"May will be fine next year as like as not: / Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four."

[larryhammer]

During those early teenage years when I was old enough to take the Metro by myself but too young to get a job, I spent much of my summertimes haunting the tourist attractions of downtown Washington, DC -- particularly the museums on the Mall, Smithsonians and otherwise. Largely, of course, because they were free, always an important consideration for the job-free, but also because they are enormous warehouses of interesting cultural, artistic, scientific, and several other kinds of -ics artifacts. 'Cause, yanno, geeky kid.

One of the more interesting places in terms of being a Storage Attic On Display is the American History Museum. In addition to the sorts of exhibits you'd expect from a name like that, including more varieties of cultural impedimenta than you'd think possible, there's entire wings left over from the days when it was still called the Museum of History and Technology -- on such topics as the history of photography, atom smashers, printing and typography, glass- and ceramic-making, et sprawling cetera. On the third floor, there was one of the zappy sorts of large van de graaf machines hooked up to a button you could push. In the basement, a monumental marble statue of George Washington wearing a toga ...

(Pause to let that sink in. What's worse is he's not wearing a tunic, just the toga. I understand the reason they keep this thing around is it's one of the few likenesses made while Washington was alive, and for the faces of tourists when they round a corner and are suddenly confronted by this ... Thing.)

... and -- um, where was I? Oh yes, another amazing monstrosity: a scale model of the Capitol Building, a few meters long, made of blown glass. This was parked just outside the glass exhibit, or rather, the latter provided the excuse for displaying it.

I've been back to DC only a few times since leaving home, and over the years, many of my fond memories are no more. The Wonders of Nature exhibit tucked into a back corner of the Natural History Museum, used to display pretty things for their own sake, such as an entire wall of morpho butterflies and a ceremonial headdress made entirely of iridescent red hummingbird feathers, is long gone, along with Ancient Civilizations -- they wanted the space for an IMAX theater. And so on. New things come, old things change, or vanish in further construction.

A friend who's just back from DC has just informed me that the glass Capitol I'd directed her toward has not been on display for 18 years.

I think I need to recuse myself from offering any further tourism advice for my hometown.

---L.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

My spouse used to hang out at the museums every day after school is D.C. rather than go home. He has fond memories of stuff that is long gone. (But he'd like to see the Space Museum as it is now.)

[larryhammer]

Air & Space is always worth the time. So Much Stuff.

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

My son loved it in 2004. (The only other things he liked were Tivoli Ice Cream in Boston, and New York City.)

[larryhammer]

High praise.

In my day, it also had the most interesting cafeteria of all the Smithsonians. Plus, it was the go-to source for freeze-dried ice cream.

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

That's right! I bought him some! I don't remember the result--he must have liked it.

[larryhammer]

Did you see any of the IMAX movies? (Or a planetarium show?)

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

We sat through one Imax movie, as the son wouldn't tolerate more. It featured someone in space; he loved the 3D glasses.

[larryhammer]

Missed that one. Not sure what I would have made of a 3D IMAX, given how overwhelming I find 2D in that theater.

---L.

[ersatz-read.livejournal.com]

Mmm...museums. Some of my best teenage hours were spent working at the county historical museum. I got to touch everything. They had a massive upright Regina music box, and elaborate lengths of wooden chain that someone had whittled while they were a Civil War prisoner.

In a way it was sad: there were so many neglected piles of family history stuffed into corners and ignored, and no one there had any training on how to properly handle or preserve things, and we had maybe one visitor a month. But it was one of the coolest jobs I ever had. Too bad it only paid $1.50/hr.

To this day, I adore the smell of mothballs.

[larryhammer]

Small-town historical museums has so much interesting stuff, sometimes. We especially liked the ones in Iceland that we managed to find. (ProTip: in any given town, look for the Norwegian House.)

The county museums in the southwest are also worth checking out, for the details of frontier daily life, or at least those that had material artifacts.

---L.

[barry-king.livejournal.com]

There is not a vanishingly small statistical probability that we passed each other in the summer of '85. There for the same reasons: free admittance, geeky mid-teen kid.

I don't think the smell of pickled elephant from the main rotunda of the NHM ever leaves your nose. I remember watching "To Fly" when they just opened the IMAX, and getting my first experience of visually-induced vertigo, and the experience of meeting other geeky kids in the Insectarium and handling the hissing cockroaches. But I also loved the East Wing of the National Gallery: the angles, the flying walkways, the Calder mobile swinging in that unique I. M. Pei space.

But the American History Museum was a sudden revelation for me. When I saw that it was also once the History of Technology building after having toured its rooms and poked at its gadgets and marvelled at the toga monstrosity, I realized in a gut-wrenching flash how inextricably bound American History is to the technology of industrialization. You learn these things and can recite them by rote, but sometimes history has that same flash of inspiration that the other poetic arts have. For me, that was one of them. Evidently, I've never entirely recovered.

[larryhammer]

Very small -- I worked through the summer of '85. I had graduated high school, and I seem to recall not making it down to the Mall very often that year. '81 & '82 were my prime years there.

But yes, "To Fly" was an imprinting experience for me -- I'm pretty sure I first saw it in the late '70s, while still in elementary school. Haunted my flying dreams for years, that did. It took me a long time to appreciate the art in the East Wing, but I kept going back there for that main gallery and its gigantic Calder -- far more often than I did the Hirshhorn. The West Wing was more to my taste, and the Freer-Sackler even more so. But my favorite undiscovered gem on the Mall was the Botanical Gardens, between Air & Space and the Capitol -- all those different habitats, with very few visitors (outside of poinsettia season).

I never had a revelatory experience about that topic -- it just sort of seeped into my consciousness over years of schooling, tho' my AP American History teacher helped pound the idea in. Possibly the most important lessons in it, though, were David McCauley's books.

---L.

[barry-king.livejournal.com]

I do love the spaces of some of the contemporary buildings there. The new Africa and Asia galleries with their underground spaces are lovely in a quiet, sort of hidden way. I always feel a little dreamlike in them.

But I don't know David McCauley's books. Which are you thinking of?

[larryhammer]

Mill in particular, but the historical details of Underground and Unbuilding contributed, as did the implicit comparisons set up by the satires of Motel of the Mysteries and Great Moments in Architecture. Well, the latter no so much with tying industrialization to American history, but it's still somewhat of a piece.

---L.

[larryhammer]

When the Insectarium opened I was, btw, disappointed to be just old enough to know I should let the little kids handle the insects first -- and there were always a fresh batch of littles coming in. But I did sit in front of the glass-walled beehive watching it, sometimes for an hour at a time. With an obligatory stop beneath the whale skeleton you had to pass on the way there.

---L.

[barry-king.livejournal.com]

Funny. I remember spending maybe not hours, but certainly a long time trying to find the queen. I don't know if I ever did. I still visualize that beehive when I come across Hex' long-term storage in the Discworld books.

But it was the turtle in the next room down from the whale that always caught my imagination; how the shell and the skeleton fit together.

[larryhammer]

Ah, yes, that turtle. I'd forgotten it.

I only saw the queen once -- I was more interested in the patterns of crowd movements. Much like watching tourists negotiate the cafeteria lines. Or demonstrators walking along Constitution Ave.

---L.

[sovay]

In the basement, a monumental marble statue of George Washington wearing a toga ...

I am impressed.

[larryhammer]

It is impressive.

---L.