limits what the Society can exhibit there.

Hispanic Society interior

Nevertheless, the cleverness of the Hispanic Society’s reopening exhibit belied its small space.

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida was a famous Spanish painter (“the most esteemed and renowned Spanish painter of his era,” per a wall text) who died in 1923. Jesús Soto was a Venezuelan abstractionist who made highly formal geometric sculptures who was born in 1923. That coincidental birth/death centennial year provides a somewhat tenuous justification for exhibiting their work together. However, each artist was interesting in his own right, and together they bridge the old Hispanic Society/ new Hispanic Society philosophy regarding curation and collecting.

That philosophy, by the way, has evolved from a focus mainly on the Old World to including the New, and from classic and retrospective to embracing contemporary work.

Hispanic Society's Sorolla and Soto exhibit, 2023, New York

I appreciated the way the Hispanic Society installed Sorolla’s bourgeois society portraits in the arches of its Main Court. Floating in space they echoed the 3D, geometric, sculptural layering of Soto’s work.

Jesús Rafael Soto, Untitled

The Sorolla Room

The Sorolla Room is something else. Much like the Spanish Inquisition, I was not expecting it. Back in 1909, the Hispanic Society held the first major US exhibit of Joaquín Sorolla’s work. Based on the success of that show, Archer Milton Huntington commissioned Sorolla to create a series of murals depicting life in España, installed in the eponymous room.

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida's Vision of Spain murals at The Hispanic Society

The murals are a delight — packed with regional detail. Colorful and exotic, they combine mundane scenes with holidays and festivals. I might feel concern that they’re a bit too exoticizing, but, hey, Sorolla was Spanish, I think it’s safe to assume he knew what he was painting. I want to take a guided tour of these murals, or at least come back and visit many more times.

The Hispanic Society installed another exhibit in the Sorolla room, entitled “Jewels in a Gem,” featuring the work of Luz Camino, a contemporary Spanish jewelry designer. This worked surprisingly well. The installation was designed to leave the murals unimpeded and the jewelry complemented what was on the walls — sometimes directly. For example, I appreciated the fishbone earrings in a case juxtaposed with a fish market scene.

Luz Camino, fishbone earrings at the Hispanic Society

Fish Market from Sorolla's Vision of Spain murals, Hispanic Society Camino’s work reminds me of early 20th century jewelry by Lalique or Cartier. It draws heavily on nature, but also has a healthy dose of humor. I don’t know who would want enamel and gold earrings lovingly shaped into popcorn, but I respect that person.

Although full of beautiful things, my one nitpick is the exhibit would have been richer had it included some of Camino’s notebooks, design sketches, and other preparatory work — I love seeing inside a designer’s creative process.

Luz Camino, popcorn earrings

Should You Visit the Hispanic Society Museum?

I’m excited that the Hispanic Society has continued its return to life as a museum. Its important collection and beautiful building are invaluable restorations to the New York’s cultural fabric.

With this phase of its reopening, the Hispanic Society has gone from being “worth a quick stop if you happen to be in that part of Harlem” (quoting myself from 2022) to being well worth a trip. The Sorolla murals are arguably the closest thing Manhattan offers to a visit to Spain. (Mercado Little Spain at Hudson Yards is the other contender…)

The Hispanic Society would make a good combination with the splendid Morris-Jumel Mansion, both historic buildings. It is also close to the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling if you’ve got kids in tow.

Hispanic Society of America Stairway — Upstairs coming soon (I hope)

I chatted with a friendly guard who said that the Society expects to have more gallery space open by autumn. I’m already excited about making another visit.

Hopefully part of the longer-term plan will make the pleasant piazza of Audubon Terrace more inviting, too. An al fresco café or tapas bar would be fantastic there (where’s José Andrés when you need him?!). Sculptures on the terrace immortalize Don Quixote (yay), the conquistadors (boo), and El Cid (I think he’s a “yay” but your mileage may vary…). The terrace was once a sort of Lincoln Center of cultural institutions, featuring the American Indian Museum, the American Numismatic Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That last one is still there, and occasionally open for exhibitions, too.

Audubon Terrace Plaza — El Cid, by Anna Hyatt Huntington

For Reference:

Address	613 W 155th Street, Manhattan
Website	hispanicsociety.org
Cost	General Admission: Free
Other relevant links	Mercado Little Spain (tapas and more by José Andrés) Luz Camino, Madrid

June 19, 2023June 19, 2023

Brooklyn Children’s Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
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.

