Friday, July 4, 2014

Walt Whitman Birthplace and The Whaling Museum

South Huntington
Cold Spring Harbor
Long Island

The Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site and Interpretive Center and the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum and Education Center are located a mere five miles away from one another and are excellent stops for travelers who want to step back in time—no admiration of poetry or blubber required.


Depending on your love of Whitman, poetry, early 19th-century living, or a combination of the three, your visit to the Whitman Birthplace could be a free thirty-minute stop or a $6 two-hour extravaganza. If you’re contented to read the rather amusing didactic display on Whitman’s life and work (some real gems, like an original edition of Leaves of Glass, are included) and view Whitman’s birth home from a distance, you’ll be fine just popping in and out of the Interpretive Center (fingers crossed that a screaming school group isn't there). And if you’re not interested in droll anecdotes about prairie living, I suggest that’s where your visit should end.


But if you’re thinking since you came all this way you may as well get the entire experience, you’ll have to wait for one of the very nice, if technologically challenged, volunteer museum guides to give you a tour. These are generally done on the hour, though depending on the speed of the guide and inquisitiveness of the group, they can go over. Actually, plan on it going over.


Do not embark upon the tour expecting to hear anything specifically related to Walt Whitman’s life or childhood beyond “This is the room where his parents slept,” or “This is how his father designed the home.” The actual tour of the home is steeped more in what it was like to live in small town America 200 years ago.

Before venturing to the home, however, visitors are treated to a terrible video of still photos of early America and a man walking along the beach (I assume it’s meant to be a reenactment of Whitman lost in poetic contemplation) accompanied by a voice-over of portions of “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and “Song of Myself.” There is zero historic or biographic information provided in said video which is played very loudly and has the production quality of a high school film project from the 1980s. I suspect this isn’t too far from its actual creation story.

After fifteen minutes of awkward viewing where the entire group tries very hard to maintain its interest, something actually interesting happens. The guide plays a CD of the only known recording of Walt Whitman reading. Two years before Whitman’s death in New Jersey in 1892, Thomas Edison recorded him reading “America.” The entire clip is only 36 seconds long from a rough wax-cylinder recording, the authenticity of which it turns out has been hotly debated, but it’s still nice to imagine we might actually be hearing the voice of Whitman himself.


That’s where the Whitman part of the paid tour ends. From this point on, the focus is the practicalities of domestic life: how women ironed the clothes, how water was pulled from a well, how the mattresses were stuffed with hay, etc. The home is charming enough, but as the Whitman family moved from it when Walt was only three or four years old, there aren’t really any striking anecdotes to be told in regards to his existence inside the place. Nor is anything inside original to the home, but all historical approximations. If this sort of thing bores you to death, skip the tour.


The last part of the tour is a visit to the Gathering House, a small art gallery built from the remaining timbers from the original carriage house and barn that were too damaged to repair and torn down. It now exhibits work from local artists and schools. We skipped this part of the tour to head over to the Whale Museum. While we’re glad repeated attempts to sell the home were unsuccessful and a local organization was able to raise enough funds to buy and save it from demolition in 1951, we knew our patience for extending the tour further had worn out. We were ready for some whaling adventures!


The Whaling Museum of Cold Spring Harbor is modest in size but grand in scope. The entire museum comprises of five small rooms, one of which displays contemporary sea-based art and a second which is little more than a playroom to keep the young’uns entertained, albeit in a sort-of-educational manner. Which means the entire historical contents are housed in three rooms—a largish one which contains a rather impressive 19th-century whaleboat fully-equipped with original gear, and two smaller ones that are filled with artifacts and tools used by whalers, a sperm whale jaw, and a pretty spectacular collection of scrimshaw—the carvings and engravings whalers did on whale bones and teeth to help keep their minds off of how brutally difficult and lonely their jobs were.


Model ship and diorama lovers will be entertained as well. Those not so interested in such things can watch the 23-minute silent documentary film On Board the Morganwhich was filmed on America's last wooden whaling ship. It’s pretty amazing, if a bit disgusting in parts. There’s also a nice little corner on the history of Moby Dick and a glass container with sperm whale blubber next to an original boiling vat. I thought it was a bit smelly, though it may have been my imagination. Sensitive souls will probably want to avoid it, along with the rather scratchy costumes available to pose in for crow’s nest photographs. Though, if you’re that sensitive, you should probably avoid this museum altogether. I, however, thought it was well worth the $6 admission.