Dear Histarch Members,

Please consider writing a letter in support of funding the re-opening
of New York Unearthed, a small but important museum of NYC archaeology
that had been open to the public from 1990 until 2005. There is no  
other museum
in NYC that showcases archaeological finds from the city, and it had a
working archaeologist on staff who interacted with visitors. It was a
really great place and was very popular with school groups. (Please
see the email and the article below for more details).

Thanks!
Meredith Linn
Metropolitan Chapter (of the NY State Archaeological Association) President

-- 
Meredith Linn, Ph.D.
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Urban Studies Program
Barnard College and Columbia University

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        From: [log in to unmask]
        Subject: We need your letters to help reopen NY Unearthed!

Dear PANYC Members,
Following the publication of the /New York Daily
News/ piece on the current state of New York Unearthed (by Alexander
Nazaryan on Sunday, December 18, 2011, see attached) the New York
City's Board of Standards & Appeals is considering funding to reopen
the facility.  PANYC as organization will be writing letters in
support of this action.

It would be great if the Board of Standards and Appeals hears from us
all and is barraged with letters supporting a reopening of New York
Unearthed!

Please consider sending a letters of your own. Some possible points
to use in your letters:

-   It is an established facility that merely needs to be reinstated
-   a unique and popular city cultural institution
-   a museum geared to visitors of all ages but particularly appealing
to, and visited by, school groups
-   a tourist attraction in a well-trafficked tourist area
-   cite the /Daily News/ article, as appropriate in support of your points

Letters should go to the following at the Board of Standards & Appeals:

Meenakshi Srinivasan, Chair
Jeff Mulligan, Executive Director
Becca Kelly, General Counsel

Board of Standards & Appeals
40 Rector Street 9th Floor
New York, NY 10006

Many thanks!
Lynn Rakos
PANYC (Professional Archaeologists of NYC) President
--------

Why is there an empty museum in lower Manhattan?
BY Alexander Nazaryan
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Originally Published: Sunday, December 18 2011, 4:48 AM
Updated: Sunday, December 18 2011, 4:48 AM

Objects like this bowl are now stored at the New York State Museum in
Albany. Of the 2 million objects that comprise the largest trove of
archeological objects from New York City’s past, there is a handful of
coffee beans from an 1835 fire, which (for better or worse) don’t
smell even faintly
like Starbucks. There are ancient oyster shells, from a distant time
when eating Gowanus Canal bivalves wasn’t a suicidal proposition.
Also, Delftware china brought here by the Dutch, some of it from
China; porcelain marbles from the bygone Greenwich Village of Henry
James; a coin from 1590 that is believed to be the oldest European
object found within the five boroughs.

But to take this figurative journey through New York’s past, I first had
to take a literal journey to Albany, where our archeological heritage is
housed by the New York State Museum. The curators there have
diligently preserved and catalogued the objects, but except for several
small displays, they are locked in steel cabinets, far from visitors’
eyes.

These constitute the collections of New York Unearthed, an archeology
museum at the corner of State and Pearl Sts. in lower Manhattan that
opened in 1990 and closed in 2005. Today, New York Unearthed is
empty except for a “6-pounder” cannon dug up from the East River
that probably remains because it is too heavy to steal. Its muzzle,
some 250 years old, points through Unearthed’s glass windows at a
plaza where, on a warm day, people are having lunch.

Maintenance workers for adjacent 17 State St. sometimes use
Unearthed as a shortcut, leaving its door open and interior
unattended. Leaves blow in; when it rains, people come in to smoke,
perhaps looking in puzzlement at the empty displays (I witnessed
some of this myself; outraged archeologists told me the rest).
Downstairs, the bathrooms are still functional, across from a walllength
cross section of what might be under any given city street. An
elevator intended to simulate an archeological dig has long been
broken, but the equipment in a glass-walled conservation lab awaits
Indiana Jones — or, at the very least, a dusting.

This isn’t how it was supposed to be. New York Unearthed was to tell
6,000 years of New York’s history in 1,600 square feet. At almost four
years per square foot, that’s precious space, but it worked because
archeology is a science of small but revealing things. What could
better tell today’s story than the iPhone or the credit card? If history is
not just about great men and their wars, then we must concede that
quotidian lives matter — as do their quotidian contents. A 200-yearold
beer bottle, found in Brooklyn, overflows with history: the artisans
who shaped it, probably German; the workers who drank it, maybe
Polish; the factories where they worked, now lofts.
(Page 2 of 4)

In a city whose resilience is intimately tied to its short memory, here
was a place to remember that this sleek metropolis did not rise out of
the seas a ready-made “Sex in the City” set. Here were the shards
that belonged to those who built that city for us: the freed blacks
carving out a life in Brooklyn’s Weeksville, the emigrants from County
Kerry huddled on Orchard St., the Italians hauling haunches of beef to
Washington Market. Gazing at a half circle of animal bones neatly laid
out in a display case at the state museum, I recall the half-eaten
chicken wings that today litter Brooklyn streets. Nothing changes,
even as everything does.

