| Edification value |  |
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| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 25 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | In an era when museums (including this one) are full of touch screens, I was happy to see an old-school board game version of the Battle of Brooklyn. Uh-oh, you drew a Hessian card! Except you’re the British, so that’s awesome for you!
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The Old Stone House isn’t actually all that old. And it’s not properly a house, though it is at least partially constructed from stone. Today’s Old Stone House replicates the Vechte-Cortelyou House, dating to 1699. The original’s history touches on Brooklyn’s earliest days, the Revolutionary War, and the dawn of the Brooklyn Dodgers. However, the house was demolished in the late 1800s.
That would’ve been that except that in 1934 the omnipresent (and nigh omnipotent) Robert Moses reconstructed it, mainly to serve as restrooms for Washington Park. The reconstruction used at least some of the stones from the original building, but unlike many of the house museums of the city, there’s nothing historic about the interior rooms or furnishings. Rather, the building contains a small museum focused mainly on the Battle of Brooklyn, with a little about the Vechte family.
Audience and Program
Mainly a kids museum, the displays are geared to the interests, attention span, and average height of the younger set. And yet, as a gathering place for the neighborhood, it aims at older people too. They show contemporary art in an upstairs space, and host theater and events with intriguing names like “Gin in June.”
The Battle of Brooklyn took place literally in the front garden, as a teeny but fairly dramatic diorama attests. 400 self-sacrificing Marylanders–like the Spartans only one-third more of them–kept a couple thousand redcoats busy long enough for Washington and his troops to slink away to Upper Manhattan, thence to base himself at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, and eventually abandon New York for the rest of the war.
In museumological terms, the Old Stone House is rather straightforward. Its displays deploy a mix of technologies, culminating in a touchscreen-based day-by-day review of the Battle of Brooklyn, which I found hard to follow.
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.
There’s little to see about the Dodgers, but the original Old Stone House served as the team’s clubhouse in the late 1800s. Their first ballpark, long since gone, was in Washington Park, before they moved to the legendary (and also long-gone) Ebbets Field.
Moving upstairs, the current contemporary art show, titled “Multilocational,” featured work by two artists touching on themes of migration and acculturation. Sort of a smaller riff on Lehman College’s Alien Nations show.
Who should visit? The Old Stone House is a quintessential local museum. It programs for its community, and that’s sufficient. Coming from Manhattan made me something of an exotic visitor to their parts. You might consider going if you are a huge fan of the Battle of Brooklyn or the history of baseball. Otherwise, plenty of other museums offer a better view of Brooklyn and New York City history.
For Reference:
| Address | 336 Third Street, Brooklyn |
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| Website | theoldstonehouse.org |
| Cost | Free |
The mansion’s vast land holdings at one point stretched the (albeit pretty narrow that far north) width of Manhattan. All that land is now Washington Heights, of course. And yet, its commanding hilltop location, surrounded by tiny, lovely Roger Morris Park, offers a taste of the country to this day. The grounds burst with rosebushes and even include a small sunken garden. I could easily see going back just to sit there and read a book.
BLDG 92 is the vowel-challenged, fascinating, historical center of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It tells the story of the Navy Yard through artifacts, an interactive tabletop, and a comprehensive timeline. 
Housed in a tiny storefront in Willamsburg, City Reliquary started as a hobby for its founder, who first created it as a display in a window in his apartment. It has grown from there as New Yorkers with collections of, well, whatever, occupied the space for exhibitions, and the Reliquary’s own collections multiplied.
The current temporary show features perhaps the most under-appreciated of the city’s street foods, the humble knish. I learned things I never thought to wonder about knishes. Where they come from (the Eastern European knish belt extends from Latvia through Moldova); who makes them (there are six “Heroes of the Knish” who are the main local manufacturers); and what it means in Yiddish slang (lady parts). Also, back in 2013 Joan Rivers tweeted that Kim an Kanye should name their baby Knish because “who doesn’t love one?” Who knew?
The current church is Gothic Revival, in brownstone, which always seems to me a striking and unlikely choice. Until this visit I never wondered what the surrounding area was like when it was built — if it was all brownstone rowhouses, it would’ve fit in nicely I suppose. Now it stands out, even as the surrounding skyscrapers far overtop it.
