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.
David 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”
In 1912, this 50-page speech, folded in Teddy Roosevelt’s overcoat pocket, helped slow a bullet fired by a would-be assassin on the way to a campaign event in Milwaukee. Bullet lodged in his side, Roosevelt proceeded to give his 90-minute speech, extemporaneously, before seeing a doctor. He later said of being shot, “It is a trade risk, which every prominent public man ought to accept as a matter of course.” Brevity may be the soul of wit, but verbosity can block a bullet.
The first thing you should know about the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace is that it’s a fake. Artificial. Teddy Roosevelt was decidedly not born in the master bedroom of that house in 1858, nor did he spend his formative childhood years in that building.
The family moved uptown and sold the original brownstone in that location, TR’s actual birthplace, in 1873. In 1916, in a fit of early twentieth century anti-sentimentality, developers demolished it in in favor of a retail building. Then, after the great man died, sentimentality won out. A group of dedicated Rooseveltians bought the property, reproducing the brownstone in its original location. The current building opened as a museum in 1923. Continue reading “Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site”
From the 1940s until the 1970s, policewomen in New York received these combination makeup and weapon holsters. So practical!
The Police Museum is currently in flux. Formerly housed near City Hall, it’s been homeless since Sandy. For the moment, it’s found space on Governor’s Island, where a scaled-down version tells a few selected stories of Gotham’s police force.
It’s in Pershing Hall, a beautiful, well-preserved, historic building, with two odd flags outside.
The green, white, and blue one is the flag of the NYC Police Department — five stripes for the five boroughs, and 24 stars for the 23 towns and villages that make up NYC, plus one for the city as a whole. I’m not making that up. Continue reading “New York City Police Museum”
You never know who you’ll meet at Green-Wood. For example, Do-Hum-Me, an Indian princess who came east with some of her tribe and died in New York.
Do-Hum-Me, Daughter of Nan-Nouce-Rush-Ee-Toe
I feel like I’m on thin ice with this one. There’s a fairly strong argument to be made that cemeteries are not museums. Start with the fact that they are called “cemeteries” and not “museums.” But bear with me here.
First off this isn’t the first cemetery I’ve visited on this project. A significant part of what makes Trinity Church important is its graveyard, and Trinity’s is relatively tiny. Grant’s Tomb offers a lone voice trying to rehabilitate the General’s somewhat tattered reputation. And the African Burial Ground seeks to recall those whom history has forgotten.
New York’s two great cemeteries, Green-Wood in Brooklyn and Woodlawn in the Bronx, represent an amazing convergence of art and architecture, landscape design, nature, and the people, famous, infamous, and not-famous-at-all, who over centuries have made New York City what it is. A stroll through a one of these vast and amazing places can be almost as edifying, and at least as entertaining, as going to a gallery or historic house (or certainly a botanical garden).
The great cemeteries were parks before the City had parks. They provide a visceral a tie to the past that dusty displays at historical societies can’t match. Continue reading “Green-Wood Cemetery”
John Singer Sargent’s “Gassed,” 1919, a monumental oil painting on loan for the WWI show from the Imperial War Museum, London. It’s a Sargent, so it’s as civilized and genteel as war gets. But at the same time, it’s a far cry from the fancy society folks I’m used to from him.
The New-York Historical Society came into being in 1804, making it (according to itself) the oldest museum in the city. Its recent evolution presents a case study of a dusty old institution retooling itself for the social media age. Over the past decade or so a series of renovations turned it from the somewhat hermetic, academic attic of the city into a bright, airy, less-dense institution. Bronze statues of Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass welcome you outside the front doors, and that unexpected, slightly eccentric vibe continues within.
Of the many things I like about the Historical Society, I sometimes think my favorite thing is the hyphen between “New” and “York.” Nowhere else bothers with that anymore. However, without it visitors might think that they are visiting the new historical society of York, England. I bet that happened a lot in the 19th century. It’s really thoughtful. I shall feel quite cross if they ever drop it and rebrand as the Newyork Historical Society. Continue reading “New-York Historical Society”
The 1883 commemorative china for the Sons of the Revolution’s Turtle Soup Feast marking the 100th anniversary of Washington’s farewell to his officers. Cute turtle.
