The City Reliquary
Walking down Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg on Sunday, I happened upon a
little sign reading "City Reliquary: $.50". Fifty Cents? I said, "Yes sir!", quarters in my little outstretched hand. The teeny tiny room was set up like an old sideshow thing (or how I imagine them to have been) with a red velvet rope before you enter, velvety red stuff everywhere, glass cases lit romantically with Edison bulbs, old wornout carpets, dark wood, you get the picture. Nice. Old. A little creepy.
The actual stuff they had at the reliquary was funny. Well, it wasn't supposed to be, I don't think. It consisted of a collection of Statue of Liberty figurines, pieces of building from such famous sites as The Carlyle, The Waldorf Astoria and other famous hotels, an extensive collection of dipsticks, small jars of dirt from each of the 5 burroughs, and a locker, which, when opened, revealed the costume of "Little Egypt" who introduced the Cooch to America at the World's Fair in 1898. Ah, the cooch. God bless that woman.
I tried to find some information about it on the web, because I wasn't thinking blog-style while I was there, so I was hoping to find information on it that I had missed. But again and again, all I could find was information on the little window museum by the same name on Havemeyer and Grand, which has much of the same stuff, but it's in a window instead, and when you push the small button, a nicely voiced young man tells you about each of the items in the window. And what I discovered is the storefront museum was birthed from the window museum just this past March. It's only been open for about 3 months. Visit the site for more information.
It's all about presentation. Jars of dirt and pieces of building in the wrong setting would be boring, maybe even insulting. But at the Reliquary and the little Reliquary window, the jars themselves are antiques, and clearly, every item there is loved and treated with respect, which in turn makes the viewer respect them truly as pieces of history.