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.

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	Rafael Viñoly Architects on the Brooklyn Children’s Museum

May 14, 2022June 11, 2023

Hispanic Society of America

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	33 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	It’s a predictable choice but Hispanic Society’s Goya, “The Duchess of Alba,” from 1797, is a fantastic portrait. I especially love that Goya inscribed his signature on the sandy shore where she’s standing. The Duchess unsubtly points a bejeweled finger toward his name. The Duchess gives Goya the finger

Note: This is my original review of the Hispanic Society, published on May 14, 2022. The museum has re-opened more since then, and I’m happy to have updated the review here.

Iberian Dreams…

The Hispanic Society is located in a splendid Beaux-Arts building in Harlem, part of the Audubon Terrace campus. It’s an interesting quirk of fate that Spanish is much more likely to be spoken in the museum’s neighborhood today than when it opened there a century ago. The beautiful old building is a blessing and a curse: the museum closed for a massive renovation shortly before I started my museum project back in 2017, and remained closed right up until 2022.

Today, happily, it is in the first stages of reopening its doors. When I visited back in March, I saw a “best-of” selection of the museum’s collection, curated to demonstrate how its mission has evolved and expanded.

Nuestra casa es su casa

The exhibit on view when I visited was titled Nuestra casa, and split a small basement space into two sections. The first half focused on Archer Huntington’s dream for the museum, travels in Spain, and the foundations of the collection. The second half was titled “A collection without borders” and focused on the museum’s mission since the 1990s, when it started to greatly increase its holdings from Latin America.

The Hispanic Society argues that this is justified because of the huge cultural influences back and forth between Iberia and its colonial (or former colonial) holdings – the Spanish and Portuguese speaking worlds. And of course it wants to stay relevant in a cultural landscape much-changed since Huntington’s time.

I’m not convinced the exhibit really supported the “one big world of influences” argument. It was easy to see Spain and Portugal influencing art in their overseas territories; however, cultural influences in the other direction were much less clear. I think that’s a fault of the bifurcated curation; it didn’t let the Society’s classic collection and its more recent acquisitions really talk to one another.

The space was a let-down as well: a small, windowless room, interrupted by a row of six large columns, with walls painted in shades of ochre that play off the collection’s Goya.

Hispanic Society Interior

That said, the Hispanic Society’s greatest hits are indeed quite great, including a dynamite Velázquez and the aforementioned showstopping Goya portrait, along with El Greco, Zurbarán, and even a dark and murky Sargent. I had a less strong reaction to the art from the New World, though some small devotional sculptures from Equador, depicting what awaits after death, were almost Tibetan in their macabre exuberance.

Manuel Chili, “The Four Fates of Man,” Ecuador, ca 1775

Should You Visit the Hispanic Society Museum?

I’m excited that the Hispanic Society seems to be (slowly) returning to life as a museum. Its important collection and beautiful building are valuable restorations to the cultural fabric of the city.

However, the tiny current space doesn’t merit a trip. Having seen photos of what the building’s interiors look like I’m confident that will change when more of the place opens back up. I just hope it won’t be another five years before that happens.

Hispanic Society Interior View

The Hispanic Society is worth a quick stop if you happen to be in that part of Harlem. It might make a good combination with the splendid Morris-Jumel Mansion, both historic buildings. It is also close to the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, and while kids may not enjoy the Hispanic Society, at least the small size means they won’t get too impatient.

On a nice day it would be pleasant to just hang out in the piazza of Audubon Terrace and contemplate Don Quixote (yay), the conquistadors (boo), and El Cid (yay? boo? I don’t know…), all of whom are immortalized there. The Society once shared the terrace with the aforementioned American Indian Museum, as well as the American Numismatic Society. A mini Lincoln Center of museums and cultural institutions, now scattered across the City. The American Academy of Arts and Letters is still there, and occasionally opens for exhibitions.

Finally, those with an interest in modern or contemporary Hispanic art should also consider El Museo del Barrio, which didn’t impress me much but for the moment has far more to see than the Hispanic Society.

For Reference:

Address	613 W 155th Street, Manhattan
Website	hispanicsociety.org
Cost	General Admission: Free

March 8, 2020March 8, 2020

Museum of the American Gangster

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	108 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	I liked this dusty model rum runner, combined with Mimi’s commentary drawing a direct line from these boats to World War II PT boats and Kennedy’s wartime heroism. Rum Runner!

