| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 104 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | In mid-19th C. New York rowhouse-style mansions, bedrooms were semi-public space. When you came calling, you’d first go upstairs to a bedroom where you’d leave your coat and hat and change from street shoes to indoor shoes. Only then would you go down to the parlor. Seems strange to me– like they should’ve had a changing room as part of the floorplan. But even in these grand houses, space was at a premium. |
The Merchant’s House Museum is a venerable 19th century home and maybe the only historic house in the city where so many of the furnishings on display are actually original to the house, owned by the home’s owners and maintained by the museum to this day.
The merchant in question is a guy named Seabury Treadwell, who bought the house for $18,000 in 1835. His family lived there for 90 odd years, and by a series of fortuitous events, the house and all the stuff in it became a museum in 1936. In 1965, when the Landmarks law was passed, the Merchant’s House Museum was among the very first places to be landmarked by the city. Continue reading “Merchant’s House Museum”
The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space occupies a classic old-school East Village squat, and consists of some artifacts, photos, and other memorabilia documenting the East Village of the 80s and 90s. It and its denizens focus mainly on squats (abandoned buildings that individuals made habitable and moved into), community gardens, bike lanes, and other aspects of a time and culture that feels increasingly at odds with the hyper-gentrified city of today. 
Marko Shuhan’s 2016 work “Space Needed, Apply Within,” a crazy hodgepodge of paintings and paints and liquor bottles on shelves. Like an artist’s studio compressed into a single wall installation. 
The Ukrainian Museum is one that I definitely wouldn’t go to barring this project. It occupies a sort of blah, to be honest, modern building on a side street off Cooper Square, and has moderate gallery space with temporary exhibits.
“Let us have peace.” So reads the inscription on the last resting place of America’s greatest military hero of the 19th century.
At one point, Grant’s Tomb was the most visited tourist destination in New York City. And to this day it is the largest tomb in North America. Built when the city didn’t extend that far north, it was a prominent marble landmark on a hill, attracting visitors in droves, by boat and train, coach and bus, to pay their respects. 
Hamilton placed a marble bust of himself styled as a slightly smirking, handsome, Roman senator, in the entryway of the Grange. Looking at it now it’s like he’s thinking, “Hey, Jefferson, you may get to be president, but see if anyone composes the biggest musical in Broadway history about YOU someday.”