New York museum opens vaults to public


Tiffany lamps, long stored in a Manhattan warehouse, are among thousands of items that the New-York Historical Society is presenting in visible storage displays at the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture

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Eclectic collection

Trend-setting presentation

'Democratization of museums'

Smithsonian plans similar center

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NEW YORK (AP) -- New York state's oldest museum has transformed an entire floor into a radical new breed of galleries.

The Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, upstairs from The New-York Historical Society, is all very transparent. With its hundreds of glass-enclosed cases and shelves, it resembles a library you can see through.

Its treasures -- including the world's biggest collection of Tiffany lamps and hundreds of watercolors by John James Audubon -- were long hidden from view, stored in a warehouse on East 20th Street at a cost of $500,000 a year.

The gallery's 21,000 square feet has rows of densely packed cases sorted by genre. There are 10,000 items on view, ranging from fans to furniture. Another 30,000 items are too fragile to leave on display and can be seen by appointment.

Eclectic collection

There are toys, glasses, smoking paraphernalia, porcelain, pottery, silverware, jewelry, clothing and, oddly, a substantial collection of apple parers. There's even a 19th-century cockroach trap.

Besides trays of election badges and other political memorabilia, many of the objects recall the nation's first presidential inauguration -- in downtown Manhattan.

On view is the center section of the balcony railing of Federal Hall, now at the intersection of Wall and Nassau Streets, where George Washington gave his inaugural address. The dark wood armchair on which he sat during the ceremony is there, too, as is the black and blue wool and velvet cloak -- with red sash -- worn by his aide de camp that day. Along with Washington's rather uncomfortable looking army cot, there are gold commemorative buttons and handkerchiefs waved by spectators.


A wooden sculpture of Harry Howard, a former chief engineer of the New York Volunteer Fire Department, is among the works on view

Fire trucks at the time were painted with patriotic scenes -- some of which are found in the newly opened storage shelves -- and city residents collected commemorative plates, jugs and ribbons to mark the date. These items also are on view.

The eclectic sculpture collection ranges from a massive head of Abraham Lincoln -- a plaster study done by Daniel Chester French for the statue in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- to death masks of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.

"You may have to get on your knees to see a painting or make an appointment to see a cloak worn to George Washington's inauguration, but you can see just about everything in our collection," says the Historical Society's Stewart Desmond. "Traditionally, they say only about 2 percent of a museum's collection is on view at any one time. This center turns that concept on its head."

Trend-setting presentation

The space, at the forefront an international trend toward visible storage, was designed by the architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle, which oversaw restorations of Grand Central Terminal and Ellis Island.

Docent-led tours, self-guided audio tours and an information desk at the entrance to the center allow visitors to focus on their individual interests. And in an unusual twist, interior glass walls behind the exhibits allow visitors to see curators at work.

On a recent morning at the new center, a museum worker carefully sorted and cataloged huge trays of framed images of silhouettes. The silhouettes were popular in the United States in the 19th century before photography really caught on because they were much more affordable than painted portraits.

Unlike most museum exhibits, this one is more interactive and electronic. Displayed objects have tags with only the most basic information and code numbers so that additional information can be accessed using handheld audio players or computer terminals installed throughout the center. Six cases have been set aside with changing thematic displays.

Hundreds of museums across the country -- and a few in Europe -- have opened visible storage areas since the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, pioneered the concept in the mid-1970s.

That number is growing rapidly, and interest among U.S. museums is so great that this year's American Association of Museums conference plans to discuss the concept.

"We've been thunderstruck by the number of institutions that have called us in the past 10 months saying they have been given a mandate to have some sort of open storage," says Jan Ramirez, head of the Historical Society's museum division.

'Democratization of museums'

The concept, she says, is "a huge step toward the democratization of museums," and the new spaces are the convergence of several trends.

"On the one hand, boards of trustees are beginning to put museum staffs to task for not making better use of collections, when they cost such a huge amount of money to store," Ramirez says.

"People are somewhat exhausted after 25 years of blockbuster exhibits being served up with these heavy tomes and yammering 'acousti-guides' and all the learned labels. These days, they want the opportunity to escape that kind of directed discovery."

She compared the new center to "raw vocabulary" and said museum visitors have made it clear that they're eager to "get into that dictionary and browse."

The New-York Historical Society is only the second museum in New York to open a facility of this kind, museum officials say.

Smithsonian plans similar center

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, but it is less user-friendly than the new center. And unlike the Historical Society's center, it does not allow visitors to see how curators work.

David Cunningham, director of special projects at the museum in British Columbia, stressed that the concept of visible storage entails much more than hardware and cases. "Each place that puts in visible storage looks quite unique. It all depends on what kind of collection is involved and what the needs of the museum are. There are a lot of different ways to do it," he says.

"The trick is how to design a center like this so that visitors come away with more than a feeling of, 'Gee, there's a lot of stuff in here,"' says Diane Dittemore, curator of ethnology at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, Arizona. Her museum is working on a visible storage area for its southwestern pottery collection.

"In New York, they had the money and they really did it right," she says about the $11.3 million project, of which about $7.5 million was donated by the Henry Luce Foundation.

In the coming weeks, the Luce Foundation is to announce plans for a similar center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Other museums with visible storage areas include the Uebersee Museum in Bremen, Germany, the Dewitt Wallace Decorative Arts Gallery in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, the Field Museum in Chicago and The Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.