New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

Cultural History

Adirondack History Center Annouces 2010 Schedule

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The Adirondack History Center Museum, located in the old school building at the corner of Route 9N and Hand Avenue in Elizabethtown, Essex County, has announced it’s 2010 Season of events and exhibits.

In addition to the season’s events, the museum displays artifacts from over two centuries of life in Essex County and the central Adirondacks. The diverse collection includes 18th century artifacts, an 1887 Concord stagecoach, an iron bobsled from the 1932 Olympic Games, a 58 foot Fire Observation Tower to climb, a colonial garden patterned after the gardens of Hampton Court, England and Colonial Williamsburg, and more.

The Museum is open 10am – 5pm, 7 days a week from late May through mid-October. The Brewster Library is open all year by appointment only. Admission: Adults $5, Seniors $4, Students $2. Ages 6 and under are free.

The 2010 Schedule includes:

Exhibits

A Sign of the Times May 29- October 31

Curators have mined the museum’s collection, scoured the region, and called upon the citizens of Essex County to gather SIGNS! The exhibit focuses on SIGNS – all things that convey ideas, information, commands, designations or directions. Displayed wall to wall and ceiling to floor this exhibit prompts the viewer to discuss and ponder facts, purposes, qualities, and gestures conveyed by signs.

Swan Furniture June 19 – October 31

This exhibit highlights the Swans and their craftsmanship as important symbols of Westport and Wadhams cultural heritage. The furniture places the Swans into historical context as representatives of our human landscape. A unique blend of pieces provides visitors an opportunity to reflect on the furniture as art objects and artifacts in a museum setting.

ACNA Cover Art Show Sept. 20 – October 31

The 23rd year of the Arts Council for the Northern Adirondacks (ACNA) Cover Art Show featuring local artists. Thirty donated artworks for a Silent Auction are included in the exhibition. The winning Cover Art show piece is to be raffled at “Field, Forest and Stream Day” on September 25th, 2010.

Events

Can History be Reconciled? A Conversation on Compassion & Courage

July 9, 4pm

Whether we’re reading the esoteric histories of others or dealing with our own, some issues are difficult to grasp and process. Don Papson, President of the North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association, will engage the audience in a discussion on compassion and courage in light of oppression, slavery and liberation.

Lecture: Captain Brown’s Birthday Party by Amy Godine

July 11, 4 pm

From 1922 into the 1960s, black pilgrims from northern cities joined ranks with white Adirondackers to honor the May 9 birthday of the militant abolitionist John Brown with speeches, concerts, sermons and prayers, earning Lake Placid a reputation as an oasis of interracial tranquility in the age of Jim Crow. How was each group able to find common cause in John Brown? How did each group use the other to promote its own agenda? And whose version of John Brown prevails at his home and gravesite in North Elba, a state-managed historic site since 1897? Join us to hear Historian Amy Godine answer these questions and examine the struggle it both enabled and concealed over John Brown’s public image and the meaning of freedom itself.

Fundraiser: Elizabethtown Historic Slide Show for the Town Hall Stained Glass Window Project

July 18, 4 pm

Back with added photographs and materials, local historian, Margaret Bartley, is offering the Elizabethtown Historic Slide Show for a second year as part of the Elizabethtown Day celebration. Proceeds from this event benefit the restoration of the Elizabethtown Town Hall stained glass windows, a project of Historic Pleasant Valley and the Essex County Historical Society. Any and all donations are welcome.

Museum Benefit: Come as you ART

July 24, 8pm

An evening of dance, delicacies, and expressive dress. Design and create your own clothing. Let your artistic side or a work of art inspire your attire. Music provided by the Chrome Cowboys.

Performance: Bits & Pieces

About a Bridge

Fridays: July 30, Aug 6 & 13, 11am / Sunday August 1, 4pm

This theatrical elegy weaves together voices from the life of the Champlain Bridge.

