Books, Arts & Manners: In Indian Country

PASSING through the galleries of the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of the American Indian in lower Manhattan is about as pleasant as a fever dream in which we seem to be running constantly toward a goal and never getting there. Thousands of objects are arranged within a cramped and narrow circuit of rooms around the Alexander Hamilton Custom House’s central core (which, for various red-tape reasons, has not been leased to the museum) so that every time you think you’ve come to the end of the exhibition, another display awaits you, and then another and an-other. Once the busloads of schoolchildren start to pour in, this sclerotic entanglement will certainly become a living Hell.

The tale of the endless legal complications that led to transplanting the George Gustav Heye Center from its uptown mausoleum to its present downtown venue is too complicated and dispiriting to describe in detail. Suffice it to say that early in the century Heye deeded his collection of more than a million objects to the City of New York on condition that the city provide space for their display. Now the Smithsonian has taken it over, anticipating the opening, a decade hence, of a larger museum on the last remaining patch of greensward on the Mall in Washington. In the meantime, as stipulated in Heye’s will, it has established this museum in New York, which eventually will become a branch of the one in the capital.

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James Gardner

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PASSING through the galleries of the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of the American Indian in lower Manhattan is about as pleasant as a fever dream in which we seem to be running constantly toward a goal and never getting there. Thousands of objects are arranged within a cramped and narrow circuit of rooms around the Alexander Hamilton Custom House’s central core (which, for various red-tape reasons, has not been leased to the museum) so that every time you think you’ve come to the end of the exhibition, another display awaits you, and then another and an-other. Once the busloads of schoolchildren start to pour in, this sclerotic entanglement will certainly become a living Hell.

The tale of the endless legal complications that led to transplanting the George Gustav Heye Center from its uptown mausoleum to its present downtown venue is too complicated and dispiriting to describe in detail. Suffice it to say that early in the century Heye deeded his collection of more than a million objects to the City of New York on condition that the city provide space for their display. Now the Smithsonian has taken it over, anticipating the opening, a decade hence, of a larger museum on the last remaining patch of greensward on the Mall in Washington. In the meantime, as stipulated in Heye’s will, it has established this museum in New York, which eventually will become a branch of the one in the capital.