history Archives - Page 3 of 8

December 14, 2017

Historic Richmond Town

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	130 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The giant “Azel F. Merrell” oyster sloop flag hanging in the museum. The city’s oystering history is one of my favorite parts of the New York story.

Most historic buildings in New York are a scattershot, here-and-there thing, involving much travel through the contemporary city to get from one to the next. In terms of quantity in proximity it is impossible to beat Staten Island’s Historic Richmond Town, which boasts over 23 buildings from the 1600s to the 1800s, mostly within walking distance and periodically open to the public. Continue reading “Historic Richmond Town”

December 13, 2017

Wyckoff House Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
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”

December 10, 2017December 10, 2017

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	109 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	My favorite fun fact from the tour is that the Lower East Side got the moniker “Klein Deutschland” before there even was a unified “Deutschland.”

There are certain combinations of places and architecture that just go together. Paris+garret; Newport+mansion; San Francisco+Victorian ; Brooklyn+brownstone. And “Lower East Side+tenement.” It’s almost redundant to call a place the “Lower East Side Tenement Museum.” But New York has one of those, and redundant or not, it is a fantastic, unforgettable recreation of a slice of life in this city.

Tenement Museum

How the Other Half Lived

The word “tenement” originally referred to any multiple dwelling building, what we’d call an “apartment” today. Very quickly, however, “tenement” came to mean a very particular type of multiple dwelling building. One aimed at the working class and recent immigrants, crammed with people and with very limited light, ventilation, and amenities.

Like how non-New Yorkers imagine New Yorkers live today, only even worse. Continue reading “Lower East Side Tenement Museum”

November 17, 2017

Woodlawn Cemetery

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	120 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	My favorite monument at Woodlawn is the Straus family mausoleum. Three mini-tombs form a complex for the sons of Isidor and Ida Straus, plus a memorial to their parents, famously lost on the Titanic. It’s a unique hybrid of art deco and Egyptian Revival, complete with an awesome, streamlined, funeral barge.

I need to preface this review with a disclosure. I have been visiting Woodlawn Cemetery for almost 20 years. Also, I’m a member of, and volunteer with, the Woodlawn Conservancy, and help out with guided tours there.

So I have a strong bias. I love this place.

Cemeteries as Museums

In my review of Green-Wood Cemetery (New York’s other masterpiece cemetery, in Brooklyn) I explain why I think great historic cemeteries merit consideration as museums. In short, their unique combination of history, art, architecture and nature makes them both edifying and, for some definition of the word, entertaining. And definitely inspiring.

Continue reading “Woodlawn Cemetery”

November 13, 2017April 11, 2021

Museum of American Finance

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	93 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	During World War II, Disney created character-driven U.S. war bonds to encourage the kiddies to contribute to the effort to “make life free and forever peaceful for all men.”

UPDATE APRIL 2021: The Museum of American Finance is closed as it seeks new space for its collection. It may reopen, but it won’t look much like it did in the pictures from this review.

I give the curators of the Museum of American Finance credit for chutzpah, anyway. In this day and age, a museum that lionizes financiers and the financial system seems tantamount to, I don’t know, a museum of baby harp seal clubbers.

That said, if you’re going to have a museum (or, as they style it, a MU$EUM) of American finance, there can be no better place for it than Wall Street. And no better place on Wall Street than in the Bank of New York’s former Grand Mezzanine.

The 1927 Bank of New York Building, at Wall and William Streets, is the third on the site. The original Bank of New York in that spot dates to 1796, about a decade after Alexander Hamilton and a coterie of America’s other financial founding fathers started it.

The Museum of American Finance was founded by a banker named John Herzog in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash. Herzog started his “museum project” (touché!) to create an institution to explain how the financial system worked. He reckoned that although Wall Street is synonymous with finance, most folks don’t really know what goes on there outside of movies. Continue reading “Museum of American Finance”

November 6, 2017May 1, 2018

Harbor Defense Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
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. 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”

October 28, 2017

Kingsland Homestead / Queens Historical Society

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	16 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Captain King’s great-grandsons, twins Ernest and Charnley Murray, also became sailors. Bearded and beret-ed in 1898, they’d fit in perfectly with the hipster denizens of today’s Bushwick or Williamsburg.

Kingsland Homestead, the home of sea captain Joseph King and his offspring, today houses the Queens Historical Society. Much like the Museum of Bronx History in the Valentine-Varian House, this building thus serves the dual purpose of historic house and museum for the borough. As in the Bronx, it’s difficult to pull off.
Continue reading “Kingsland Homestead / Queens Historical Society”

October 17, 2017

Voelker Orth Museum, Bird Sanctuary, and Victorian Garden

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	32 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The small “Victorian” garden hosts a couple of bird feeders, a grape arbor (they freeze grapes and make grape juice for visitors all year round), a patch of lawn, and even a teensy koi pond.

Voelker Orth Museum

I didn’t believe that they could squeeze a museum, bird sanctuary and Victorian garden onto a residential lot in Queens. I mean, two of those things, maybe. But then, I’d never been to the Voelker-Orth House.

In 1899, German immigrant Konrad Voelker bought a rather pretty house on the outskirts of Flushing to live in with his wife Elizabeth and daughter Theresa. Voelker published German language newspapers in New York, and the house reflected his success and the family’s prosperity. Continue reading “Voelker Orth Museum, Bird Sanctuary, and Victorian Garden”

October 16, 2017

Lewis Latimer House

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	58 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Latimer’s work on the lightbulb made him (slightly) famous, but he patented many other things. He invented a method of cooling a room by dampening fabric hung in a window. And a rack that could safely lock your hat, coat, or umbrella, for use at offices or restaurants. And finally, a better train toilet, details of which I’m probably happier not to know.

Lewis Latimer, the son of escaped slaves, helped patent the telephone, refined the design of the light bulb, and ended up a Grand Old Man of the General Electric Company. He also painted and wrote poetry.

He’s sort of a footnote to history — but a good footnote, and a meaningful one, not one of those ones you just skim over. It’s therefore fantastic that his home in Flushing today serves as a museum to his memory.

Lewis Latimer House

Continue reading “Lewis Latimer House”

October 16, 2017

Bowne House

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	61 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	We didn’t even discuss it on the tour but this vintage washing machine (definitely later than 1661) evoked for me all the artifacts from hundreds of years of Bowne family life in this house– the stories they could tell!

Imagine the year 1661. Charles II was crowned King of England. Sweden and Russia wrapped up a war. The Netherlands ceded the territory of New Holland to Portugal (nowadays it’s a chunk of Brazil). A kid named Isaac Newton enrolled at Cambridge. And Englishman John Bowne and his wife Hannah settled in a small farmhouse in the Dutch village of Vlissingen, in the hinterlands of New Amsterdam.

Bowne House, Flushing, Queens

356 years later, that modest house (with several additions and alterations) still stands on its original plot of land. Today we call Vlissingen the neighborhood of Flushing in the borough of Queens. Continue reading “Bowne House”