Historical Fiction: New York

I read a lot, pretty much daily, and my love of history definitely creeps in to my book choices. I have already described my early love for young adult historical and time-travelling novels, and for a long time my favourite summer reading was anything about Henry VIII, his wives, and his descendants. Luckily my tastes have broadened since then and reached beyond the 16th century. Historical fiction is a great way to get introduced to different eras and real-life characters, even if it only convinces you to visit Wikipedia to see if something you read was true or not. Just before Christmas I happened to finish three different books about one of my favourite cities, New York, and I thought I'd share them.

It took only a few days to read The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay (author of The Birth House), which shows you how much I enjoyed it. The book follows Moth, a 12-year-old girl in the Lower East Side of 1870's New York. The book delves deep into the poverty, crime and generally poor quality of life (sanitation-wise, health-wise, education-wise, you name it) for residents of that neighbourhood. Young girls and women are hit particularly hard - Moth is first sold into being a maid for an mentally unstable rich lady who beats her, escapes to beg on the street, and ultimately ends up in a house where girls are trained to become prostitutes and their virginity is sold to the highest bidder.
McKay wrote the book after researching her great-grandmother, who was a 'lady doctor' in the Lower East Side at this time, so we also get a fascinating glimpse into the life of a woman who chose to study medicine (in the 1870s!) and then committed herself to treating the poorest women in the city. I love that McKay's own family history got her researching and writing. And while the 'virgin cure' (the idea that having sex with a virgin can cure syphilis) seems crazy, McKay writes on her website that parallels can be found today with AIDS in countries like Thailand and India, which just reminds me why we need to keep studying history in the first place.
Read before: visiting the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

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It took me significantly longer to read Edward Rutherfurd's New York, but then again, it is almost 900 pages long. This is Rutherfurd's love letter to New York, an epic that follows the van Dyck and Master family (among others) from their beginnings as 17th century Dutch immigrants to their success in the financial world of Wall Street by the 20th century. Did I mention the book is 900 pages long?
The book is far from perfect. Some parts became too bogged down with historical detail - the American revolution was important but I didn't really need to read about every movement of the British and rebel armies. I enjoyed how events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire were detailed, but other ones were completely ignored - one Amazon reviewer recalled the amalgamation of the boroughs and the building of the subway as events unworthy of being left out. And while secondary characters were created to discuss some of the more marginalized populations (the Irish, African Americans) the book was really about a white, upper-class family.
The main character of this book is really the city itself. I found it fascinating to learn interesting tidbits of New York history, from when and why buildings were built to why streets are named what they are named. While it got a little cliched at times with its talk of freedom and the American Dream, it is a well-researched epic that's worth reading for its historical detail.
Read before: wandering Wall Street and drinking at Fraunces Tavern.

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Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin is set in 1970s, which begs the question - when is fiction classified as 'historical'? Are the 1970s historical? Is last year historical? Either way, I'll include it in my list for it's portrayal of a very specific time in New York history. One summer morning in 1974, New Yorkers looked up and saw something incredible: a tight-rope walker balancing, without a harness or safety net, between the two World Trade Centre towers. McCann introduces a variety of characters - an Irish priest looking after prostitutes in the Bronx, a grieving mother on Park Avenue, the tight-rope walker himself, among others - and chronicles their stories as they interconnect.
McCann does a great job placing readers in his specific time period - you feel the growing tension in Harlem, the heat of the summer day, the poverty on the mean streets of the city, the anger regarding Vietnam, the excitement of the new World Trade towers. While I wouldn't necessarily call it historical fiction, he does drop readers right in the middle of that particular day.
Read before: wandering up Park Avenue before exploring Harlem and the Bronx.

Digital History: What's on the Menu?

Food history was buzzing online last week - Ian Mosby's post on Active History discussed problems with popular locavore author Michael Pollan's rule about only eating food your great-grandmother would recognize, and it came only a day after this Star article about the University of Guelph's 13,000-volume Culinary Collection. Public historians should recognize the importance of studying food - the politics and social norms surrounding serving and preparing food can tell us so much about different eras, and describing (or even creating) old recipes can really grab the public's interest. As Mike Ridley, U of Guelph's chief librarian, says, "the fastest way to people’s minds is through their stomachs".

