OVERRATED/UNDERRATED
HISTORICAL MUSEUMS
Underrated
A tie—between the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New
York City, and the National Civil Rights Museum, in Memphis. Both
museums are unique adaptations of historic buildings, two of the
most innovative and truly moving historical museums I have ever
seen. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum consists primarily of
an early, cold-water New York tenement, at 97 Orchard Street,
built in 1863 and the home to one wave after one of European immigrants,
before its owner closed it in 1935 (rather than adhere to a new
city ordinance requiring that each apartment be equipped with
a working toilet!). The museum has painstakingly researched the
history of each apartment in the tenement, and recreated five
of them, with a sixth to follow soon, just as they were back in
different eras stretching from the Civil War to the Great Depression.
To take one of the museum’s guided tours is to pass through
working-class, urban life as it was lived for some seventy years
by German, Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants. It is history
conveyed through the implements these new Americans worked and
ate and cleaned with, through the beds they slept in, the crude
wooden tubs that doubled as kitchen sinks, the dark hallways where
they groped their way along at night; even the spoken words of
a living woman who lived in the building as a child. One is struck
more deeply than ever, on a much more visceral level than either
words or even photographs can convey, by the sacrifices so many
of our ancestors made, how hard their lives really were—and
what a short time ago it all was. The tiny proportions of the
rooms they once crowded into are enough to bring tears to the
eyes.
The National Civil Rights Museum is located in
what was once Memphis’ Lorraine Motel, the same motel where
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered. The museum has gutted
most of the building’s original, two-storey interior, and
replaced it with an ingenious display, a series of remarkable,
largely hands-on exhibits chronicling the history of the modern
civil rights movement. Visitors can sit in a perfect replica of
the Montgomery city bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up
her seat and move back to the “colored” section—and
even hear a recording of the words the white bus driver said to
her. There are further replicas of the Woolworth’s lunch
counter in North Carolina where the sit-in movement took off in
1960; the Freedom Riders’ Greyhound bus so infamously torched
by white supremacists in 1961; the interior of a Southern jail
cell, and many other tactile reminders of how difficult it was
to achieve the rights that so many of us now take for granted.
All of these exhibits, along with a strong, running
historical text, are situated along a winding, gently rising ramp,
so that the visitor ends his tour in the actual room that King
stayed in, reassembled to look as it did on that fateful evening
of April 4, 1968, when he stepped out on the second-floor balcony
and was struck down by a sniper’s bullet. It is another
room capable of bringing one to tears, in part when one looks
at the wreath commemorating the spot where Dr. King fell, right
there right out there before you on the balcony—but also
when you look at the sheer homeliness of the room itself, a room
King was sharing with another minister. It reminds you again of
how many such rooms Dr. King had to stay in during his long years
on the road, of how this was the best that a Nobel laureate and
one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, could expect even
in 1968, if his skin were the wrong color.
A few years ago, the museum also acquired the
rundown boardinghouse from which James Earl Ray shot and killed
Dr. King, and those who are so inclined can make the short walk
across and actually stand on the spot where Ray crouched in a
bathtub and fired the fatal shot—a grisly but intriguing
historical footnote. Altogether, it is an incomparable preservation
of our historical memory, though my colleague Allen Barra also
highly recommends the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which
is located just across from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church
in Birmingham, the epicenter of so many vital moments in the civil
rights struggle. I have never had the opportunity to visit the
institute, but if it is anything like the National Civil Rights
Museum it, too, is well worth the trip.
Overrated
Any and all museums of financial history. The museum at the visitors’
gallery in the New York Stock Exchange has been closed—along
with the gallery—since 9/11, but even when it was open it
was a great disappointment. The problem with the stock exchange
museum, along with every other financial history exhibit I have
ever seen, is that they try to serve as a sort of financial prospectus—sober,
dry, and reassuring. This is understandable, but it leaves out
all the good stuff. A first-rate financial museum would trust
us dedicated capitalists with the great panics and swindles, the
coups and raids, venality and greed—in short, all
of the things that make history and finance both so much fun.
Grand paeans to the market, or to various pillars of fiscal rectitude
are all fine and good, but without the whiff of a real killing
why are all those people working the floor in the first place?