Lecture: Asanath Nicholson: Adirondack Teacher and World Humanitarian by Maureen Murphy

August 8, 4 pm

Maureen Murphy, Professor of Curriculum and Teaching in the School of Education in Health and Human Services at Hofstra University conveys the history of Asenath Hatch Nicholson, an early 19th century woman, schoolteacher, health reformer, traveler, writer, evangelist, social worker and peace activist. Asenath Hatch Nicholson (1792-1855), born in Chelsea, Vermont, made her way across Lake Champlain to Elizabethtown, New York. At age 21, she started a boarding school on Water Street for students from the town and neighboring farms. While in Elizabethtown, she met her husband Norman Nicholson, a local widower with a young family. The couple moved to New York City where Nicholson became a disciple of the health reformer Sylvester Graham. Nicholson opened a Grahamite boarding house and worked among the poor. After she was widowed, she set out from New York on a fifteen-month visit to Ireland to “investigate the condition of the Irish poor,” reading the Bible to country people, and sharing their hospitality, leaving us with a glimpse of Ireland on the eve of the Great Irish Famine in her book Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (1847).

Festival: Field, Forest & Stream Sept 25, 10-3:30

A harvest festival sponsored by the Arts Council for the Northern Adirondacks and the Elizabethtown-Lewis Chamber of Commerce featuring demonstrations and exhibits by regional craftspeople, antique dealers, storytellers and musical performances.

Finger Lakes Museum Selects Keuka Lake Site

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On Thursday, the Finger Lakes Cultural & Natural History Museum Board of Trustees adopted a resolution to select Keuka Lake State Park in Yates County as the future home of the Finger Lakes Museum. The vote was unanimous with one abstention.

After nearly a year of evaluating 19 sites that were originally submitted, the Site Selection Committee, under the direction of chairman Don Naetzker, recommended two sites for the Board’s consideration: Seneca Lake State Park in and adjacent to the City of Geneva, and Keuka Lake State Park near Branchport.

The idea to create a museum to showcase the cultural heritage and ecological history of the 9,000 square-­mile Finger Lakes Region was first floated in a Life in the Finger Lakes magazine article by John Adamski in March 2008.

After enlisting ConsultEcon Inc., a Boston­based market research firm in March, it was determined that the project is viable at either site although for different reasons. Board president, John Adamski added, “While the Seneca Lake site has significant advantages like a central location, the Board determined that the Keuka Lake site more closely met the requirements that were originally established in the Strategic Plan, especially as they relate to natural history programming.”

Among the advantages that he said tipped the scales in favor of the Keuka Lake site are the following:

• There is 700 feet of intimate lakefront with a level, sandy beach.

• The natural history element of the project is predicted to draw the most visitors. The rolling, hilly terrain, ravines, brook, woods, and areas of natural succession that exist there are ideal for wildlife exhibits in natural habitats.

• Several hundred acres of land are available for wildlife habitats and interpretive use—now or in the future.

• A 350­-car paved parking lot already exists.

• Keuka College has offered to add Museum Sciences to its curriculum
and become a partner in the educational aspect of the Museum.

• Yates County and Keuka­area business leaders have pledged over $2 million in start-up funding.

In addition, Adamski said, “The Branchport Elementary School, which is presently vacant, has been purchased by the Finger Lakes Visitors Association for use as the Museum’s base of operation during the project’s start-up phases. The building will provide 15,000 square­ feet for business offices and initial programming as well as storage for the acquisition of artifacts and collections.” Its 13­-acre site provides navigable water access to Keuka Lake.

He also stated, “Finger Lakes State Parks and the Finger Lakes Museum Project will undertake a joint master plan for the entire 620­acre park. The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation has been very cooperative and enthused over the proposal and we look forward to working with them to bring the project to fruition.”

Although the Museum will be built on lands leased from Finger Lakes State Parks, it will remain a privately­-owned and mostly privately­-funded not­-for­-profit educational institution.

Earth Day: A Revolution 40 Years In The Making

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On Earth Day 1970, people around the country, mostly college students, demonstrated on behalf of environmental causes. Forty years later, the environmental movement has come into the mainstream and secured state and federal agency leadership positions. More importantly, the movement has significantly improved the quality of our rivers, lakes and forests and in doing so has provided for the proliferation of local wildlife. While there are certainly challenges that remain – invasive species, inappropriate development, toxic exposures, nitrate and storm water management, climate change, the plight of amphibians, migratory birds, and bats – the environmental successes of the last 40 years should not be underestimated.

