November 2010

The Museum at Bethel Woods is an immersive and captivating multi-media experience that combines film and interactive displays, text panels and artifacts to tell the story of the Sixties and Woodstock. It explores the unique experience of the Woodstock festival, its significance as a culminating event of a decade of radical cultural transformation, and the legacy of the Sixties and Woodstock today.

Through personal stories and profiles, immersive multi-media exhibit displays and experiences, engaging programs, and educational events, The Museum encourages inter-generational dialogue about important ideas and issues relevant to today. It also helps to preserve the historic site on which the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair took place.

The house of Edward Hopper’s youth was built in 1858 by the artist's maternal grandfather, John Smith. Smith’s daughter Elizabeth married Garret Hopper in 1878 and the newlyweds moved into the house with Elizabeth’s widowed mother. Marion, their first child, was born in 1880 and Edward, in 1882.

The exterior of the house and most of the interior were created in the style loosely called "Queen Anne." As you enter, the rooms on the left are part of the original house built in the Federal style, indicated by the classic simplicity of the mantelpiece, the faithfully restored plaster molding, and the wide floorboards. The room to the right, with a ceiling of polished wood and a tiled fireplace, was added in 1882 the year of Edward's birth. To the right at the back of the house was the kitchen. In 2000, the Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation received the distinction of being listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

An internationally renowned art museum and one of the most significant architectural icons of the 20th century, the Guggenheim Museum is at once a vital cultural center, an educational institution, and the heart of an international network of museums. Visitors can experience special exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, lectures by artists and critics, performances and film screenings, classes for teens and adults, and daily tours of the galleries led by experienced docents. Founded on a collection of early modern masterpieces, the Guggenheim Museum today is an ever-growing institution devoted to the art of the 20th century and beyond.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana’s famous quote has probably never been used more appropriately than in the context of the Holocaust. With that in mind, the Holocaust Museum & Study Center is determined to prevent the lessons of the Holocaust from falling to the wayside. Through permanent, virtual and traveling exhibits, the museum provides visitors with insight into the anti-Semitic movement that took over Germany when the Nazis came to power.

In order to prevent anything like the Holocaust happening again, the museum is also a devoted education center, preaching cultural diversity and mutual respect of others.

The Museum of the City of New York's name says it all. Their mandate is to explore the past, present, and future of New York City and celebrate its heritage of diversity, opportunity, and perpetual transformation; they present a variety of exhibitions, public programs, and publications, all investigating what gives New York its singular character.

In this year alone, the museum has presented exhibitions on the golden age of New York baseball, the city's transformation under planner Robert Moses, and the hip-hop fashion revolution in New York. Recent public programs have included a talk by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Robert Caro, an interior design symposium on New York's great residential spaces, and a musical tribute to the rich heritage of Yiddish theater and its influences on Broadway. Through educational programs this year, children built their own model bridges based on New York's, conducted research projects for New York City History Day, and learned about New York's immigration stories through original hands-on workshops.

The South Street Seaport Museum preserves and interprets the history of New York City as a world port, a place where goods, labor and cultures are exchanged through work, commerce, and the interaction of diverse communities.

From transatlantic shipping to immigration to New York’s rise to economic pre-eminence, the waterfront world has played a critical role in developments that have transformed the entire city. Designated by Congress as America’s National Maritime Museum in 1998, the South Street Seaport Museum is located in a 12 square-block historic district on the East River in Lower Manhattan, the site of the original port of New York City.

The Museum is comprised of over 30,000 square feet of exhibition space and educational facilities in New York City’s largest concentration of restored early 19th-century commercial buildings. The Museum houses exhibition galleries, a working 19th-century print shop, an archaeology center, a maritime library, a craft center, a marine life conservation lab, and the largest privately-owned fleet of historic ships in the country.

In an effort to help younger generations grasp the cultural revolution associated with the Woodstock Music Festival, the Woodstock Museum has several movies on Woodstock and the Woodstock Festivals. In addition, the museum focuses on the movements important to those associated with the festival, including solar energy and Siberian Shamanism.

The museum is home to artifacts from the festival as well as information on Woodstock's official sister city, Nimbin, Australia.

Its history exemplifies the diversity of Brooklyn’s colonial farms, where Dutch-American landowners, enslaved and freed Africans, and later European immigrants labored on some of the country’s most fertile land.

Pieter Claesen Wyckoff, an illiterate teenage farm laborer, arrived in the New Netherlands in 1637. After serving his indenture to the van Rensselaer family, he and his wife, Grietje van Nes, settled in the village of Nieuw Amersfoort (modern East Flatbush-Flatlands, Brooklyn) where Wyckoff became a successful farmer and magistrate. Today his and Grietje’s eleven children have more than 50,000 descendants.

The Wyckoff Farmhouse typifies the vernacular farmhouse architecture of the Dutch-American farms of Brooklyn and Queens. Generations of Wyckoffs enlarged and altered the House and continued to farm the land until 1901.

Merchant Jacobus Van Cortlandt began purchasing land in the Bronx in 1694. Gradually, he developed the property into a wheat plantation with extensive milling operations. Jacobus’ son Frederick inherited the estate and commissioned the present house in 1748. The House was built in the Georgian style out of native fieldstone, and its elegant interior speaks to the family’s wealth and refinement.

During the Revolutionary War, the House’s location between Broadway and the Albany Post Road gave it a strategic position in the conflict. The House and plantation were occupied by Colonial and British armies in turn. General George Washington is known to have stayed in the House at least twice, as did British General Sir William Howe.

Blacksmith Isaac Valentine built this four-level fieldstone farmhouse in 1758 near the Boston Post Road. His property included a blacksmith shop, outhouses, farmland, and a number of slaves. His homestead was later the site of six skirmishes between American troops and British forces, who occupied the house for most of the Revolutionary War. After the Revolution, the Valentines fell on hard times and the Dutch Reformed Church seized the property. In 1791, the house passed into the hands of the Varian family. In 1905, William F. Beller purchased it.

In 1965, his son, William C. Beller, generously donated the historic house to The Society to be used as a museum.

In 1968, the restored house was opened to the public as the Museum of Bronx History. Visitors today can touch the fieldstones Isaac Valentine used to construct the house and walk on the oak and pine floorboards he fashioned. The main level contains three galleries that feature rich rotating bi-annual exhibitions, and a museum gift store. The upper levels are not open to the public.