I arrived at the Museum of the American Gangster predisposed to dislike it. A small, threadbare operation by the sound of it, two modest rooms over a nautically-themed absinthe-specialist dive bar on St. Marks Place (with a fancy take-out-window sandwich shop embedded in it). Combine that premise with a steep $20 admission charge and it seemed sketchy — like the execrable Ground Zero Museum Workshop, a ploy to separate gullible museum-goers from their hard-earned cash.

Museum of the American Gangster-Entrance

And, yup, it’s that.

But it’s not just that. It’s also Mimi, the guide on the Sunday shortly before New Year’s when I took my tour. Mimi who gave a rather astonishing, 105-minute, note-free, free-associative, and fascinating history of the entire American project, from colonization through today, as viewed through the lens of organized crime and from the unapologetic perspective of a smart, funny, middle-aged, super-liberal, Jewish New Yorker.

I realize that description contains a fair amount of redundancy.

What I Saw at the Gangster Museum

The Gangster Museum is indeed basically two rooms, the size of a starter New York apartment (which in a past life it probably was). Very much of the Science Fair variety of exhibition: lots of photos, reproduction documents, and wall text with a few artifacts (old bottles, models, some bullets from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre…Tommy gun) to liven things up.

Museum of the American Gangster-Tommy Gun

You can only visit on a tour — no wandering in off the street. For the first chunk of it, covering the early history of organized crime and booze and America, there are thankfully seats. The second part is about standing and peering at pictures on the walls. There’s not much of any time for self-guided exploration, but then again, there’s not much to explore.

Museum of the American Gangster-Office The space is, to put it kindly, disheveled. A desk in at the front of the first room serves as the office, with various bits that should probably be thrown out or tidied up, just kind of out there. If you need a restroom break, visit the dive bar on the ground floor.

Eventually, the tour takes you down to said dive bar, which was a speakeasy during Prohibition, and which also now houses the old St Mark’s Theater, installed after the Prohibition days. Then you put on somewhat sketchy hard hats (are these things sanitized between visitors?) and go down to the basement, which is even sketchier, and gives you a great view into what the basement of an East Village apartment building that also contains a dive bar and trendy sandwich shop looks like. Cluttered with utility pipes and ducts and wires and conduits dangerously everywhere.

Museum of the American Gangster-Basement — Typical East Village Basement

In the Prohibition days, the organized criminal who ran the enterprise kept his office down there, and you can see what the space is like today. It didn’t add much.

What I Heard at the Gangster Museum

I’m not going to try to reconstruct the Gangster Museum spiel from my notes. You need to hear it firsthand. Some highlights of what we covered, though:

The triangle slave trade
Women’s rights and the dawn of Prohibition
Southern plantations as Auschwitz
Rum Runners and Kennedy’s WWII Heroics
Prescription Booze
The Dawn of the Cocktail
The Chemist Wars as Extrajudicial Killing — or “Assisted Suicide”
Prohibition was just for the poor

And then we finally got to gangsters. This review is already long enough but two of my particular favorite quotes from the gangster part were:

Arnold Rothstein (real gangster): “I think we can do crime better.”
Omar Little (fictional gangster): “You come at the king, you best not miss.”

We rolled right over our allotted tour time and still barely had time for the history of the building. As it was Mimi turned away a guy who arrived for the 2:30 tour — sent him to the bar for a hot apple cider, because she wasn’t finished with us yet.

Museum of the American Gangster-Interior

We learned of lost safes, buried in concrete. The speakeasy turned theater, the lost office, the whole building an “improvised explosive device” should the Feds come knocking. Escape tunnels and expired Italian dinners (locked in said safes).

I can’t even.

There was a whole heck of a lot left out. No real conversation about organized crime post-Prohibition, or certainly not post-WWII.

Nothing about the potentially awesome, deep topic of organized crime in popular culture. Though Mimi did talk about the ways that early gangsters masterfully manipulated their images in popular culture — at least until their extralegal activities got too bloody or grandiose for their generosity or outsized personalities to balance.

I left exhausted and excited in a way I hardly expected from a two-room, threadbare, quasi-museum.

Museum of the American Gangster-Interior

Is The Museum of the American Gangster a Hit?

Rarely in the course of my museum project have I found myself so stymied by the bottom line. Generally, it’s an easy “go” or “don’t go.” Or a “go if you’re into so-and-so topic.” The Museum of the American Gangster isn’t a good museum — it’s not worth it if you approach it as one, even if you’re into organized crime.

