The Streets of Manhattan

Keep your splendid, silent sun; Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods; Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards; Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields, where the Ninth-month bees hum; Give me faces and streets! give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs! Give me interminable eyes! give me women! give me comrades and lovers by the thousand! Let me see new ones every day! let me hold new ones by the hand every day Give me such shows! give me the streets of Manhattan! -"Give me the Splendid, Silent Sun," Walt Whitman

This past Friday we took an intern field trip (yes, intern field trips again!) to New York City.  As part of the internship at the National Museum of the American Indian, we visited the original museum - the George Gustav Heye Center - in New York.  Housed in the old marble-columned commerce building, it has a very different atmosphere from the Mall museum.  Yet its exhibits are wonderful - everything from beaded tunics and moccasins to Maya epigraphy and Aztec obsidian "mirrors," to Peruvian gold emblems.  I love how the NMAI unites native heritage throughout the Americas.

I also had some time to explore the American Museum of Natural History before flying back to D.C.  It's a bit of a shock to go from Native American museums to Natural History museums.  I suppose I've been spoiled by the NMAI and its devotion to consultation with native groups in curating exhibits.  The museum-goer is presented with a different perspective when exhibits are imbued with traditional, as well as anthropological, understandings of the objects displayed.

NMAI interns in NYC

It was interesting to be back in New York City again.  So much noise, movement, and diversity.  But I must say, I don't quite agree with Whitman.  I would choose the quiet serenity of the country any day over the bustle of city life.  It is beautiful, in its own way, but not so peaceful.