| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value | |
| Should you go? |  |
| Time spent | 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”
Baby Bootlegger was a 1924, 29-foot 10-inch speedboat with a 240 horsepower engine. She was designed by George F. Crouch, built by Henry B. Nevins of City Island, and owned by Caleb Bragg. She won the Gold Cup in 1924 and 1925 and I’m sure no rum was ever run in her.
In addition to various books, copies of Yachting magazine going back to the 1930s, and neat ship models, the library currently houses a temporary show of local artwork memorializing the City Island Bridge, recently torn down.
Then again, I have to say much of the collection feels random and not very important. For example, the museum has an array of outboard motors that look like they date to the 1940s-1960s. Whose outboard motors were they? Are they historically important for some reason? Who made them and why? There’s a case of arrowheads. A bunch of old bottles. Old cameras. Nothing feels…documented. The artifacts kind of tell a City Island story, in that they all presumably were used there at some point. But they don’t tell it in coherently. And they crowd out things that would give a better understanding of the island’s people and times.
A scale model of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in full swing during World War II. I can only imagine the hours and focus and attention it required YNC Leo J. Spiegel USN (Ret.) to build it. Scaled at 1 inch = 50 feet, it depicts 46 naval vessels (all called out by name on a sign below), 273 shipyard buildings, 8 piers, 6 drydocks, and 659 homes in the surrounding area. 
That’s Schuyler as in General Philip Schuyler, father of the Angelica, Elizabeth, and Peggy Schuyler and so Alexander Hamilton’s father-in-law. It’s a tenuous Hamilton connection, but I’ll take it.
Finally, I discovered a door with a small brass plate. This may be the most stealthy museum I’ve yet visited. I tried the door, and it opened. So in I went.
In 1915, Theda Bara, about 30, so-so looks, minor acting credits, exploded into the Madonna of her time. She ranks as the first ever “vamp” in cinema, playing a succession of seductresses and destroyers of men. Every femme fatale since traces her lineage back to Ms. Bara, Bayside resident.
But just in case anyone is curious about Bayside’s past, it does have a Historical Society, which occupies a little castle of a building on the grounds of nearby 
Visiting the National Jazz Museum made me think about the regular reports of the death of jazz, which may even be deader than opera at this point. I wondered if having a museum to it serves as yet another piece of evidence for the demise of the form? They have a display with photos of young jazz musicians, and sorta reach toward hip-hop, kinda. But really nothing I saw there suggests anything innovative or interesting has happened in jazz since the 1970s.
A pair of Christian Louboutin boots laboriously decorated with antique glass beads by Jamie Okuma, of the Louiseño and Shoshone-Bannock tribes.
The National Museum of the American Indian’s George Gustav Heye Center is one of the Smithsonian Institution’s two New York outposts (along with the 
Indeed, the idea of turning a building focused on trade, from an era that unabashedly glorified the commercial impulses that ended up dispossessing the Native American tribes of their lands, into a museum for those nations…well. I find it pretty ironic.
The Brooklyn Historical Society’s gorgeousness struck me throughout — a very loving restoration must have happened here in the not-too-distant past. The light fixtures! The woodwork! The stained glass skylight! And each floor had different humorously old-timey logos indicating where the gents and ladies rooms were. A small thing, but I appreciated it.
The Transit Museum is one of only a few New York City museums not housed in a building. Instead, the city established it in a disused subway station in downtown Brooklyn.
A family tree shows how the Revolution divided families between loyalists and revolutionaries. It also names some of the slaves who worked for the Vechte family, though of course no one bothered to record how they felt about independence, or anything else about their thoughts and beliefs. Still, I like that they don’t sweep the Vechte’s slaves under the historic rug. Another brief display on slavery observes how surprisingly prevalent it was in revolutionary Brooklyn. One in three Kings County residents was a slave, and half of Dutch households owned them.
