This Friday we went to a particularly peculiar museum in Willamsburg, Brooklyn. The City Reliquary was once operated out of the ground floor apartment of its owner. After gaining fame in the neighborhood by passersby who stopped to look at the odd collection of Statue of Liberty miniatures, local residents began to donate their own curious collections for display. When we walked in we were greeted with walls filled with all sorts of bits of New York’s discarded past. We moved through the Coney Island attraction turnstile to find pieces of famous buildings long destroyed, a collection of seltzer bottles from Brooklyn’s seltzer water heyday and even a token from the day that the Brooklyn Bridge opened to the public in 1883! Students read about the lives and stories of some longtime New York residents, people who lived interesting lives but who weren’t famous beyond the bounds of their own neighborhoods. The museum gave us a personal history of New York City that you can’t find in the well known institutions on Museum Mile! In keeping with the idea of collecting, we finished the field trip by visiting a local junk shop where a couple of students bought some vinyl records and discussed history through the various found antiques.
