New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

Editorial Staff

Aircraft Carrier Intrepid Returns to Pier 86

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The aircraft carrier USS Intrepid returned home to Manhattan last week. The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum’s grand re-opening celebration will be held on Veterans Day, November 11, 2008. Intrepid left her berth at Staten Island’s Homeport Pier on October 2, and was moved north to the brand new Pier 86 following a 22-month overhaul (NYT).

According to Newsday:

Bill White, president of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, said the museum has paid $10 million to dredge more Hudson River mud – more than 90,000 cubic yards – than was done for the first unsuccessful attempt to move the 900-foot-long ship to a New Jersey dry dock. And for good measure, the ship’s four 16-ton, bronze, 22-foot-diameter propellers have been permanently removed so they can no longer serve as unwanted anchors. “I am 100 percent confident she will come back in with no problems,” White said.

The ship reopens to the general the public after a private event Nov. 8 at Pier 86, at 12th Avenue and West 46th Street. After an expenditure of almost $120 million since the carrier was finally relocated in December 2006, visitors will see new exhibits, areas of the 29,000-ton ship launched in 1943 that were formerly off limits during its first 23 years on display and additional historic aircraft and they have access from a newly built pier topped by a free park.

The 2008 Veterans Day Parade has been rerouted west across 42nd Street, and north up 12th Avenue, with the parade passing the Intrepid Museum. 5,000 of the parade’s veterans will take part in the Museum’s grand re-opening celebration.

While in Staten Island, Intrepid will undergo the next phase of her refurbishment, and receive an $8 million interior renovation. Of that, $4.5 million has been privately raised – $3.5 million is yet to be procured. Never-before-seen areas of the ship including to the focasle (commonly known as the anchor chain room), general berthing quarters and the ship’s machine shop will be opened to the public for the first time. The hangar deck will feature a new layout and design including new interactive exhibits.

This Week’s Top New York History News

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NYS Military Museum Abandons Oral History Project

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The Albany Times Union is reporting that the New York State Veterans Oral History Project is being abandoned by the leaders of the New York State Military History Museum and Veterans Research Center (which is run by the NYS Division of Military and Naval Affairs).

The man who had been running the oral history program from the basement of the Military Museum in Saratoga Springs, Michael Russert (cousin of the late broadcaster Tim Russert), retired at the end of June after having recorded nearly 1,500 interviews over the past eight years. His equipment was sold at a loss on eBay and the program’s space has been cleared out:

The state let it go for $1,200 without consulting staff after buying it for $14,000, Russert said.

“I was really crushed when I found the studio was going on eBay,” said Russert, a retired teacher who lives in Cambridge. “They looked at it as a waste of space, and that always bothered me because it was a very valuable program for the museum.”

The collection now contains 1,595 interviews, including talks with three World War I vets and three Medal of Honor recipients. The project aims to capture firsthand stories of veterans and make them accessible to historians and to the public.

The state Office of General Services sold the studio for the museum because it occupied prime exhibit space, museum Director Michael Aikey said. He wouldn’t say how much it was sold for, and an inquiry to OGS went unanswered…

The state is not rehiring for Russert’s position, said Lt. Col. Richard Goldenberg, a spokesman for the state Division of Military and Naval Affairs.

Wayne Clark, the program’s videographer, has taken on an expanded role that includes identifying vets, coordinating meetings, doing interviews and publicizing the program…

The lack of manpower is slowing the archiving of stories from the state’s veterans at a time when many World War II vets die every day and New York service members are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, Russert says.

The Military Museum is located on the web here, and the Veteran’s Oral History Program is located here. Neither sites have been updated recently (some stuff there dates from 2006, and there are currently no events scheduled for the museum). The museum has been closed for the past month while the heavy wooden doors on the building’s front entrance were replaced with new glass doors.

Ellis Island to Include Native Americans, African Slaves

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The Associated Press is reporting that the Ellis Island Immigration Museum is creating The Peopling of America Center to tell the history of those who arrived in America outside the traditional peak immigration dates of 1892 to 1954:

Exhibits will focus on the arrival of Native Americans, who are believed to have migrated to North America more than 10,000 years ago across the Bering Sea from Asia; Europeans who landed on the Eastern seaboard from the 1600s through 1892; Africans brought here forcibly by slave traders; and today’s immigrants from all over the globe…

The $20 million, 20,000-square-foot space, designed by Edwin Schlossberg of ESI Design, will be located in an existing gallery that will be redesigned and in an adjoining building that now houses the curatorial staff…

Work on the new center began in September. Funding has been underwritten in part by Bank of America and the Annenberg Foundation. Briganti said the foundation has attained more than 75 percent of its fundraising goal.