I was reading Food Network Magazine not too long ago when I came across a mention of a New York Public Library project, What's on the Menu?. The NYPL has one of the world's largest historical menu collections, with over 40,000 holdings, 10,000 of which are scanned. To make this amazing resource even more user-friendly, the NYPL has started a transcription project with those scanned menus, and they are enlisting the help of the public to help them with the huge project.

Their aim is to have all the menu items and prices transcribed for each menu, so dishes can be easily searchable by whomever wants to search them - academic historians, museum curators creating an exhibit, historical fiction writers, chefs, the list goes on. The NYPL plans to do this by letting internet users look through the menus and transcribe the items and prices into a text box. Users don't have an account, and there is no log-in - anyone who visits their web page is pointed towards menus that need transcribing. They hope, of course, that visitors read the Help section first - which details what to transcribe, what to skip, and how to format.

This is an great way to have data easily searchable and available to anyone with an internet connection. Why not allow users to transcribe data? Everything is reviewed by staff (though I can't imagine how long it will take to review 642,961 - and counting - dishes). One would assume that the job won't be perfect, but isn't it better than not having anything searchable or digitized at all? It reminds me of the oh so cruel Why you shouldn't become an archivist video that made the rounds last year. One character points out archivists will toil away (in a basement, of course) processing a large collection that no one will use - until someone finally does, but that person will be angry that the entire collection isn't digitized. The video is a joke, of course, but it does point out that researchers expect a lot from these collections - and records aren't serving their purpose if they're not easily accessible. In this digital age, accessibility is key - for researchers and, really, for anyone with an interest in history.

One interesting aspect is the Data section, where the NYPL lets users download the collected raw data and use whatever creative tools they can to analyze, interpret, or even create games with the data. The NYPL clearly understands the use of crowdsourcing - something I touched upon way back in January 2009 when discussing the Smithsonian's digital reputation. Maybe a software engineer will come up with something brilliant - using knowledge a trained historian wouldn't have. If only Miss Frank E. Buttolph could imagine how the collection she started in 1900 for the NYPL would be used in 2011.

Recent Visit: Lower East Side Tenement Museum

I finally had a chance to see the Lower East Side Tenement Museum when I was in New York last month. I had heard of the museum a few years back, and was looking forward to taking a tour with one of their volunteer docents.

The price was a little steep - 20$ for an adult - but I hope it doesn't stop people from visiting because the museum gives glimpses into a part of New York's history that isn't unknown, but probably doesn't get the attention it deserves from most tourists. In a city like New York it's easy to spend the majority of your time at the big tourist destinations, and ignore the smaller museums. I find it hard sometimes just to leave mid-town Manhattan! But this museum, which focuses on the immigrant experience over multiple decades, is definitely worth a visit.

Visitors must take guided tours, which last roughly an hour, so first there was some waiting around in their gift shop/visitor centre. Luckily their gift shop is full of interesting books on New York and immigrant history. There is also a short film that visitors can watch.

Our docent met us in the shop and then we were led across the street to 97 Orchard, a five-floor tenement building built in the 1860s. The building had been closed down in the 1930s (the landlord couldn't afford to pay for some renovations) and basically shut for the next fifty years. The storefront was in use, but the apartments above stood empty up until the 1980s, when the museum founders were looking for a space for their museum. The museum consists of restored apartments based on specific families, and there is a wide variety - the Irish, Russians, Germans and Italians are all represented. Our tour was "Getting By", which talked about how immigrants lived, worked, and what happened if they hit hard times. It focused on two apartments and families - The Gumpertz family, German Jews in the 1870s, and the Baldizzi family, Italian Catholics in the 1930s.

The docent used a variety of interpretive tools, including artifacts (furniture, textiles, photographs) in the apartments, photocopies of census lists, oral histories, even a court transcript to talk about the families and the Lower East Side in general. To give us the feel for the period she would describe what language we would have heard on the street, where people may have worked, what shops would have been nearby. But the real star was the building itself.