Fraunces Tavern started out as a private home in 1719, then opened for business as a drinking establishment in the 1760s. It served as the venue for two important events:
The governor of New York, George Clinton, held a public dinner there to celebrate the withdrawal of the British from New York (and the rest of the colonies), an event known as Evacuation Day. Evacuation Day (25 November) used to be a major New York holiday, though it’s mostly forgotten now, except by the Sons of the Revolution (about whom more anon).
After the war, General Washington gathered some of his staff in one of the private dining rooms to retire and say farewell to them. This was before the U.S. was the U.S., before the Constitution and before the country decided it needed a president (and what a fine idea that has turned out to be), and so before Washington knew he’d have another major role to play for his country.
If you’ve read any of my other historic place reviews, you can guess my questions: when was Hamilton there? And secondarily, what did he have to drink? Continue reading “Fraunces Tavern Museum”
The Museum has a lovely, quiet, outdoor space called “Garden of Stones,” created by nature artist Andy Goldsworthy. 18 dwarf oak trees growing out of holes in hollowed out boulders, with New York Harbor as the backdrop. It was a deeply welcome spot to spend a few minutes reflecting.
Goldsworthy’s Stones and New York Harbor
“It can’t happen here.”
It’s the refrain of the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
You see it in quotes on the walls and on screens, time and again, from both Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. As the Nazis were coming to power, as rights were being stripped away, as things got worse and worse.
Of course, in retrospect no one really even knew what “it” was, until it was too late. They just clung to the certainty, then the belief, then the hope, that it wouldn’t happen. Because it couldn’t.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage, aka New York’s Holocaust Museum, occupies a lovely plot of land in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan, right on the Hudson. Shaped like a ziggurat with a low, rectangular addition, the museum opened in 1997, designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates.
Surprisingly shiny escalator
Its architecture is incredibly carefully thought out. The Core Exhibit spans three hexagonal floors. You move around the perimeter of each floor, then step on a surprisingly shiny escalator to go up to the next one, moving forward in time as you ascend.
The ground floor serves as the prologue, covering Jewish life in Europe in the early 20th century. It touches on topics like holidays, weddings, synagogues, education, and trades, with carefully chosen artifacts showing illustrating those themes. It wraps with four key political strands weaving through Judaism then: socialism, Zionism, liberalism, and orthodoxy.
Then its on to the escalator to Hitler. Worst. Escalator. Ever. The second floor proceeds chronologically, event by event, down a counter-clockwise path toward unspeakable suffering and horror. Small galleries look at (among other things):
The rise of Hitler and Nazi populism.
The story of the St. Louis, an ocean liner full of 900 Jewish refugees that got all the way to Cuba in 1939 only to be turned back to Europe.
Non-Jewish people, like Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler, and Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who helped rescue Jews.
How the Nazis covered up the Holocaust as they were perpetrating it.
There’s actually less here than I was expecting. Maybe because there’s too much. You can get overwhelmed by scale, lose the trees for the forest. This place is exquisitely careful to make sure you are always aware of the individuals. Every thing, item, photograph is documented to a specific person if they can, with a picture of the individual if they possibly can. Even when it introduces the six main death camps the Nazis used, each comes with a photograph of one person, one actual human being, who was murdered there, who stands for all the rest.
The one part that pushes on scale is a small area with rough wooden walls and flat columns holding photographs of about 2,000 people. Each column has a small booklet, so you can read the names and stories of each of those 2,000 people. It’s not a very big space. The columns go up pretty high. All of them were from France, and all died at Auschwitz.
They had names…
The museum doesn’t bother to observe that to commemorate everyone, all the Jews who were murdered, you’d need 3,000 such spaces. But I thought about that. It does remind you, piercingly, that “They had homes and lives. They had families and friends. They had names.”
The chronology continues, inexorably, through the Nazis’ last-ditch efforts, the liberation of the death camps, and efforts to rescue people and send them home. And somehow live with what happened. And remember.
You ascend once more, another shiny escalator to the post-Holocaust world. Here the story is very much focused on the rise of Israel and the United States as the centers of postwar Jewish culture, and what that culture consists of today, in terms of religious life, the arts, society.
And then, the architects of this place accomplish one of the great feats of New York museum design. I’m not going to give it away. But I got through the core exhibit, walked through the exit doors, and literally had my breath taken away.
Rescued kids
In addition to the Core Exhibit, the Museum of Jewish Heritage currently has a small show called “My Name Is…” of photos of rescued kids who got sent to a variety of centers, with capsule summaries of their stories. This I think was a slight misstep — where the core exhibit works very carefully to go deep and focused, this was a little too broad, with whole lives boiled down to a couple of paragraphs. I think fewer photos with longer stories, and even current pictures of any of the kids who are still alive today, would be better.