By and large, the first Earth Day was much like those that have followed: politicians, celebrities, concerts, environmental fairs, and the like. But Earth Day 1970 was a radical proposition in a time before the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded, and before there were state sanctioned bodies like the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to protect the environment. At Boston’s Logan Airport, where a few hundred demonstrators had gathered in what a CBS reporter called a “thoroughly peaceful and non-disruptive demonstration”, police charged the crowd and arrested 13.

In the 40 years since that first Earth Day the Adirondack region has seen a revolution in the way we interact with our environment. Sure, we can point to the founding of DEC (1970), the establishment of the EPA (1971), the Clean Air Act (1970), and the Clean Water Act (1972), State Environmental Quality Review Act (1980), the Superfund Law (1980), and the Environmental Protection Fund (1993) but there has been a leadership revolution as well. Today, Pete Grannis, who was part of the first Earth Day demonstrations, is now the head of the DEC. Judith Enck, the state’s leading environmental activist in the 1980s, is now the Administrator of EPA’s Region 2.

Changes in the natural environment have been extraordinary. The Hudson River, once an open sewer where no one dared to boat, never-mind swim or fish, now bustles with recreation activities in summer. According to the DEC, the number of seriously polluted waters in the state has fallen by 85% and Sulfur Dioxide pollution is down by 90%, with a corresponding improvement in Acid Rain.

Successes we don’t typically consider include the closure of outdated and poorly located landfills (more than 100 in Adirondacks alone), the elimination of the tire dumps (including more than 27 million tires statewide), the cleaning up of Superfund and brownfield sites (1,800 statewide) and the thousands of water bodies large and small around the state that have been cleaned-up in the last 40 years through waste-water management.

We may not consider those victories as much as we should, but local wildlife certainly has. In 1970 there was just one occupied Bald Eagle nest in New York State, in 2010 there are 173. Eagles and other raptors we rarely saw in the 1970s and 1980s, birds like the peregrine falcon, are now fairly frequent sights; ravens and osprey have returned to the Adirondacks. Wild turkeys have exploded from about 25,000 in 2010 to 275,000 today, and so turkey hunting has returned to the Adirondacks. Native trout have been returned to more than 50 ponds according to the DEC, and the average number of fish species has increased by a third offering increased angling opportunities. Beaver, fisher, and otter have flourished in cleaner, more diverse waters and so trapping seasons have returned for those species. In 1970 there were no Moose in the Adirondacks, today there are 400 to 500 in the region.

Clean water, clean air, and open spaces were the demands at the first Earth Day in 1970. Those demands were met by legions of combative corporations, industry alliances, business groups, chambers of commerce and their attorneys. A look at a local paper on any given day shows that those battles continue, but 40 years has shown that the environmental movement has been an enormous success. Despite the attacks and “enviro-nazi” insults, the former hippies, political greens, organization environmentalists, and wildlife conservationists who have made up the environmental movement have much to be proud of.

Illustration: Earth Day 1970 Poster

Mapping New York: Illustrated Urban, Social History Survey

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I love maps, so when I heard about Mapping New York, the follow-up of Mapping London from Black Dog Publishing, I had to get a copy to review – I was not disappointed. Mapping New York is a richly illustrated survey of the urban and social history of New York City. From early woodblock engravings to the latest satellite images available of Manhattan, these maps show the intricate story of the development of one of the world’s most populous cities. One of my favorites is an early topographical map from the Report on the Social Statistics of Cities, compiled by George E. Waring Jr., in 1886.

The distinctive maps in this volume date back to the 16th Century, when New York was a commercial trading post scattered with farms, right up to the present day. This book shows the complexity of early land transfers (like Henry Tyler’s 1897 map of the original grants of village lots from the Dutch West India Company) up to its current role as one of the most built up urban areas in the world.

Although there are plenty of early maps here, Mapping New York does not neglect maps from the 20th and 21st century. These are arranged thematically and featuring maps on population, military, water, transport, commerce, crime as well as planning and developing maps and boundaries of the five boroughs. Well known maps such as the New York City subway map are tracked through their history and in artist representations. Additional map as art pieces include Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Manhattan #1: Postal Codes from 1966 and the poem, Manhattan, in the shape of the city by Howard Horowitz. This book is an amazing look at typography and design in the history of mapping as told through one location.

The latest satellite images are included along with a fantastic projection on the growth of the city “Manhattan 2409” by Heidi Neilson showing her vision of what the city will look like in the future based on current satellite imagery (greener than you might expect).