The museum would have lost a lot of its impact if it hadn't been housed in that tenement building. Immediately walking in you were transported back 100 years. The hallway was tiny, the walls dingy. The cramped air felt worse once the docent described how dark it would have been, how many families lived in the building, coming and going at all hours. The public toilets weren't installed until 1901, gas lighting not until 1905, electricity not until the 1920s.

The apartments themselves were tiny - how did a family with several children live in a three-room apartment with one window? The Gumpertz family used outhouses in the backyard, and had no running water. The Baldizzi family had only three rooms as well, and an air shaft between their apartment and their neighbour's left little privacy. It was amazing to listen to how Mr. Gumpertz had left for work one day and never came back - no one ever found out what happened to him - and to stand in the apartment where his widow and children learned to live without him. We listened to Josephine Baldizzi speak about living at 97 Orchard as a small child - remembering how her family played checkers at the kitchen table and what brand of soap her mother kept above the sink. The docent made good attempts at getting us to comment on what we saw, asking us lots of questions - "What would it have been like?" - and though we weren't the chattiest group, the message came across.

The tour included a quick look at some unrestored apartments, where the shopkeepers stored their goods and used the walls to do inventory lists while the building was closed. The building isn't in the best condition, and I hope the museum has the funds to keep their programmes going while making sure the building survives well into the 21st century.

The museum's website is really well done, with big, clear text and graphics. It is easy to navigate and lets visitors know how they put the museum together. I especially like their use of crime scene photos to look at furnishings - "Note the Decor. Ignore the Body". I would definitely recommend a visit if you're in New York. It's easy to get swept up in the grandeur of Fifth Ave but history is definitely alive in the Lower East Side.

In which I look at a photograph

Another museum podcast has inspired an entry. It has brought up some issues we have discussed a few times in class, ideas which I think are important to review for museum studies and public history students. The first issue is everyone's favourite, money, and the second is the museum's effect on perceptions of objects of culture.

This podcast came from the Met, and it featured retired director Philippe de Montebello discussing a photograph, Onesipe Aguado's "Women Seen from the Back", with his curator of photography. The photograph was part of the Howard Gilman collection, a large acquisition made in 2005. Gilman had been collecting photographs from the first one hundred years of photography, and had amassed a large collection in over twenty years. He has been an executive of a paper company, and had his own private curator (!).

The Met had long ago expressed interest in his collection, since they were lacking in this area, and in fact the museum had worked closely with Gilman. Their acquisitions were made with the knowledge of what Gilman had, and he did the same. The museum had long hoped, "with fervent expectation", that Gilman would make a gift or bequest of the collection to the Met upon his death.

They were disappointed (though I think their sentiments were much stronger than what can be mentioned in a podcast) to find that in Gilman's will, there was no mention at all about donating the collection. It then took seven years, rallying support from the Trustees, to fund the major purchase. As Montebello explains in a sidenote, unfortunately, right when they were negotiating the price, there was a "reversal of fortune" for Gilman's paper company, meaning they were no longer in a position to just donate the collection. That doesn't change the fact that Gilman had not made any bequest in his will.

This illustrates many of the financial woes that museums face. After working so long with Gilman, it would have only seemed natural to donate the collection to the Met. Perhaps he believed the Met to be large, and rich enough, despite its being a not-for-profit cultural institution, to support the purchase? What if he had been working with a smaller museum, one that could never afford a large acquisition such as this? Would he still have refused to donate the collection? Economic downturn or no, the real losers in this situation are the public, the visitors to all museums. It's a clear reminder that museums depend on donations to survive, and even large institutions like the Met can have difficulty when prices are put on artifacts. Of course, buying and selling is a normal practice in the art world, and the Met is an art museum. But who sets the price?

Which brings us to the second point brought up in the podcast - the museum's ability to place value, both cultural and financial, on an object, by displaying it, or collecting it in the first place. All museum activities are interpretive: "merely by collecting or choosing to place an object on view, museum staffs were interpreting the object, attributing importance to it within the museum's subject matter, and anticipating the expectations of visitors viewing the artifact or artwork." [1].

