Tourists in Our Own City

My museum buddies and I tend not to venture too far from “Museum Mile.” It’s not that we wouldn’t, it’s just we tend to plan our outings based on reviews that pique our interests. Luckily for us, a couple of weeks ago Crain’s New York Business published an article about tourism post-9/11 in lower Manhattan. Eight years later things still aren’t business as usual. The article “Fortress Feeling Keeps Downtown Off Beaten Path,” cited a number of reasons: construction, poor public transportation, image problems. All fair reasons, but I think it’s actually a PR problem. Until this article came out, I had no idea that there were 7 museums (8, if you count the Statue of Liberty) in lower Manhattan. Those smaller museums are overshadowed by the city’s giants—the Met, MOMA, the Guggenheim, etc.—who are getting all the reviews. And it’s a shame.

Imagine if these places got real press. Just reading the name Skyscraper Museum was enough for me to send out the rallying email to Katie and Patty that we needed to spend our Sunday afternoon at the tip of the island. Now to be fair, I had an inkling it was a cool place--I’m down at the Seaport for work about once a month--but this is the first time I really explored the area.

Patty and I got there a little bit before Katie so we moseyed around with all of the other tourists. Across from Battery Park, we stumbled upon a shrine to Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American saint (her three attributed miracles were curing three people, including a nun, of incurable diseases). Nothing in Battery Park was quite as surprising as that. Still, we enjoyed the statues of people whose names are no longer recognized in popular culture. Our favorite was John Ericsson a Swedish-born inventor who among other things significantly improved ships’ propeller design. And like all of the other tourists, we got in on the fun and snapped pictures with the Statue of Liberty in the background.

Patty with Lady Liberty

But the highlight of the day was the Skyscraper Museum. It’s pretty awesome. For a lot of reasons. It’s cheap, only $5. It has mirrored ceilings which elongate the columns in the gallery, creating this soaring sense of verticality in a small, one-story space. Their current exhibition is Vertical Cities: Hong Kong | New York. Using photographs, videos, maps, and models, it juxtaposes the two cities to illuminate one another. The two cities are roughly the same size; New York has 8 million to Hong Kong’s 7 million. Hong Kong’s density is just as high, however, because their city is packed much closer to the harbor than ours. Hong Kong also has more skyscrapers than us—these impossible-looking, futuristic, thin, narrow things. The models were pretty cool; I really liked the scale model of midtown. And standing there, picking out the buildings we recognized, I had a flash back to grad school and Bernie Herman’s theory class where we read On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. ‘Ol Susan Stewart would get a kick out of the Skyscraper Museum and its ability to make tangible and accessible the gigantic through miniaturizing. Then I remembered I was now a member of the real world and got back to thinking about how sad St. Patrick’s steeples looked dwarfed by all the high rises and whether anyone else was as ready for lunch as I was.

Coming soon, a post about our post-lunch trip to the Museum of the American Indian.