Month: September 2009

Russell Shorto To Guest Host NY Harbor Walking Tour

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Island at the Center of the World author Russell Shorto will guest host a special edition of The New Amsterdam Trail walking tour of the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy, to celebrate the culmination a week-long celebration of the 400th Anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of New York Harbor. Urban historian and National Park Ranger Steve Laise will lead the event which will also include an exclusive curator’s tour of New Amsterdam: The Island at the Center of the World, a new exhibit opening at the South Street Seaport. The tour takes place on September 13th at 9:30 a.m. Tickets are limited and must be purchased in advance by visiting www.nyharborparks.org.

Throughout the 90-minute tour of lower Manhattan, Laise and Shorto will share entertaining and insightful stories about the famous and infamous characters that helped make New Amsterdam a bustling seaport, an international melting pot and a center of commerce. They will also discuss how the Dutch colony still impacts our culture today. The curator’s tour at South Street Seaport follows, with an insider’s peak at rare documents, maps, plans and watercolors connected to New Amsterdam &#8212- including “the best real estate deal of all time”—the 1626 letter of purchase of Manhattan for goods worth 60 guilders. Many of these items have never been seen in the United States.

The audio and map for this tour are available for free at: www.nyharborparks.org.

Weekly New York History Blogging Round-Up

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  • American Magazine: Waterfront Priests [Video]
  • Brooklynology: W.F. Mangels and his &#8220Amusing&#8221 Career
  • AHA Today: Is There a Future for Humanities Journals?
  • American Heritage: Doulas Brinkley On TR’s Wild Side
  • Patell and Waterman: Knickerbocker Beer
  • Lost City: The Bloomberg [Preservation] Legacy
  • Ephemeral New York: Wigstock A Labor Day Tradition
  • New York Outdoors Blog: Old Croton Aqueduct Trail
  • Uncataloged Museum: Does Pricing Change Visitor Behavior?

    • Brooklyn Museum Launches Smart Phone Gallery Tours

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    Visitors to the Brooklyn Museum with mobile phones with Internet access can now create their own gallery guides to the permanent collections through a first-of-its kind program launched last week. Museum attendees who bring their Web-enabled phones will also be able to suggest works of art to fellow visitors. Based on the visitor’s initial selections, the guide will generate additional recommendations about works to see.

    Anyone who wants to will now also be able to create sets of annotated objects, which function as customized tours, through the Museum Web site, www.brooklynmuseum.org. These tours may be shared with friends and featured on the Museum Web site for other visitors. The Brooklyn Museum Web site now contains images and brief information on more than 11,000 objects from its comprehensive holdings, which range from antiquity to the present and
    include nearly every culture.

    For example, a visitor to the ancient Egyptian galleries containing more than 1,200 objects might focus on the Old Kingdom section, encompassing Dynasties 3 through 6, from 2675 through 2170. There, they might select a limestone group statue depicting a man, his wife, and their small son that was the first major work of Egyptian art ever exhibited in America. Given their interest in this statue, the program then might suggest that the visitor look at three elaborately painted wooden tomb statues depicting a man at various stages of his life and an exquisite alabaster statue of the child King Pepy II seated on the lap of his mother.

    Through the aggregation of data provided by visitors and their individual tastes, the guide is designed to grow more intelligent as more visitors use it and more data is supplied. The new customized guide will be free to all visitors and may be used on any Web-enabled mobile phone.

    The guide is designed as a mobile Web application, specifically engineered for the small screen of a mobile device. The object data displayed within the application is drawn from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection online and combined with the social element that each visitor contributes while in the gallery during their visit.

    Eventually, the data generated by visitors using the guide in-house will be exported back into the collection online to form a recommendation system on the Brooklyn Museum Web site.

    This project was developed by Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology, with assistance from Jennifer Bantz, Manager Interpretive Materials, Brooklyn Museum. The Web application was engineered in-house by Paul Beaudoin, Programmer, Brooklyn Museum.

    Light On New Netherland Exhibit at NYCs Federal Hall

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    New Netherland &#8211 the Dutch province that stretched from today’s New York State to parts of Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut &#8211 existed for 55 years and its legacy lives on. Just two years after the founding of the first permanent English colony at Jamestown in 1607, and eleven years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the Dutch were in New Netherland. And, although their hold on that part of North America was tenuous and brief, the influence of the Dutch was both impressive and long term.

    Light on New Netherland, a traveling exhibit consisting of 26 two-dimensional panels, introduces adults and children to important, but not well-known aspects of this part of the American history and culture. The New Amsterdam History Center (NAHC) has arranged for the exhibit to appear at Manhattan’s Federal Hall National Memorial site. The exhibit will be on display on the main level of Federal Hall from Aug. 5 through Sept. 8. “Light on New Netherland” has appeared at the New York State Museum in Albany as well at several other notable institutions. The Federal Hall National Memorial Site is open Monday through Friday from 9AM to 5PM- it’s located at 26 Wall Street.

    Photo: The Extent of New Netherland (from a map published in 1685).

    Inside The Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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    A new book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, by Michelle and James Nevius offers 182 short chapters that tell the story of the city from Henry Hudson’s voyage of discovery in 1609 to the present-day rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. At the back, fourteen self-guided tours allow you to use the chapters to create your own explorations of the city.

    This fast-paced narrative history unfolds in mini-chapters designed to guide you to obscure and prominent historic places throughout the city. The supplemental maps and step-by-step directions make using the book to explore the city in a new way easy and accessible. The book is broken down into several parts that include New Amsterdam, the Revolutionary Era, and the Birth of New Republic- The Great Port, 1805-1835- The Growth of the Immigrant City, 1836-1865- The City in Transition, 1866-1897- The New Beautiful City, 1898-1919- Boom and Bust, 1920-1945- and the City Since World War Two.

    The layout makes reading the book as a traditional history possible and brings to life the city’s fascinating and dramatic past for locals, tourists, and anyone eager to better know the stories and places of New York City history. Also check out the authors’ blog.