Brooklyn Heights
Brooklyn
The New York Historical
Society is next door to the Museum of Natural History and is just a stone’s throw
from the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park. It boasts an enviable
collection of Hudson River School paintings, original Audubon drawings, and
Tiffany lamps. As such, it has much greater success pulling in visitors than
the far-less-known Brooklyn Historical Society. The Brooklyn Historical Society
is geared toward all things Brooklyn and so can come off as exclusive to
non-residents. The NYHS definitely caters to a larger
audience. However, the BHS building is far more interesting than its Manhattan
neighbor; so, if you’re around during a weekend when BHS is offering a tour,
you might consider crossing the East River.
When the Queen Anne style
building designed by George B. Post opened in 1881, Brooklyn Heights was the
place to be: the Brooklyn Academy of Music hadn’t yet moved away and Saint
Ann’s was the tallest church in the city. Post had already designed the
Williamsburg Savings Bank and New York Stock Exchange and was a hot name in
architecture. Due to budget constraints, the exterior designs were modeled from
red terracotta. It is the red color that makes the building stand out in a sea
of brown and gray, although there are obvious long-term preservation issues
with using such a material outdoors. The heroic busts of Michelangelo,
Beethoven, Columbus, Franklin, Gutenber, and Shakespeare seem to be holding up
just fine, and are looking perky due to a recent cleaning that removed decades
of coal smoke residue.
Despite a glorious
beginning, the building that houses the BHS has had a rather checkered past
that has caused some of its former features to be lost. The ground floor had
originally been a grand theater, but when the Great War diminished the demand
for performances and dances, the chairs were pulled out and it was converted
into a nurses’ station. Then, alas, during WWII, when it was once again a
nurses’ station, the stained glass in the windows was removed to allow in more
light. For several decades lawyers rented the rooms left vacant after the end
of the wars. Now, finally, the first floor is being renovated. It will return
to being a theater space as well as a lobby gallery. And, thankfully, there are
still a few windows in the building that retain their original stained glass.
It will be several months
before visitors can see if the renovated theater space lives up to its former
glory. The real jewel of the BHS, the Othmer Library, thankfully can never be
altered as it is a designated interior landmark, one of only a few in Brooklyn.
It is entrance into the Othmer Library that makes taking the tour worthwhile.
The library is open only 1 to 5, Monday through Friday—hardly hours most
working adults can take advantage of. The library doors get thrown open,
however, during the public tours offered one or two Saturdays a month.
The contents of the
Othmer Library will seem ho-hum to most; the collection focuses on mainly
Brooklyn housing information and genealogy. There is nothing ho-hum, however,
about the gorgeous carved oak interior. Despite being surrounded by dark wood,
the room feels very light an airy, thanks to Post’s application of the bridge
construction technique of a truss system in the roof that suspends the fourth
floor. Post deliberately designed the shelves to be short of the ceiling in
order to prove that they don’t offer any structural support. The Corinthian-style columns are
actually strong iron that has been wrapped in oak; the bases are looped with art nouveau-esque plant tendrils.
As you walk around the
building, keep an eye out for little design details. Post was very thorough;
even the door hinges and keyholes are decorated. The lamps in the stairwells
are also original, though they now use electricity instead of gas.
If you are interested in
viewing the exhibits, you may want to get to the BHS early. Our 45-minute tour
lasted almost 90. Tours generally start at 3pm, and the building closes at 5pm.
It opens at noon, so you can get there well before the tours. Not that you’ll
need hours to view the four small exhibits on display, three of which were
designed by college and high school students. As such, they are a bit lacking
in places, but offer some bright moments.
The third floor holds Say
Cheese and Inventing Brooklyn, both of which were curated by high school
students through the Historical Society’s Ex Lab (Exhibition Laboratory)
program. Say Cheese is on the
development of portraiture and contains images ranging from tintypes to digital
prints. It’s always nice getting to see tintypes which are usually kept in
storage for preservation purposes. The didactics, however, were clearly written
by the students, and, as such, some fair better than others.
Inventing Brooklyn begins in the hall with a rather loud television
broadcasting clips of Brooklyn in movies. Keeping with the loud theme, the
walls are covered in movie posters and advertisements. The part of the
exhibition through the doors, however, is quiet as can be. It’s a bit small and
cluttered, but not claustrophobically so, and the didactics appear to have been
written by the BHS curators.
The second floor has a
surprisingly interesting little display on the journals of Gabriel Furman, an
early 19th-century writer who chronicled Brooklyn. There are some
rather timely excerpts, including a piece he wrote about “those crazy fanatics”
the Mormons in a journal entry titled “American Superstitions.” Furman had been
a prominent citizen who died in poverty and obscurity after becoming addicted
to opium after an 1832 cholera outbreak. Furman (wrongly) believed opium
prevented contracting the disease. This exhibition was put together by college
students through the Historical Society’s Students and Faculty in the Archives
(SAFA) program.
Also on the second floor
is a small room with 18th and 19th century paintings of
Brooklyn, including a map from 1770. All the information from this room is on a
printed card that does not make it at all clear which painting is which. On the
plus side, there are lovely views of St. Ann’s tracery from the windows.
It is rather odd for such
a small museum to allow three-fourths of its exhibitions to be curated by
people between the ages of sixteen and twenty. And it does create a sense of
something being wanting. Fortunately, not to the point where it’s not
worth the effort to take one of eight different subway lines that stop in
Brooklyn Heights. On a final note, the tiny gift shop located in the vestibule
is surprisingly interesting. It’s filled with books specific to several
different Brooklyn neighborhoods filled with history and walking tours. The
register also has a few local walking tours visitors can snag for free.
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