Discovered at the museum!
HERE are the wackiest things unearthed from the city’s house museums, which are often among the oldest residences in the city. These objects’ discoveries often stem from the properties’ painstaking restoration or preservation efforts.
BABY SHOE
Found: In the walls of Poe Cottage Where: Grand Concourse and East Kingsbridge Road, Fordham During a 2010 restoration of the Bronx cottage where Edgar Allan Poe once lived, workers found quite a few artifacts, including a single baby’s shoe, corn cobs used for insulation and shards of ceramics. But because several people inhabited the cottage over the years, we can’t be sure anything belonged to the famous poet, says Kathleen McAuley, director of museums for the Bronx County Historical Society. “That’s part of the mystery of it all, just to imagine that maybe, who knows, a piece of that plate was used by Poe,” she says.
PILLBOXES AND FOOD
Found: At the Tenement Museum Where: 103 Orchard St., Lower East Side Aspirin tins, half-eaten bagels and desiccated raspberries are just a few of the hundreds of objects recovered from the museum’s buildings on Orchard Street. The bagel and a bag of raspberries were both found in boarded-up fireplaces, according to David Favaloro, director of curatorial affairs at the museum. “The ash and whatever in which these things were sitting kind of wicked away all the moisture and helped preserve them,” he says. “How they got in there, I have no idea.”
OPIUM BOTTLES
Found: In the eaves of the Hendrick I. Lott House Where: 1940 E. 36th St., Marine Park “Somebody had tossed them — obviously to hide them,” says Mary Jablonski, founder of Jablonski Building Conservation, Inc., who was working on a project at the site when she spotted the bottles of Dr. McMunn’s Elixir of Opium, a popular and widely available brand during the 19th century. “Literally, you could buy opium locally. It was terrible.”