My NY-LON: NYC History Fix?

December 2015
It’s nearing the end of 2015, and I’ve been slightly remiss on keeping up with My NY-LON Musings over the past few months.  So on this rainy, still-not-too-cold December day, I wanted to share one last batch of thoughts before embracing 2016.

Since relocating to New York six months ago, I’ve existed between two worlds. The first –  London – is where I continue to work, dedicating my day-light hours to British heritage and British audiences,  perpetually anxious about connecting with colleagues because of the unforgiving five-hour time delay. The second world is my new home here in Brooklyn, where I sleep, eat, and discover; where my American accent doesn’t betray me as a foreigner, but my ingrained use of British inflections and terminology attracts raised eyebrows. Do I sound phony like Madonna?   

My instinct upon arriving in any new place, whether as a fresh resident or a visitor, is to seek out the museums and memorials that can tell me something about that place’s past. I carry an insatiable curiosity for the stories that shape a place and make it unique everywhere I go. Too often, the real experts on these stories – the people who actually live there – are reluctant to share their experiences with strangers, feeling that their stories are insignificant and mundane, or far too complex to divulge to wide-eyed strangers. This is precisely why museums, historical societies, memorials, and libraries play such a critical role in documenting a community’s history: they validate that history. They hold a microphone to quiet voices so they can be heard. Just as easily, they silence others. 

Together, we have granted these institutions the responsibility of stewarding our collective memory and cultural inheritance.  Yet in the US, a nation to which people have flocked – of their own free will or not – to begin a new life, I often find reverence for history to be pitifully lacking (a subject of discussion for another time).

I had been in New York less than a week when I visited the New York Historical Society (NYHS) for the first time. I paid my $20 entry with a smiling face, eager to surrender myself to one of the world’s most exciting cities.  After just a few minutes, I discovered that a large section of the museum was closed for renovations, restricting my visit to just a handful of well executed, but less significant exhibits that told me little about Gotham.

(I’m more than happy to hand over $20 to an organization with a mission I believe in, but I do wish the admissions desk had at least told me that the entire fourth floor was closed before taking my crisp Andrew Jackson.)

I slouched around NYHS for about an hour, reading every label I could, poking every interactive screen, staring at the map time and time again hoping I’d missed something. Each artifact that intrigued me turned out to be a facsimile.  The main film, which is literally at the center of visitor experience and hard to evade given the blaring music that emanates from central auditorium, was well crafted and emotionally captivating, but it felt more like an advertisement for New York than the thoughtful historical documentary I was expecting. As I left the theater, Jay Z and Alicia Keys making one last pitch for New York as city of the millennium. I felt like I had been brainwashed into having pride for a city I still did not know and assaulted by the blunt fist of naive optimism. 

Since then I’ve tried to get my NYC history fix elsewhere, from the Museum of the City of New York, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the Tenement Museum. All are worthy institutions working hard to represent the multiplicity of people who call NYC their home. Each has its own voice, its own perspective on a slice of the Big Apple. But I’m still left yearning for a museum experience that allows me to explore the history of this city through a wide biographical lens, a lens the lets me zoom-in on the details I find intrinsically interesting and frame out those I find dull. In short, I realized that what I was looking for was a Museum of London…about New York.

I’ve visited the Museum of London (in the City and Docklands) countless times since I was a child. It’s suffered criticism over the years for some of its displays and re-displays of collections ranging from prehistoric fossils to glittering glam rock leotards. But I’ve returned there again and again, always discovering something new. It lacks the glamour of the V&A or the British Museum, and that’s what I like about it -- it’s more approachable. It successfully balances a voice of historical authority with a familiar East London accent.

The Museum of London’s approach to its permanent exhibitions is a predictable: a chronological review of the city from the perceivable beginning of time up to today (with the today part being lack-luster and hurried), told through a multiplicity of voices ranging from the aloof academic to the 6th form students down the road. It offers the kind of biographical overview that makes me yawn as a museum practitioner, but enchants me entirely as a visitor; journeying me though time with heroes and villains, hopes and struggles, triumphs, failures, and the odd bit of toilet humor. In short, it’s just a damn good story, the same sort of story I was expecting when I walked into the New York Historical Society that day so many weeks ago, and the same sort of story I’m still searching for six months on.

So what am I most looking forward to in the New Year? I won't bore you with my long list of hopes and dreams, but I will admit that --  true to my inner nerd --  the re-opening of the New York Historical Society's new exhibits is in my top five. 

More My NY-LONS

Infinite Hope