Apparently, you can have too much of a good thing — which explains why Lauren Bacall’s gowns, Beethoven’s death mask, a paddy wagon and a 68-million-year-old triceratops skull are all in storage.
It’s the typical New York bind: There’s never enough shelf space. Whether too big, too fragile or redundant — just how many triceratops skulls does one need to admire, anyway? — millions of cultural artifacts are kept under wraps. And no place seems to tuck away as many things as the American Museum of Natural History: Though it contains more than 32 million specimens and artifacts, only a measly 2 percent are on display at any one time.
The rest — everything from beetle wings to a paper bicycle from Vietnam — is stowed in curators’ offices, cabinets, hallways and places like the Big Bone Room, where Carl Mehling oversees hundreds of pallets and drawers full of fossilized dinosaur remains.
Imagine a combination of library, morgue and Costco. Given that some bones are 6 feet long, it’s more like Fred Flintstone’s Costco. And Mehling, a self-described “nerd” who started as a volunteer there 24 years ago, keeps meticulous tabs on it all.
“Nobody wants to watch ‘Jurassic Park’ with me,” says Mehling. “When [the actors] blow off some dust and there’s a whole skeleton lying there, [I cry], ‘Nooo! That’s ridiculous!’ ”
Some skeletons are more complete than others. The other day, he gently lifted the plastic cover off an ovireptorid fossil fresh from Mongolia. Splayed out, its vertebrae, neck and tail bleached white, it looks like prehistoric roadkill.
“It’s about 80 million years old,” Mehling says of the fossil, on loan to the museum’s researchers, “give or take a week.”
On a shelf nearby lie the fossilized remains of a duckbill dinosaur’s skin. Black and pebbly, it could make a pretty interesting, if heavy, handbag. It came from Canada even before Neil Young did — about 70 million years ago.
Elsewhere are jawbones as long as some people are tall, half a triceratops skull and a big brown blob that turns out to be the footprints from a large ornithopod. That last was pulled from a Colorado coal mine in the 1930s.
“The miners saw tracks on the ceiling and started chopping away,” Mehling says. Luckily, someone asked the museum to take a look.
Nothing around here needs dusting — a highly efficient heating-ventilation system takes care of that — and some packages sent to the Big Bone Room lie on the floor, as yet unopened. One of them is dated 2003.
“It waited 80 million years to come here,” Mehling shrugs. “It can wait a few more years” before the museum opens it.
Occasionally, some stored objects are simply too weird to classify. Case in point: the Pavarotti Halloween mask at the Metropolitan Opera.
While the company stores its sets in an Edison, NJ, warehouse, “all the good things are here,” insists Robert Tuggle, longtime head of the Met’s archives.
“Here” is two floors below the company’s stage in Lincoln Center, home to a random wonderland of programs, posters, photos, sculptures, costumes and oddities like Beethoven’s death mask (one of several floating around the world), that Pavarotti mask donated by the tenor’s lawyer and a life-size wax head of ballerina Anna Pavlova, whose sightless eyes gaze out at a forest of filing cabinets.
Here, too, lying flat in labeled drawers, are many of the most famous opera costumes in the world: the clown suit Caruso wore in “Pagliacci,” with its matching, pompom hat; Marc Chagall’s hand-painted vestments for “The Magic Flute” and many a “Madama Butterfly” kimono. Leontyne Price supplied her own costume for “Aida”: Beaded and bejeweled, it looks like nothing any slave girl could afford. But the soprano was giving her farewell performances in that role, and wanted to make sure she’d stand out. She did.
Most singers and opera patrons donate the goods — though one of the Met’s biggest benefactors is the Museum of the City of New York. “They gave us all their opera costumes,” Tuggle says, gleefully. “Everybody runs out of room!”
It’s true, says Lacy Schutz, that museum’s director of collections. Of their 750,000 or so relics of old New York, only “a tiny fraction” are on display in the handsome building at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street.
The big stuff — a paddy wagon, streetcar and a 2-foot-tall terracotta maquette of the Statue of Liberty with chains on her feet that gave rise to what archivist Lindsay Turley calls the “urban myth” that Lady Liberty was African-American — is parked in a warehouse in Brooklyn.
Smaller stuff — maps, photos, negatives, posters and such oddities as the “Women for Prohibition Reform” buttons — is stored on the museum’s ground floor. One floor below that is “Costumes and Textiles,” which has been, for 34 years, the musty domain of curator Phyllis Magidson.
Pulling on a pair of white gloves, she holds up a pair of dainty pumps.
“These belonged to Mrs. George Blumenthal, who married many times and shopped in Paris,” she says. All told, Magidson oversees roughly 450 pairs of New Yorkers’ shoes, from the early 18th century to the “wedding sneakers” a bride designed for her 1997 nuptials. Size 7, they have white satin ribbon laces and, as far as Magidson knows, are one of a kind.
There are also drawers upon drawers of lingerie, corsets, caps, even tiaras and racks of dresses. About 28,000 of them, several of them Betty Bacall’s.
“She loved St. Laurent and Jimmy Galanos,” Magidson says, wistfully. The actress’ gowns were last displayed in 1987, part of an exhibit titled “Best of the Best-Dressed List.” Absent from that list were the mayoral duds in the museum’s collection: Ed Koch’s rumpled tweed jacket; David Dinkins’ warm-up suit; and Fiorello La Guardia’s silk smoking jacket. Noël Coward’s smoking jacket’s here as well.
And, just like those late-night knife ads promise, there’s more: Boss Tweed’s cuff links, Mrs. Astor’s brooches, a locket from the van Rensselaer clan (complete with locks of some ancestral hair) and Jack Dempsey’s silver championship boxing belt. All that and more are tucked away in the museum vault behind a 6-inch-thick steel door secured with a combination lock and an extra keyed lock for good measure. After all, this is New York — where you can never have too many locks.