Illustration: Sanitary and Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York, 1865 from Mapping New York.

Iroquois Indian Museum Offers Early Technology Day

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The Iroquois Indian Museum in Howes Cave, NY kicks off a celebration of our 30th Anniversary on Saturday, April 10 with the 1st Annual Early Technology Day, their annual Spring Party and a special screening of a new documentary on the museum’s history. [Read more…] about Iroquois Indian Museum Offers Early Technology Day

Call For Artists: Fenimore Art Museum’s ‘Art By The Lake’

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Fenimore Art Museum is now accepting submissions for its third annual outdoor, summer event Art By The Lake – formerly called A Taste of the Sublime. It will be held Saturday, August 7, 2010 on the museum’s spacious grounds overlooking Otsego Lake.

Art by the Lake is a juried art invitational that welcomes artists from across New York State in a celebration of the historic relationship between the artists and the landscape that surrounds us. The event features outstanding artists in all genres of landscape art, interactive demonstrations, educational programming, live entertainment, and tastings of some of the best food, wine, and beer from across the state.

Prizes will be awarded in the following categories:
• Best Interpretation of New York Landscape
• Most Outstanding Use of Color
• Most Original Style
• Audience Favorite

An artist’s information packet and application form can be found on the Fenimore Art Museum’s website at FenimoreArtMuseum.org.

Applications must be postmarked by May 3, 2010. (Late applications may be accepted at the discretion of the jury if space is available.) Artists will be notified of their acceptance by May 17, 2010, at which point they will receive detailed event information and an artist’s contract.

Brooklyn Museum to Host Annual ‘Brooklyn Ball’

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The Brooklyn Museum will celebrate the major exhibition “American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection” and the landmark collection-sharing partnership between Brooklyn and the Metropolitan Museum of Art at its annual gala, the Brooklyn Ball, on Thursday evening, April 22, 2010.

The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. with cocktails and hors d’ oeuvres in the Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing on the fifth floor and an exclusive opportunity to preview American High Style. Featuring some eighty-five masterworks from the newly established Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition traces the evolution of fashion in America from its nineteenth-century European beginnings through the twentieth century. It marks the first time in more than two decades that a large-scale survey drawn from this preeminent collection will be on public view.

Included in the exhibition will be creations by such legendary American designers as Charles James, Norman Norell, and Gilbert Adrian; works by influential French designers including Charles Frederick Worth, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jeanne Lanvin, Givenchy, and Christian Dior; and works by such first-generation American women designers as Bonnie Cashin, Elizabeth Hawes, and Claire McCardell. Among the objects presented will be Schiaparelli’s Surrealist Insect Necklace, considered by experts to be one of the most important works in the collection; elaborate ball gowns and day wear by Charles James; evening ensembles by Yves Saint Laurent, Halston, Scaasi, and Mainbocher; street wear by mid-twentieth-century designers Vera Maxwell, Claire McCardell, and Elizabeth Hawes; a group of hats by celebrated milliner Sally Victor; and dazzling evening wear by Norman Norell.

The Brooklyn Museum’s groundbreaking collection-sharing partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art went in to effect in January 2009. At that time Brooklyn’s renowned costume collection of 23,500 objects, acquired over the course of a century, was transferred to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is fully integrated into the Institute’s program of exhibitions, publications, and education initiatives and remains available for exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

Co-chairs for this year’s Ball celebrating American High Style include chef and restaurateur Mario Batali and his wife Susan Cahn, European Editor-at-Large for Vogue Hamish Bowles, New York Times Style Editor Stefano Tonchi, Museum Trustee Stephanie Ingrassia, decorative arts specialist and educator Susan Weber, photographer Annie Leibovitz, fashion designer Zac Posen, and collector Carla Shen.

An interactive dining experience, designed by Jennifer Rubell, whom New York Times senior critic Roberta Smith credits with “laying waste to the prolonged ordeal that is the benefit dining experience,” will begin at 8 p.m. in the magnificent Beaux-Arts Court on the third floor. The interactive food journey through the Museum is titled Icons and includes drinking paintings, suspended melting cheese heads, and a larger-than-life dessert surprise. A hybrid of performance and installation art, Rubell’s food projects deconstruct the ritual of the meal and are often of monumental scale.

