I'd never been to the New York Historical Society, but I had been to the Natural History Museum. It was there that I saw gigantic bones in the shapes of dinosaurs that are now too extinct to walk and frolic amongst the now melting icecaps. Then I arrived on the front steps of the New York Historical Society and realized that I had been there before. It was there that I sat alone in a small wooden shack that was supposed replicate the dark attic Harriet Jacobs lived in, hiding there for seven years in the confines of its cramped quarters. And now, this time, I stood around a large wooden table in their library counting small folded index cards that read, “INK PENS NOT ALLOWED, please use pencils only” and “THOSE STUDYING MAPS HAVE PROIRITY AT THIS TABLE.”
I managed to eavesdrop on a guy sitting behind me wearing glasses and studying housing maps of Manhattan over near Riverside Park. I heard him ask a girl younger than myself if she was aware of for whom her house was built for. She answered, “Mary Pickford.” “Do you know who she is?” “Wasn’t she…a silent film star? And they called her America’s Sweetheart, or something?” “Well, she wasn’t my sweetheart,” he grumbled and ended the conversation he had started. She knew some about Mary Pickford, but lacked the natural enthrallment of someone who was actually living and breathing and sleeping and watching primetime television in an apartment built specifically for Mary Pickford. The same Mary Pickford that enthralls me by just blinking her eyes and smiling coyly in the 1928 film, “My Best Girl.” Mary Pickford is my favorite actress. But I stopped listening after grandpa verbally sulked out his own failure to get with Mary Pickford by putting in his last two unnecessary cents.
Then I looked at the oversized table in front of me, the same one that gave special priority to map users, but there wasn’t much in the way of maps covering it, except one or two small maps of the park. Unenthused with the lecture that went along with the tour of the artifacts that came from the archives of the New York Historical Society, I thought about reading It Happened on Washington Square. The history of the park is detailed almost meticulously in that book, making a short, thirty minute lecture seem like old hat, common park knowledge. Although the lecture wasn’t much for teaching us many new things, with respect to the short time and having read the book, having the maps and watercolor architectural paintings was an experience on its own. It’s not everyday those who don’t lurk in the archives of libraries get to see things that are older than some of our great-grandparents. Although, someday, I do aspire to achieve status of professional archive lurker. The ephemera, ephemera, ephemera, although we didn’t get to see too much of that, the phone book directories were terribly interesting. The early arch sketches were worth seeing and the Washington Centennial celebration book looked thick and full of the plain facts of having fun, first president style. So, making the hour train trip uptown in the middle of the afternoon for a thirty-minute talk at the New York Historical was worth it. If only for the sight of the archive’s collection of artifacts and, of course, what was overheard of Miss Pickford’s apartment.
--nicole wallace.
I managed to eavesdrop on a guy sitting behind me wearing glasses and studying housing maps of Manhattan over near Riverside Park. I heard him ask a girl younger than myself if she was aware of for whom her house was built for. She answered, “Mary Pickford.” “Do you know who she is?” “Wasn’t she…a silent film star? And they called her America’s Sweetheart, or something?” “Well, she wasn’t my sweetheart,” he grumbled and ended the conversation he had started. She knew some about Mary Pickford, but lacked the natural enthrallment of someone who was actually living and breathing and sleeping and watching primetime television in an apartment built specifically for Mary Pickford. The same Mary Pickford that enthralls me by just blinking her eyes and smiling coyly in the 1928 film, “My Best Girl.” Mary Pickford is my favorite actress. But I stopped listening after grandpa verbally sulked out his own failure to get with Mary Pickford by putting in his last two unnecessary cents.
Then I looked at the oversized table in front of me, the same one that gave special priority to map users, but there wasn’t much in the way of maps covering it, except one or two small maps of the park. Unenthused with the lecture that went along with the tour of the artifacts that came from the archives of the New York Historical Society, I thought about reading It Happened on Washington Square. The history of the park is detailed almost meticulously in that book, making a short, thirty minute lecture seem like old hat, common park knowledge. Although the lecture wasn’t much for teaching us many new things, with respect to the short time and having read the book, having the maps and watercolor architectural paintings was an experience on its own. It’s not everyday those who don’t lurk in the archives of libraries get to see things that are older than some of our great-grandparents. Although, someday, I do aspire to achieve status of professional archive lurker. The ephemera, ephemera, ephemera, although we didn’t get to see too much of that, the phone book directories were terribly interesting. The early arch sketches were worth seeing and the Washington Centennial celebration book looked thick and full of the plain facts of having fun, first president style. So, making the hour train trip uptown in the middle of the afternoon for a thirty-minute talk at the New York Historical was worth it. If only for the sight of the archive’s collection of artifacts and, of course, what was overheard of Miss Pickford’s apartment.
--nicole wallace.
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