Upon its completion in 2011, the museum will be renamed Ellis Island: The National Museum of Immigration.

NYPL Acquires Papers of Theatrical Legends

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The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center has acquired the papers of renowned performers and acting teachers Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghof. The collection consists of thousands of pages of unpublished correspondence, diaries, scripts and manuscripts, photographs, clippings and other documentation relating to the dynamic theatrical careers of both Hagen and Berghof. This collection of professional and personal papers, spanning nearly 100 years of theater history, is being made public for the first time. To celebrate the bequest, the Library is planning a series of eight free public programs featuring many close friends and colleagues of Ms. Hagen and Mr. Berghof’s including such figures as Harold Prince, Edward Albee, David Hyde Pierce and Eli Wallach.

The collection consists of 99 boxes of papers totaling 49 linear feet and provides in-depth insight about Ms. Hagen and Mr. Berghof’s personal life, their working processes in various theater productions, and their renowned acting school HB Studio, and includes correspondence from esteemed personalities such as Katharine Hepburn, Tennessee Williams, José Ferrer, David O. Selznik and Thornton Wilder.

Ms. Hagen’s papers include correspondence to and from her family, as well as other Hagen family papers. Her letters to her father Oskar Hagen – whom she playfully refers to many times as “papalop” – reveals new details of her personal and professional life. Of particular interest are various letters mentioning segregation during the Othello tour (1943-1945) with Paul Robeson and her then-husband, José Ferrer, and her diaries and notebooks which detail character studies for many of her roles. A notebook Hagen kept during rehearsals of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is overrun with a range of notes and observations regarding character motivation and psychology. In one section, she writes: “Attacking George for being a failure all the time. Motive; ashamed of his dependence on my father….aware of his subservience.”

Mr. Berghof’s papers document the many productions which he performed in, directed, adapted, translated, or developed. The productions and projects span his entire career from the late 1920s to his final project in 1990. Included are materials and correspondence with Samuel Beckett regarding Waiting for Godot.

The collection, entitled the “Uta Hagen/Herbert Berghof Papers” was bequeathed by Uta Hagen to the Billy Rose Theatre Division in 2007. It will be housed in the Billy Rose Theatre Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

A tour de force in the theater world for over seven decades, Uta Hagen’s numerous leading roles included Martha in the original Broadway production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962 (for which she won a Tony Award), Desdemona opposite Paul Robeson’s Othello, and Blanche DuBois opposite Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. She taught at the tremendously influential acting school HB Studio, where her students included Matthew Broderick, Robert DeNiro, Liza Minnelli, Al Pacino, Amanda Peet, and Jason Robards. Ms. Hagen married its founder, the actor, director and writer Herbert Berghof in 1957.

Mr. Berghof, who died in 1990, remains one of the most revered acting coaches in theater history. During the years he presided over HB Studio, the roster of alumni included – in addition to the ones mentioned above – actors such as Anne Bancroft, Geraldine Page, and Fritz Weaver. Mr. Berghof also had immense success outside of the school, and garnered much praise for directing the American premiere on Broadway of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1956 and the first all-Black cast version of the play in 1957.

Free Public Programs for Uta Hagen/Herbert Berghof Papers will take place in the Bruno Walter Auditorium in The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center located at 111 Amsterdam Avenue (between 64th and 65th streets). Admission to all programs is free and first come, first served. For information, please call (212) 642-0142 or visit www.nypl.org/lpaprograms. Programs are curated by Alan Pally, Manager of Public Programs at the Library for the Performing Arts.

Expanded Brooklyn Children’s Museum Reopens

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The Brooklyn Children’s Museum reopened Saturday after a year-long closure for an expansion and redesign. According to the New York Times:

The museum doubled the size of its city-owned building — with $48 million in city money and $32 million raised by the museum — to 102,000 square feet. As Robin Pogrebin reported in The Times in February, the project struggled through financial hardships. The museum itself lacked a strong physical identity, because most of its space has been underground since a 1977 design by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates created two lower levels. The greatly enlarged museum now hopes to improve its annual visitor total to 400,000 by 2010, from about 250,000 before the museum closed last September for the final stage of the renovation.