Trinity’s history goes back to 1697, but this is the third church on this site. The first Trinity Church burned down in the Great Fire during the revolution in 1776. The second revealed structural problems following a severe snowstorm in 1838 that led to its replacement with the current building in 1846. So while it’s old, it’s not as old as it might want you to believe. St. Paul’s Chapel, a Trinity offshoot a short stroll north on Broadway, dates to 1766. I strongly recommend visiting both if you have time.
The interior of Trinity is pretty, but not especially noteworthy. It’s on a par with most other gothic revival churches in the U.S. or U.K.
Anyone who likes old churches or cemeteries or Hamilton (or Robert Fulton) must visit Trinity. Moreover, the graveyard is an oasis of green in a part of the city that doesn’t have a lot of that. For those frantically visiting all of Lower Manhattan’s many historic sites, museums, and other landmarks, it represents a chance to catch one’s breath in the midst of a jam-packed day. Trinity also has a fine music program–definitely take a look at their website. Even for a casual visitor, Trinity is worth a special trip.
Federal Hall is not what it seems. In fact, it’s not Federal Hall at all. From the outside a passer-by might easily believe that it was the first capitol of the U.S., and the building where George Washington took the oath as president. I thought that for years; only recently did I realize: right location, wrong building.
But I couldn’t help get the sense that the National Park Service would trade today’s building if they could get the “real” Federal Hall back again.
The South Street Seaport Museum just celebrated its 50th anniversary, and its establishment contributed to the survival of a collection of historic buildings in the face of Lower Manhattan’s relentless pressure for development. The museum includes a print shop (worth visiting; great cards), the museum building proper, and the “street of ships,” a collection of historic vessels, several of which are open for tours when the museum is open.
Edgar Allan Poe, proto-goth, inventor of the detective story, writer of gruesome tales and horror-struck poetry, quother of the raven, had a hard life. Baltimore has largely claimed him as its own (just think of their NFL team). While he did live there for while, and died there in 1849, Poe was a New Yorker for a good chunk of his life. Indeed, he was only visiting Baltimore when he shuffled off his mortal coil in circumstances that remain mysterious to this day. For the last three years of his life Poe resided in a small rented cottage in what was then the village of Fordham in Westchester County, known today as the Bronx.
It’s furnished with a fair number of period pieces, three items of which are known to have been Poe’s: a rocking chair, a fancy gilded mirror, and the narrow bed where Virginia Poe passed away.
My guide during my visit was a local kid who really loved Poe and the place. His enthusiasm helped bring the cottage to life. 
The African Burial Ground is a small monument overshadowed by the government buildings around Foley Square. As they were digging for a new federal building in 1991 they discovered bodies, and from there re-discovered a forgotten cemetery used by the city’s African American population in the late 1600s and early 1700s.
Today a corner of what used to be the cemetery is a small green open space with a black granite monument, standing in for a headstone. There aren’t any markers, of course, and if it weren’t for the signs and a series of low humps of earth, you’d probably just think it was a pocket park. It’s not the whole extent of the cemetery, as this city is sufficiently about commerce and building that it won’t let the past fully forestall progress, even when that past includes the earthly remains of slaves.
The African Burial Ground is definitely not entertaining. But it is important. Every New Yorker and everyone with an interest in the city and its history should go and pay their respects.
All the front windows of the house have neat, scary terra cotta faces centered above them. This was apparently a Dutch thing to ward off bad spirits. Reproductions are available at the gift shop!
The Van Cortlandts in the early days were super-wealthy, and the house showed it. They were also super-Dutch, proud of their heritage as New Amsterdammers, and many of the details of the house (including a blue and orange color scheme for the china cabinets in the parlor) reflect that as well. Little that’s in the house today remains from the Van Cortlandts, but most of the publicly accessible rooms are filled with period furniture and knick-knacks that give a sense of what the lives of the earlier generations of the family might have been like.
When it opened as a museum, one room was redone to depict a modest city house, simulating how a much less successful Dutch family would have lived down in Manhattan. They’ve kept that to this day and while I would’ve liked the place to be as close as possible to how the family lived in it, the contrast is informative.
The Van Cortlandts lived a very different kind of life than the 