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.
NowThen
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”
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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”
Antonio Meucci built a rustic rocking chair from roots and saplings. The description says that he would sit in his garden “embittered by the thought that the glory of his invention had been denied him.” The rocking chair of bitterness, I can get behind that.
Hope and bitterness, triumph and failure, fame and obscurity, a technological and a political revolution, all in one modest house in Staten Island. How can one place epitomize such divergent fates? Such is the story of the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum.
Meucci
Antonio Meucci comes first. An inventor who dabbled in new-fangled applications of electricity, Meucci moved from Italy to Cuba before settling in Staten Island in 1850. As early as 1849, he started working on something he called the teletrofono, which converted sound waves to electricity, transmitted them over a wire, and re-converted them to sound via a speaker at the other end. Sound familiar?
Remember Meucci!
The house tells the story of a brilliant but naive man, who took his invention (prototypes, models, and all) to a major telegraph company, only to be brushed off. He lacked resources to file a patent on his own. And was incensed when Alexander Graham Bell patented a suspiciously similar invention a few years later. And Bell had worked for that very same telegraph company!
In addition to a video narrative of his story, one room in the museum collects some Meucci-bilia, including a few surviving teletrofono models, his rocking chair, and his death mask.
Belatedly, both the New York City and the U.S. House of Representatives have acknowledged Meucci’s unsung role in the telephone’s invention, though of course neither he nor his heirs ever saw one dime of royalties. The museum houses those proclamations as well.
If Meucci had a better lawyer, more resources, better English language skills, or a less trusting nature, we’d all be talking on celltrofonos today.
Garibaldi
Giuseppe Garibaldi was the driving force for Italian independence and unification. Italy hadn’t been a single political unit since the fall of Rome, and by the 1800s various bits were controlled by the Swiss, Austria-Hungary, the Papal States, and Bourbon Spain. But as the tide of nationalism was rising across Europe, a few visionaries (or lunatics, depending) like Garibaldi decided Italy should be a single, independent country, too.
Viva Garibaldi!
Garibaldi’s story is one of the merits of persistence. He tried a couple of times to march an army across the Italian peninsula, and failed. He fled to exile first in Uruguay (where he again stirred up revolutionary passions among the locals) and then, for a while, in New York. When the local Italian community needed a place for the polarizing, heroic man to lie low, Meucci stepped forward. Garibaldi wanted to be out of the limelight, so the idyllic little house in Staten Island appealed.
Eventually, of course, History called (but not on a teletrofono), and Garibaldi returned to Europe. Where, much to the surprise of nearly everyone, he actually succeeded in creating the Italy we know today.
Garibaldi only lived in the house for a couple of years, but two rooms of the museum cover that time. One presents a collection of Garibaldi artifacts — weapons, uniforms, an imposing bronze bust, and some charming maps that detail his travels in loops of yarn. The other, upstairs, re-creates Garibaldi’s bedroom.
Should You Visit the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum?
After Garibaldi’s death in 1882, the house got a plaque recognizing his stay. When Meucci died, New York’s Italian community took over. In the early 1900s, they erected an ersatz Palladian temple of wood and plaster over and around the house.
Maintaining that proved difficult. They removed the monumental shell in the 1950s to create the modest museum and cultural center that exists to the present day. Operated by the Sons of Italy, the museum has periodically formulated plans to expand.
That might help. Garibaldi was l’eroe dei due mondi, (hero of two worlds–Italy and Uruguay, that is). However, I’m not sure everyone needs to make a pilgrimage to his brief home on Staten Island. It’s interesting, but haphazard. Like many small museums, the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum’s very limited space and resources hamper its ability to tell its dual stories.
An introductory video covers Meucci, with appropriate levels of bitterness and righteous anger. And my guide through the museum was both knowledgeable and enthusiastic. However, a clutter of folding tables and chairs in the way of the displays detracted. They serve the museum’s other role as classroom for Italian language, culture, and opera.
If you’re a fan of history, Italy, or underdog inventors, you’ll enjoy visiting the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum. And if you are trekking to the terrific Alice Austen House, this is an easy walk away.
There’s so much I liked about Alice Austen’s story and her home. However, I was blown away by Clear Comfort’s spectacular, panoramic views of the harbor. I’d go back there just to sit on the lawn and watch the ships go by.
Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Alice Austen House
Touring Alice Austen’s house in Staten Island, my guide quipped that if Alice Austen were alive today, she’d be one of those people who lines up for the new iPhone each time one comes out. I say she’d also most likely be an Instagram star.
That her life stretched from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, most of it spent in a lovely house on the shores of Staten Island, makes her even more fascinating.
A plaque (reproduced just below) visualizes how New York’s historic harbor defenses overlapped to protect Lower Manhattan and the Hudson. With the actual harbor spread majestically before you, it’s phenomenally effective.
Historic Harbor Defenses, Plus Harbor
I’ve seen three forts (Totten, Schuyler, Clinton) in the course of this project so far, with several more yet to come. Governors Island features a twofer, which (like the others) speak to changing military technology and adaptation to new uses.
All the extant fortifications around New York Harbor and Long Island Sound have two things in common. The military never had to use them to defend the city, and advances in military technology very quickly rendered them obsolete. Not that it was necessarily money down the drain; the mere existence of the chain of forts around the city may well have helped deter attacks from, um, pirates or Canadians? They almost certainly helped ensure New York remained unmolested by the British during the War of 1812. Continue reading “Governors Island National Monument”
For the second time in this project, I ran into Theda Bara, the proto-vamp of American cinema, starring in Cleopatra in the World War I exhibit’s section on popular entertainment.
The Museum of Bronx History occupies the 1758 Valentine-Varian House. Ten years younger than the Van Cortlandts’ fancy mansion, this is the second oldest house in the Bronx.
Two stories tall and made of rough field stone, it feels solid and cozy and, like so many houses of its vintage, very symmetrical. Like Hamilton Grange, the house isn’t where it started out. In 1965 they moved it to its current spot in a quiet corner of a park and athletic complex. Continue reading “Museum of Bronx History at the Valentine-Varian House”
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.
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.
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!
That might help. Garibaldi was l’eroe dei due mondi, (hero of two worlds–Italy and Uruguay, that is). However, I’m not sure everyone needs to make a pilgrimage to his brief home on Staten Island. It’s interesting, but haphazard. Like 
The Museum of Bronx History occupies the 1758 Valentine-Varian House. Ten years younger than the