But think of this place, instead, as a theatrical experience. Your reaction to it will completely depend on your guide and whether you click with that person. I can only speak for Mimi, who reminded me why I love this city in all its quirky, passionate, fascinating diversity.

Note also that there’s a Groupon deal seemingly always available that gets you in two-for-one. Do that. Even for Mimi, I have trouble recommending spending $20 on the Gangster Museum.

Museum of the American Gangster-Exterior

For Reference:

Address	80 Saint Marks Place, Manhattan (near First Avenue)
Website	museumoftheamericangangster.org
Cost	General Admission: $20, check website for guided tour times. Note, check Groupon for a 2 for one deal.
Other Relevant Links	Foxface, the fancy sandwich window, reviewed by the Times William Barnacle Tavern, reviewed in World’s Best Bars

June 29, 2019June 29, 2019

American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	52 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	There’s only one actual dog at the Museum of the Dog — or a former one, anyway. Belgrave Joe died in 1888, and is the prototype Fox Terrier. And the mascot of the AKC Library. He reminded me of the nameless canine taxidermied and memorialized at the Fire Museum.

A Museum That’s Gone to the Dogs

The American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog is one of the newest museums in New York City, having opened in an office building lobby space near Grand Central in May of 2019. The Museum’s prior incarnation was located in St. Louis, but its move back to the Big Apple represents a homecoming for an institution based here from its founding in 1982 until 1987.

The museum is split over two airy, brightly lit floors with large windows looking onto East 40th Street. The design cleverly maximizes the limited floorspace, with temporary walls for paintings standing at a diagonal to the floorplan, and a series of library-style archival storage racks upstairs that visitors can look through.

Ironically, dogs are not allowed.

The museum unsurprisingly collects caniniana (I just made that word up). What’s on display is mainly art — paintings and a multistory vitrine of small knicknacks and sculptures. It also includes a very few artifacts, like a charming carousel animal carved like a parakeet. Okay, carved like a dog.

If I had to characterize the paintings, I’d say they were mostly fairly mediocre, and in most other museums would be relegated to study collections or dusty back rooms (indeed, I speculate dusty back rooms of other museums may even be the source of some of the collection). But, hey, they’ve got a dog in them, so here they are stars of the show. One particular favorite of mine featured what I declare to be the world’s most windswept poodle, out on the moors somewhere.

Who’s a Good Museum? Who’s a Good Museum?

The Museum of the Dog, like the AKC, is devoted to dogs, and their raising, training and breeding. Actually, almost exclusively the latter. Rather than dogs as companions, or dogs as living creatures, much of what’s on display speaks to dogs as objects that humans have shaped and molded over generations to create an astonishing array of variously lovable, weird, practical, and unlikely breeds.

One interactive element consists of a tabletop screen that with little dogs walking along it. Drag one to a doghouse and the table gives you all sorts of facts and lore about the breed.

There’s other interactivity as well. A kiosk snaps a visitor’s selfie and then identifies a breed of dog they resemble. I got tagged as a German Pinscher, which I suppose I’ll take. At least I’m not a pug in its machine vision eyes. Though my ears are definitely not that pointy.

The museum also contains the AKC’s modest library, including everything from children’s literature to a book on the art of Beagling (I did not make that word up).

Speaking of beagling, I was grateful that in a rare moment of showing a dog as an exemplar of popular culture, rather than an object, the curators had a single Peanuts comic on display.

Should You Visit the Museum of the Dog?

The AKC Museum of the Dog is a perfectly nice little museum. It’s very well designed, makes great use of its space, and doesn’t overwhelm the visitor. It’s a fun tribute to dogs, albeit one that’s very heavy on forgettable (except for that poodle) paintings and curios as the expression of dog.

The emphasis on dogs as breeds, as objects that humans create and curate, took some of the joy out of the subject for me. I hope future exhibits look more at dogs in other lights, but given what the AKC does for a living, I’m not optimistic about that.

I’m not sure who the Museum of the Dog wants as its audience. It’s a natural topic for a kid-focused institution, but aside from a rather boring interactive dog training simulator and an activity area in the library there’s not much here that would appeal to kids.

Fundamentally, if you’re an AKC member you should absolutely go — you’re self-selected (I’d almost say bred) to love it. If you deeply love dogs, deeply, you might like it, too. For everyone else, $15 feels steep for what they have on display and what you learn.