The Eichmann Capture Team…
And then I saw “Operation Finale,” a newly opened special exhibition on how the Mossad tracked down and kidnapped Adolph Eichmann, spiriting him from Argentina back to Israel for trial and eventual execution in the 1960s.
This was shockingly entertaining in a place I don’t think of as endeavoring to entertain. A real-life spy story. I’m not 100% sanguine about a country abducting someone in another country, even if that someone was a horrible someone. But better that than simply assassinating him. The recreation of his trial, using several different video projections running in sync, combined with the bulletproof booth Eichmann sat in, worked particularly well.
Eichmann Trial in Projection
In terms of amenities, the Museum of Jewish Heritage has a cafe, although, honestly, what it should have is a shot bar or something. I know I really wanted a drink coming out of the exhibit. It also has the requisite gift shop–if you find yourself needing a mezuzah, their selection is top notch. The museum also boasts a nice, modern auditorium. I’d attended conferences in that space long before I actually went to see the museum itself.
A Little Museum-ology
From a museological perspective, I have a few observations.
Old Screen
The Museum of Jewish Heritage just turned 20 years old, and parts of it need a refit. Some of their video screens have burn-in problems, and others are probably nearing the end of their life expectancy. Some of the photos on display, too, looked like they may not be aging well. I know they’re meant to be old, but still, I think they may require swapping out for fresher prints.
The section on non-Jews who helped — whom Yad Vashem in Isreal recognizes as the “Righteous Among The Nations” needs an update to reflect inductees since this museum opened. That’s a sign that probably other things could use an update, too, since the world has 20 years more Holocaust scholarship on which to draw.
There’s nothing interactive in the Core Exhibit at all. That is certainly for the best. Just brainstorming possibilities in my own mind borderline offends me. So I hope it stays that way.
Video, on the other hand, is critical. There are video screens throughout, and you are never far from someone talking, telling what they saw, what they experienced, relevant to the section or the theme. It’s vital to the museum’s mission of never letting visitors lose sight of real, individual, people.
Never Say Never
I rechecked my time-spent calculations for this visit several times. I still can’t understand how I spent three hours at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. It didn’t feel like it. However, at the same time it was exhausting.
I was talking with a friend about this place just a few days ago and she said “I really, really don’t ever want to go there. Does that make me a bad Jew?” When New York is blessed with museums of so many other, happier things, like maritime industry and Louis Armstrong and lighthouses, mathematics and art and more art, I can’t blame anyone for preferring any other topic to the Holocaust.
But it’s important. It is museum as vaccination. Because it’s all too easy for all of us, everywhere, at all times, to fall into the trap of “It can’t happen here.” It’s good, no, vital, to be reminded that absent vigilance and speaking and acting our consciences, yes, it can.
If you haven’t been to a Holocaust memorial or museum in the past 3 years, you are due for a booster. Go.
McKim Mead and White’s Castle Garden Aquarium looks spectacular, all heavy romanesque arches and wrought iron barriers to keep the penguins and what-not in. In my dreams of alternative New Yorks where lost architecture survives, I wonder what that building would be today.
Named for New York mayor DeWitt Clinton, Castle Clinton dates to 1811. It was an important fortification built on an island just off of Manhattan. It wasn’t the first defensive installation built to protect Lower Manhattan, and has nothing to do with the older fort that guarded Niew Amsterdam back in the day, which is long gone.
1695 Manhattan map, way before Castle Clinton
However, the fort was part of the network of five state of the art harbor defenses built in the youth of the United States. Although never used in war, merely by existing Castle Clinton and its fellow fortifications around the city helped deter British attacks on New York during the War of 1812. So that’s good. They sacked D.C. instead. Continue reading “Castle Clinton National Monument”
150 minutes, including 26 queued to get in. I could easily have spent more (inside, that is).
Best thing I saw or learned
For all those who think technology progresses in only one direction, Intrepid offers a few counterfactuals, but none better than Concorde. From 1976 until 2003, people (very few, and very rich to be sure) jetted across the Atlantic in under 3.5 hours. I hope we see supersonic travel again in my lifetime. But I doubt it.
Driving up the west side of Manhattan helps New Yorkers exercise our jadedness. Here’s my routine with out-of-towners.