This particular photo, "Woman Seen from the Back", had been relatively unknown until the Met placed the picture on the front of the catalogue for the first major exposition of the Gilman photographs. "Did we not create its celebrity?" Montebello asks. He points out a museum's incredible responsibility, and their effect on perceptions of works of art, especially large institutions like the Met. The curator believed it to be their mission to shine a spotlight on these lesser-known works, and not to rely solely on famous artists and their works. I believe the Met is right in their way of thinking. While it can't be forgotten that most of the public perceives museums, especially art museums, as upper-class, more temple than forum, the Met should be lauded in attempting to introduce something new to the public, a work that has power, and beauty, but may have been ignored because it didn't have a famous name attached to it.

Museums must also be careful, however, and must remember that "Museums make judgements and... ascribe meaning (and power) to the objects and the very institutions that contain them." [2]. It is their responsibility to showcase a wide range of artworks, from ancient times to 2009, from different artists with different messages. The authority of a museum is highly valuable, Montebello explains, since the photograph is now in the canon of photographic works. But it must not turn to authoritarianism. Museums must use this power to explore new messages, new artists, and make sure different viewpoints are represented.



[1] Edward P. Alexander and Mary Alexander. Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008, 257.

[2] Ibid, 258.

In which I think of new forms of exhibits

This week in museology we've been reading about exhibits - who is listening and looking (students? the upper class? the 'public'?), who is talking (curators? designers? educators?), the problems with interpretation, the concerns with 'blockbusters', the ethical questions that need to be thought through. "Museums are not museums without exhibitions", writes Kathleen McLean, and they are "the soul of a museum experience". I thought I would share with you, readers, a very interesting exhibit I saw recently: the Met's The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions.

This was a very strange exhibit for me, especially as a public history student. Traditionally exhibits are thought of as visually appealing, 3-D versions of an academic paper, in the way that there is a thesis, and objects are used to illustrate this idea. We are used to exhibits talking about one historical subject, perhaps two; but this exhibit was very different.

Philippe de Montebello was the director of the Met until his recent retirement. His 30+ year influence, as well as the respect given to him by his colleagues, is obvious. The show really is a celebration of his time at the museum, and it was well-advertised; the Met's Special Exhibition podcast had been doing shows about the objects featured in the exhibit for months.

This exhibit was not on one historical topic, nor did it centre on one historical era or country, and it didn't talk about a certain art movement. Th exhibit featured the Met's most important acquisitions over the past thirty years, most important being defined in this case as the most transformative to its collections. As the exhibit website describes, it is a celebration of the diversity of the museum's collection. Three hundred objects were placed in the gallery's largest exhibition space, and in it was created "an explosive kaleidoscope of works in various materials representing artistic traditions that range across the globe and across time".

The show was organized in a completely different way than a usual art gallery. The objects were organized solely by acquisition date, meaning that a visitor moved from an 18th century French dress, to a 4th century BC Egyptian figure, to a 14th century Burgundian deck of cards, to a 5th century Indian Buddha, to a Sienese medieval painting, to a picture of Marilyn Monroe. The artifacts spanned thousands of years, hundreds of countries (even Easter Island), and included everything from famous painters (Rembrandt, Picasso, van Gogh) to little-known 19th century photography, from clothing to quilts, from pistols to armour.

Walking through the exhibit was slightly overwhelming. I'd never seen an exhibit that literally centred around acquisitions and ignored any sort of thematic organization. But I, as well as my father who was with me, both agreed it was a new and wonderful way to see the objects. There was no attempt to relate the objects to one another; the accompanying text panels spoke only of the individual artifact. The exhibit let the visitors make their own connections between the objects, between styles, between countries, between eras. It also did a great job at illustrating the sheer size of a world-class art museum like the Met, whose collections mandate must be very long indeed.

While it might seem counterintuitive for curators to put together a large exhibit without a historical (or artistic) theme and which had no prescribed learned message for visitors, this sort of exhibit still worked. It let visitors see objects that had never been displayed together in the same room, allowing for new meanings to come out of the objects. It broke traditional museum rules and moved some of the interpretation from the curators to the visitors. Overall it celebrated the efforts of a single man, who helped the Met become one of the most important art museums in the world.