For Reference:

Address	101 Park Avenue, Manhattan (entrance on East 40th Street)
Website	museumofthedog.org
Cost	General Admission: $15

March 9, 2019March 9, 2019

Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
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.

March 7, 2019March 7, 2019

Mmuseumm

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	23 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Occlupanids. That’s the word for those little plastic whatsits that keep the bags store-bought bread comes in closed. How many of those have you seen in your life? Used? Thrown out? Have you ever thought about them? And yet, each got made somewhere, and each serves a purpose. Mmuseumm devoted an exhibition in its tiny space to making me see these quotidian things for the first time.

Of the institutions I’ve defined as “museums” for my purposes, New York’s largest (in area not breadth) is the 478-acre Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. I’ve now, at the eleventh hour of my museum-visiting project, visited the smallest museum in New York, the simply named if imaginatively spelled Mmuseumm. Located in a converted freight elevator down a narrow street just south of Canal Street in the non-neighborhood between Tribeca and Chinatown, I’ve seen walk-in closets larger than this quirky institution.

But what a density of eccentricity it achieves in its petite space!

Mmuseumm describes itself as devoted to now. “Now,” reads the Mmuseumm brochure, “is always weird.” It goes on to claim that the Neanderthals probably found their “now” weird, as did people in the Middle Ages. Mmuseumm dissects some of that weirdness, putting it on display in an analytical, humorous, thoughtful way.

Mmuseumm opens each spring with a new collection — of small exhibitions related to the weirdness of now. Last year was “season 7.” As it’s essentially outdoors, it makes sense that it shuts down over the colder months.

The Collection

How do I describe the Mmuseumm’s collection philosophy? I come back to my designated best thing: occlupanids. As I mentioned before, occlupanid is the fancy name for the plastic clip that holds a bread bag closed. Most of us, I wager, have never given them much thought, outside of checking if the rye on the shelf at Fairway is likely to still be good in a week. But occlupanids are a thing. You can organize them, analyze them, create a Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group (HORG) if you want to. It’s weird that these humble things are given a shelf in a museum. But no more weird than their existence in the first place.

Other exhibitions in the “Season 6, 2018” set included:

A study of standard consumer objects that were somehow deformed – the brochure description for “Nothing is Perfect” starts out “Humanity exists in a state of eror.”
Strange counterfeit brands that have sprung up in post-economic-collapse Venezuela.
Unexpected common items that have saved lives, and ones that were causes of death.
An array of devices people have deployed to fight snoring.
The security patterns that get printed inside envelopes so you can’t see the checks in them.

In sum, the fall 2018 roster included a mind-boggling fourteen exhibitions. On a thoughts-provoked-per-square-meter basis, Mmuseumm’s little space is quite possibly the densest of any museum in New York.

Among the 150-ish objects on view at the Mmuseumm during my visit was a small shelf space labelled “Nothing.” I appreciate an institution that defies the standard museum philosophy of being full of stuff, in favor of devoting a space (especially one in such a small space to begin with) to emptiness.

Should You Visit the Mmuseumm?

This place confounded me. I was all set to be put off by its archness, its twee, self-satisfied cleverness. And to dismiss Mmuseumm as not really a museum. I did leave pondering whether I’d had a museum experience, or just seen a clever piece of conceptual art, a wry commentary on museum-ology, quite possibly the first meta-museum I’ve visited.

Meta- or not, though, Mmuseumm is a museum. It tries to edify and entertain, and whether it is actually earnest or not, it comes across as on the level. In collecting ephemera, it reminds me of City Reliquery, though with a broader mandate and a much smaller space. I spoke a bit with the docent who was standing by to answer questions (there is also a phone-based audioguide and an awesome, exhaustive brochure), and she was super enthused about the place and its mission.

Also, two-or-so doors down the alley from the Mmuseumm is the even tinier Mmuseumm Rest Stop. I wouldn’t do my Christmas shopping there, but it featured funny and well-curated gifts, souvenirs, and snacks in counterpoint to the items on display.

I strongly recommend a visit to the Mmuseumm, particularly after you’ve been to many (like a couple hundred) more conventional museums. It encapsulates much of what I’ve come to think about what makes a good museum, and a meaningful museumgoing experience.

For Reference:

Address	4 Cortlandt Alley, Manhattan
Website	mmuseumm.com
Cost	General Admission: $5 donation suggested
Other Relevant Links	The Holotypic Occulpanid Research Group

June 27, 2018

Coney Island Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
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. 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’s, Liberty, 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”

June 19, 2018

Enrico Caruso Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
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”