Museum of the American Gangster

Edification value 2/5
Entertainment value 4/5
Should you go? 2/5
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.   

Museum of the American Gangster-Rum Runner
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-OfficeThe 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

 

Merchant’s House Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 104 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned In mid-19th C. New York rowhouse-style mansions, bedrooms were semi-public space.  When you came calling, you’d first go upstairs to a bedroom where you’d leave your coat and hat and change from street shoes to indoor shoes.  Only then would you go down to the parlor.  Seems strange to me– like they should’ve had a changing room as part of the floorplan.  But even in these grand houses, space was at a premium.

The Merchant’s House Museum is a venerable 19th century home and maybe the only historic house in the city where so many of the furnishings on display are actually original to the house, owned by the home’s owners and maintained by the museum to this day.

The merchant in question is a guy named Seabury Treadwell, who bought the house for $18,000 in 1835.  His family lived there for 90 odd years, and by a series of fortuitous events, the house and all the stuff in it became a museum in 1936.  In 1965, when the Landmarks law was passed, the Merchant’s House Museum was among the very first places to be landmarked by the city. Continue reading “Merchant’s House Museum”

Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS)

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 19 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Micro-mini exhibit on activist technology over time

The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space occupies a classic old-school East Village squat, and consists of some artifacts, photos, and other memorabilia documenting the East Village of the 80s and 90s.  It and its denizens focus mainly on squats (abandoned buildings that individuals made habitable and moved into), community gardens, bike lanes, and other aspects of a time and culture that feels increasingly at odds with the hyper-gentrified city of today. Continue reading “Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS)”

Ukrainian Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 41 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Marko Shuhan’s 2016 work “Space Needed, Apply Within,” a crazy hodgepodge of paintings and paints and liquor bottles on shelves.  Like an artist’s studio compressed into a single wall installation. 

The Ukrainian Museum is one that I definitely wouldn’t go to barring this project.  It occupies a sort of blah, to be honest, modern building on a side street off Cooper Square, and has moderate gallery space with temporary exhibits.

Currently on show were contemporary works by Ukrainian American artists, a textile exhibit comparing traditional textiles of the Romanian and Ukrainian parts of the Carpathian Mountains, a small display of traditional woodcarving, and some of the artwork coming out of the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution. Continue reading “Ukrainian Museum”