Oh, the Renzo Piano Whitney building. I was just there the other day.
Hmph, High Line. Too crowded with tourists.
Frank Gehry’s IAC Building is really showing its age, isn’t it?
I can sometimes be bothered to look up from my smartphone at midtown’s forest of skyscrapers.
Hudson Yards, a whole new city within the city, is an inconvenient and messy construction zone.
And that over there? Oh, that’s just our aircraft carrier.
I can act the part. But, oh, the Intrepid. I’m still a kid at heart. I love boats and planes and exploding things. And the Intrepid has all of that, including a Concorde, a nuclear submarine, and even a (sort of) space shuttle. I love that we’ve got an aircraft carrier, just parked next to Manhattan like its crew dropped by to see a show or go shopping on Canal Street.
As I’ve observed, New York has a glut of art museums and far too few science museums. Intrepid is one of the latter, with a good dose of history to boot. Partly due to supply and demand, then, there can be long lines. And it gets away with charging a hefty entrance fee. Still, it’s worth it. Continue reading “Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum”
This place feels so real. It’s like Louis and Lucille Armstrong just left the room to get you an iced tea, and they’ll be back in a jiffy. Nothing is labeled, no velvet ropes. The Armstrongs’ iron (or very good facsimile) still sits in their closet. I strongly suspect their air conditioners cool some of the rooms. More than any other house museum I’ve visited so far, this place still feels like a home.
A riddle: If Louis Armstrong were a superhero (and I’m not saying he wasn’t), what would he call his souped up vehicle for patrolling the streets of Gotham?
A: The SATCHMOBILE.
Actually the Satchmobile is the name of the official van of the Louis Armstrong House Museum.
Quick, Dizzy, to the Satchmobile!
Louis Armstrong practically invented jazz. He played all over the world, made a bajillion records, sang songs that everyone knows. And when he wasn’t doing all that, from 1943 until the day he died he and his wife Lucille lived in a modest three-story brick house in the Corona area of Queens. They entertained generations of neighborhood kids, Louis made tape recordings of himself (he was sort of a tape diarist), and generally lived far more quietly than you’d expect from a jazz superhero.
Louis Armstrong died in 1971. Lucille lived for another 12 years, until 1983. They never had kids. And the house, pretty much exactly as it was when Lucille died, passed into the hands of the city. Queens College manages the place, and they lovingly restored and opened it in 2003 as the best house museum I’ve seen so far.
You can only enter the house on guided tours, but my gods, it feels just like you’re visiting the Armstrongs. The group (nine people joined my tour on a random Saturday afternoon) goes right up the front steps, rings the musical door chime, and proceeds on their visit, which explores every room in the house, down to the breakfast nook.
The House
The management frowns on photos. I cheated once, to take a picture of Louis Armstrong’s infinitely mirrored bathroom. I wondered if Yayoi Kusama ever visited the Armstrongs. Or took this tour…
Here are some of the things I managed to resist photographing:
Louis’s wood paneled den with its fabulous bar (there is still alcohol in his bar. Drambuie.) and fabulous reel-to-reel tape recorders.
The Armstrongs’ bedroom with its wild silver wallpaper.
The amazing 50s kitchen. Bright blue, enameled, curvy cabinetry, custom sub-zero fridge, everything built in. Paper towels stored in their own wall cubby. They even had a blender built into their countertop. Lucille and her kitchen designer were geniuses!
Their white upright piano, which neither of them could play, but looked good in the living room.
Four green ashtrays shaped like the suits from a deck of cards.
Art from a lifetime of world travels.
Okay, I wanted to take pictures of everything.
But I could not resist the bathroom. I apologize, Louis Armstrong House Museum folks.
The Louis Armstrong House uses sound, but unexpectedly it doesn’t play a lot of music. Rather, during the tour, the guide periodically plays bits of recordings of Armstrong talking about the house and his life. In his den, there’s a portrait of him by Tony Bennett (!), and Louis talks about that–how he signed it “Benedetto.” Letting the man speak for himself in his own home works incredibly well.
A Few Other Things
The gift shop’s in Louis Armstrong’s garage
The entry to the Louis Armstrong House and its gift shop is in their former garage.
From the garage you proceed to a small exhibit area, in what used to be his rec room. Where he played poker with Dizzy Gillespie. (His poker table is on display upstairs.) I like to think of it as the Satch-cave.