During the evening, the Brooklyn Museum will honor the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former Mellon Program Officer Angelica Rudenstine. Donald Randel, Mellon Foundation president, will accept the Museum’s highest honor, the Augustus Graham Medal, on their behalf.

Immediately following the Ball, the Museum will host High Style: The After Party in the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Pavilion. The festivities will feature artists’ fashions and dancing to live music.

Tickets to the Ball range from $500 to $1,500, and tables are available from $5,000 to $50,000. All tickets to the Ball include admission to High Style: The After Party. Tickets to the after party start at $75. Tickets may be purchased online through Monday, April 19. You may also download, print, and complete a ticket request form and send it by fax to (718) 501-6139. Further information about ticket options and table purchases is available by e-mailing special.events@brooklynmuseum.org or by phoning (718) 501-6423. Proceeds from the event will support the Museum’s public and education programs.

The Augustus Graham Medal is being presented to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in recognition of its outstanding support of the Brooklyn Museum, including funding for the survey of the costume collection and the endowment of curatorial positions at the Museum. Through the foundation’s generosity, the first complete inventory, collection review, digital photography, and cataloguing of the Museum’s holdings of approximately 23,500 American and European costumes and accessories has been completed. More than 5,800 of the most important works are now available to scholars, students, and the public through ARTstor, an innovative online initiative of the Mellon Foundation that provides access to curated collections of art images and associated data for noncommercial, scholarly, and not-for-profit educational use.

The Augustus Graham Medal is named after one of the founders of the Brooklyn Apprentices Library in 1823. That institution, which Graham nurtured and expanded, grew into the Brooklyn Institute and later became the Brooklyn Museum.

Hudson Valley Cultural History Discussions At Senate House

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In a unique collaboration, the New York Council for the Humanities has joined forces with the Senate House State Historic Site, in uptown Kingston, to offer “Reading Between the Lines: Cultural Crossroads at the Hudson River Valley,” a free reading and discussion series that runs from March through July 2010, meeting on Saturday afternoons once a month.

Reading Between the Lines is designed to promote lively, informed conversation about humanities themes and strengthen the relationship between humanities institutions and the public. Reading Between the Lines series are currently being held in communities across New York State.

At Senate House, the discussion leader will be A.J. Williams-Myers, Professor of Black Studies at the State University of New York, New Paltz. He will lead discussions of each series book: Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Literature, by Gordon M. Sayre; Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson River Valley, by Judith Richardson; The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in 17th Century North America, edited by David Alan Greer; and Long Hammering: Essays on the Forging of an African American Presence in the Hudson River Valley to the Early Twentieth Century, by A.J. Williams-Myers. All books are loaned to participants.

In addition to the book discussions, Senate House staff will offer a brief presentation of a related artifact or document from the site’s collections at the end of each session, so that participants can get a taste of the site’s historical treasures.

For more information about Reading Between the Lines: Cultural Crossroads at the Hudson River Valley visit www.nyhumanities.org/discussion_groups.

A New History of the Munsee Indians

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More enigmatic than they should be in this late age, even among historians of New York, the Munsee are less known than the story for which they are best known – the purchase of Manhattan Island for veritable pittance in 1626. One reason the Munsee (a northern sub-set of sorts of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware, as they were called by Europeans) have been ignored by historians is their rather early refugee status by the 1740s.

Anthropologist Robert S. Grumet’s The Munsee Indians: A History attempts to paint a portrait of the Munsee, whose territory stretched form the lower Hudson River Valley to the headwaters of the Delaware, as an Indian Nation in their own right. Previous histories, particularly those of the Lenape, have generally ignored the important role of the Munsee.

Grumet marshals archeological, anthropological and archival evidence to bring to life the memorial lives of Mattano, Tackapousha, Mamanuchqua, and other Munsee leaders who helped shape the course of American history in the mid-Atlantic before the American Revolution. The Musee emigrated to reservations in Wisconsin, Ontario, and Oklahoma where their descendants live to this day.

Grumet is the senior research associate at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Historic Contact: Indian People and Colonists in Today’s Northeastern United States in the Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries.

The Munsee Indians: A History is part of the Civilization of the American Indian Series by the University of Oklahoma Press.