And few spaces in New York are as rich with history as the several
thousand square feet that encompass the lot that includes the 42-story
high rise 17 State St., the one-story Unearthed building that stands in
its shadow and the pleasant little plaza that separates them. According
to archeologist Joan Geismar, this was also the site of the house of
Peter Stuyvesant, the fierce director general who brought order to
Nieuw Amsterdam; here lived Abraham Isaacs, one of the city’s first
prominent Jews. Here died Robert Fulton, who pioneered use of the
steam ferry; here Herman Melville was born. Here was the city’s first
“menagerie”(zoo).

The above comes from a report that Geismar submitted to the
Landmarks Preservation Commission in April 1986. The William
Kaufman Organization had bought the lot at the corners of State and
Pearl St., tearing down the Modernist Seamen’s Church Institute that
had stood there since 1969. The plan was to build big, and build
quickly, capitalizing on the Gordon Gekko spirit of the day.
Not so fast, Geismar cautioned. Digs around lower Manhattan had
been uncovering layers of history preserved under the pavement; the
construction of the Goldman Sachs headquarters at 85 Broad St., four
blocks away, became a cause celebre for preservationists in 1979 after
digging revealed the foundation of the original Dutch town hall, the
Stadt Huys. Because the land at 17 State St. had been so constituently
used, and for so long, it was likely fecund with historical material,
including rare artifacts of colonial Jewish life.

Kaufman built anyway, with blessing from the city’s Board of
Standards and Appeals. In exchange for forgoing a mandated city
Environmental Quality Review, Kaufman agreed to an exhibition space
devoted to archeology. This was penance, but only of a wrist-slapping
magnitude. “I don’t want to overstate it. It’s not going to be one of the
great educational experiences of all time,” a Kaufman lawyer told The
New York Times in 1990.
Page 3 of 4)

Thus New York Unearthed was born, the awkward stepchild of civic
compromise: owned privately by Kaufman but operated for the public
by the South Street Seaport Museum. Its chief archeologist for 12
years, Diane Dallal, wistfully remembers it as a “tiny place with a lot of
information crammed into it.” The two-story space was designed by
the studio of Milton Glaser, famous for his “I ª NY” logo. Students
came in droves; tourists toting Century 21 shopping bags suddenly
found themselves in Century 17. A 1995 notice from the News called it
a place for “archeology buffs, historians and the merely curious.”
For a decade, Unearthed thrived, supported by TIAA-CREF, which had
bought 17 State from Kaufman. An internal memo from the late 1990s
described aspirations of becoming “the most important center for
urban archeology in the nation.”

But that never came to pass. TIAA-CREF sold 17 State to RFR Realty in
1999, which refused to provide material support to Unearthed beyond
not asking for rent or utility charges. RFR representatives tell me the
company — which also has midtown’s iconic Lever House and Seagram
Building in its portfolio — is “in no way responsible” for Unearthed’s
current condition.

That’s disputed by Jerold Kayden, a Harvard expert on public-private
spaces whose work is routinely referenced by the City Planning
Department (which refused to comment for this article). “It’s not a
public exhibit space if there’s no public exhibit in it,” Kayden says. The
author of “Privately Owned Public Space,” he believes that the owner’s
obligation was to both construct and fund the museum. After all, a
public-private space like Zuccotti Park must adhere to certain civic
standards — so argued Mayor Bloomberg when it came time to expel
the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Those same standards apply to
Unearthed. But while one became the center of worldwide attention,
the other, only blocks away, remains utterly uncared for.

Yet Unearthed did not close merely because RFR withheld funding. The
South Street Seaport Museum simply abandoned the space as a costcutting
measure, firing Dallal in 2005 and shuttering Unearthed shortly
thereafter. With the seaport museum growing increasingly desperate
about what to do with its vast collections, archeologists from Albany
came to the rescue. Down they went to Manhattan, hauling two million
little pieces of New York upstate. None of that saved the South Street
Seaport Museum, which continued to lose visitors and accrue debt
until it was taken over by the Museum of the City of New York this
year.
Page 4 of 4)

City Hall also forgot this little museum. When I called Bloomberg’s
office about it, a spokesman confessed that he had no idea what
Unearthed was. Yet the City Planning Department’s website still lists
Unearthed as a “destination” space, while an “Exploring Lower
Manhattan” information marker on State St. touts Unearthed’s
“remarkable” collections.

What doomed Unearthed is prevailing neglect. And that neglect can
still be reversed. Dallal says it would take perhaps $200,000 to get
Unearthed running again. Some of that must come from RFR, whose
founder, Aby Rosen, is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and knows
that a deserted ground-level space is not what potential renters at 17
State St. want to see.

Some help should come from the Museum of the City of New York and
the New-York Historical Society, both of which should see in Unearthed
an opportunity to establish a foothold in a downtown rife with tourists
again. Some of it, too, should come from a City Hall intent on
promoting lower Manhattan as more than bankers’ pasture grounds.

Recently, maintenance workers on Fulton St. found some 5,000
artifacts — chamber pots, bone toothbrushes, a gravy boat — that
offer evidence of the life of a wealthy family in the early 19th century.
This led the website Gothamist to wonder, “What might future
archeologists find. . . 200 years from now? Some yogurt-covered
pretzels and a petrified copy of the Duane Reader.”

Maybe so. And one inevitable day, 17 State will become landfill, and
we will become dust. Future generations will wonder how we lived —
not only which country we invaded, which bank collapsed, but how we
led our ordinary lives in this most extraordinary of cities.

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