Look at these stairs! And the wallpaper!
Exhibit Room, with inevitable brief DVD introduction
Currently there’s a display commemorating the 50th anniversary of the inescapable, somewhat saccharin (to my taste) “What a Wonderful World.” Not a hit when first released, the film “Good Morning Vietnam” rediscovered the song and set it on its path toward ubiquity. But Louis said whenever he sang it, it reminded him of Corona.
You can also see Armstrong’s bathrobe and slippers, life mask, and suitcases. And one of his trumpets. And three pages he wrote about his joy living in the neighborhood. I got the sense that even if someone had offered them, say, Andrew Carnegie’s mansion, he and Lucille would’ve stayed right where they were.
The most unexpected thing about the house is the Armstrongs bought the lot next door and made it into an expansive garden, with pine trees, a little lawn, a tiny koi pond, and a bar and barbecue. In this one place, I felt a legendary musician exerting some star power. They only built the garden in 1970, so just a year before Armstrong died. Better late than never.
I sat there for a while playing in my head what I’ll get to say when someone asks me what I was up to today. “Oh, not much. Sat in Louis Armstrong’s garden reading a magazine for a bit.”
Changes Coming
New interpretive center coming soon…
The Louis Armstrong House experience will soon change significantly. A vacant lot across the street (where they currently park the Satchmobile) is going to get a spiffy new building that will greatly increase the museum’s ability to tell Louis and Lucille’s story. I think that’s wonderful — though I wonder if the neighbors on this quiet block agree.
But even as they’re able to show off more of their collection, I sincerely hope that the house stays just exactly the way it is. It is an amazing monument to the talent, humility, and soul of one of the great figures in the history of music.
You can build museums to jazz (not saying you can succeed, but you can try). You can memorialize great concert performances in museum form. You can digitize music and tell its story through touchscreens and headphones. But nothing you can possibly do will bring you closer to Louis Armstrong than visiting his house in Corona, Queens.
Meanwhile, somebody please write a Justice League-style comic book featuring the Superheroes of Jazz battling the forces of squareness.
Steiner trumpet, gift to Armstrong from King George V, July 1934.
David 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.
Bullet lodged in his side, Roosevelt proceeded to give his 90-minute speech, extemporaneously, before seeing a doctor. He later said of being shot, “It is a trade risk, which every prominent public man ought to accept as a matter of course.” Brevity may be the soul of wit, but verbosity can block a bullet.
The first thing you should know about the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace is that it’s a fake. Artificial. Teddy Roosevelt was decidedly not born in the master bedroom of that house in 1858, nor did he spend his formative childhood years in that building.
From the 1940s until the 1970s, policewomen in New York received these combination makeup and weapon holsters. So practical!
The Police Museum is currently in flux. Formerly housed near City Hall, it’s been homeless since Sandy. For the moment, it’s found space on Governor’s Island, where a scaled-down version tells a few selected stories of Gotham’s police force.
I feel like I’m on thin ice with this one. There’s a fairly strong argument to be made that cemeteries are not museums. Start with the fact that they are called “cemeteries” and not “museums.” But bear with me here.
Fraunces Tavern started out as a private home in 1719, then opened for business as a drinking establishment in the 1760s. It served as the venue for two important events:
“It can’t happen here.”
There’s actually less here than I was expecting. Maybe because there’s too much. You can get overwhelmed by scale, lose the trees for the forest. This place is exquisitely careful to make sure you are always aware of the individuals. Every thing, item, photograph is documented to a specific person if they can, with a picture of the individual if they possibly can. Even when it introduces the six main death camps the Nazis used, each comes with a photograph of one person, one actual human being, who was murdered there, who stands for all the rest.
Named for New York mayor DeWitt Clinton, Castle Clinton dates to 1811. It was an important fortification built on an island just off of Manhattan. It wasn’t the first defensive installation built to protect Lower Manhattan, and has nothing to do with the older fort that guarded Niew Amsterdam back in the day, which is long gone.
Driving up the west side of Manhattan helps New Yorkers exercise our jadedness. Here’s my routine with out-of-towners. 
The most unexpected thing about the house is the Armstrongs bought the lot next door and made it into an expansive garden, with pine trees, a little lawn, a tiny koi pond, and a bar and barbecue. In this one place, I felt a legendary musician exerting some star power. They only built the garden in 1970, so just a year before Armstrong died. Better late than never.