A pioneer in education, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum was the first museum created expressly for children when it was founded in 1899. Its success has sparked the creation of 300 children’s museums around the world. It is the only children’s museum in New York City, and one of few in the country, to be accredited by the American Association of Museums. The Museum encourages children to develop an understanding of and respect for themselves, others and the world around them by exploring cultures, the arts, science, and the environment.

The just-completed expansion features eco-friendly design in hopes of attaining LEED certification – it’s said to be the first “green” museum in New York City. In keeping with the Museum’s commitment to preserve and protect the world’s natural resources, it uses environmentally advanced, sustainable, renewable and/or recyclable materials and systems in the building’s design and construction.

Brooklyn Children’s Museum is one of the few children’s museums in the world with a permanent collection, including nearly 30,000 cultural objects and natural-history specimens. The cultural collection contains both ancient and present-day objects, including musical instruments, sculpture, masks, body adornments, and dolls, as well as everyday household and personal items. The natural-history collection contains rocks, minerals, and fossils, as well as mounted birds, mammals, insects, and skeletons (highlights include the complete skeleton of an Asian elephant, dinosaur footprints, and a whale rib).

For years, much of the collection has been inaccessible to the public simply because of space limitations. Now, an expanded collection study area allows the Museum to display more of the collection and to offer more hands-on activities—so children learn by touching as well as by looking.

Fort Ticonderoga Appeals to Public for Help

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Although it is apparently, no longer up, two local newspapers have reported (1, 2), that Fort Ticonderoga is asking the public to keep the fort from shutting down. According to Fred Herbst of Denton Publications:

You have probably seen the headlines. Fort Ticonderoga is in a very difficult financial situation. We don’t want to sell assets. We don’t want to lay off staff. We don’t want to curtail our education programs. We don’t want to close. Without the help of our friends and supporters, however, we may be faced with having to take one or more of these measures.

Fort Ticonderoga’s financial troubles began when benefactors Deborah and Forrest Mars Jr. withdrew their support – it’s been covered at length here.

The original statement continues:

Fort Ticonderoga needs its army of defenders now more than ever. The new Mars Education Center is 95 percent paid for. We have raised and borrowed more than $22 million, but we still need $700,000 to settle the outstanding bills and an additional $3.5 million to repay the loans and replenish our endowment fund.

Herbst revealed more about the details of Forrest Mars conflict with Executive Director Nick Westbrook.

“The ride is over,” he wrote in an Email to Westbrook that was provided to the Times of Ti.

The Email said Westbrook would not listen to new ideas and had stopped communicating with Mrs. Mars, when she was president of the fort board of trustees.

“We will not be writing any further checks,” Mr. Mars wrote. “Your performance as a manager is lacking. As a historian and archivist, etc., you excel. You have not given proper supervision and leadership to the staff.”

Mr. Mars said he and his wife paid for most of the Mars Education Center.

“As far as the new center, I would think that besides not communicating with your president (Mrs. Mars) regarding the opening of it, the exhibits to be in it, the budget for operating it and a program for the future use, you might have been nice enough and polite enough to communicate with the major donor (Mr. Mars),” the Email reads. “Not a word from you to either of us. We do not even know if you can fund it.”

The Email also said Mr. Mars had paid for one of Westbrook’s sons to attend a private school and had paid for vacations for Westbrook and his wife.

The Fort is under threat to close next year or sell off some it collections; Westbrook will be resigning. The fort closes for the season October 20th.

“The fort is running through its available endowment funds to pay the Mars Education Center bills, and, in the absence of a major infusion of funds, the fort will be essentially broke by the end of 2008,” Paine said in the memo.

UHA / MANY Annual Conference Announcement

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Upstate History Alliance and Museum Association of New York are calling for participation in their recently reorganized annual conference. According to their web site, “The UHA/MANY annual conference has a new name and a new format and we need your ideas and leadership to bring it to life! We’ve decided to leave the “talking head” sessions of past conferences behind and focus on generating a new energy through conversations and networking.”

Museums in Conversation: Fresh Perspectives for New York State Museums is being organized in collaboration with the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Council for the Humanities, and the Archives Partnership Trust. It will be held March 29-30, 2009 at the Doubletree Hotel, Tarrytown, New York.

The calls for session proposals and pre- and post-conference workshops proposals are now available here. The submission deadline is November 1, 2008.

Proposals are being welcomed “from a wide range of disciplines and professions, within and outside the museum community, that focus on how institutions are using interdisciplinary approaches to reach new audiences and build innovative collaborations that strengthen program organizational development.”

The conference organizers are seeking undergraduate and graduate student volunteers.

This Week’s Top New York History News

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