BEHOLD’s Public Information Meeting
by Thaddeus Flint
Behold! New Lebanon, the self-described “museum of the people of Rural America” is back for a second season in New Lebanon—obviously–and decided it was time to formally introduce itself to some of those rural Americans who found themselves living in a museum that seems to have included them whether they wanted it or not.
[private] Behold! managed to ruffle some feathers last year when it appeared in the Town without really letting all that many of the Town’s people know beforehand that they would be appearing. So this year the new face of Behold!, program director Abigail Allard, made a point of holding a public information meeting before the July 4th kickoff.
There have been “some misconceptions making the rounds,” said Allard who is friendly, enthusiastic, and—probably most importantly to those of the rumpled feathers—a local.
The conceivers of those “misconceptions” are either a small minority, or just didn’t feel like coming to sit in the library on a beautiful summer’s night, because most of those crammed into the Library’s back room last Thursday night seemed to be Behold!’s “rural guides,” the local townspeople who will be conducting this summer’s workshops and tours.
There was Fiona Lally, who will be giving tours of her home, the Elm Tree Mill. President Theodore Roosevelt’s pancakes were milled there, and Lally will tell all about that and what it’s like to grow up in a historic home; “Tremendous splinters!” said Lally.
Debbie Gordon said she will be talking about jam making. “Cooking, like a lot of other domestic arts, is a skill being lost,” said Gordon. She will also be showing some 1800’s buildings that her organization, the Phoenix Project, is in the process of preserving.
One of those buildings might one day be a butcher shop, and Phoebe Young might one day be the butcher there. “It’s become a passion”, she said. Young will be showing how she makes her own version of Lebanon Bologna, called, appropriately, New Lebanon Bologna.
The talents went on and on (the whole list can be found online at beholdnewlebanon.org) and this was a mere sample of what was to come. Dolores Meissner will explain the auction business, Monte Wasch, who studied music at Julliard and played on the SS France before jumping ship to see Europe, will be discussing jazz. Roger Boutard had a small forage basket of mushrooms with him. “This one is called Satan,” he said, holding an evil yet tasty looking mushroom aloft. Just which ones one can eat will be the subject of Boutard’s program.
All that was well and good. Nobody was there to protest mushrooms or New Lebanon Bologna. But some residents present did want to know more about Behold!’s founder, Ruth Abram, and her previous project, the Manhattan Tenement Museum.
Abram opened the Tenement Museum in 1992 to show what it was like to live on the lower east side of Manhattan in the 1800’s. It was crowded then and it is still crowded now, though not nearly to the same extent. With the success of that museum came the need for expansion, and this is where controversy began. Louis and Mimi Holtzman, who lived in the working tenement next door, were asked to sell their building. The price the museum offered and the price the Holtzmans were willing to accept were never very close. The museum then enlisted the Empire State Development Corporation to get the building through eminent domain. So the Tenement Museum, which exists to showcase the hardship of tenement life, was now trying to kick out some real living tenement owners, as well as all the other people who lived and worked there, and turn their tenement into a larger tenement museum. “It does seem ironic,” Abrams was quoted by the New York Times in 2002.
Ironic too is that life-long New Lebanonites are now defending life-long Manhattanites thirteen years later.
“Ruth Abrams tried to take their property,” said resident Johanna-Johnson Smith.
Unfortunately Abrams was unable to attend the meeting as her husband had been in a recent car accident.
“You have a lot of questions and fear,” stated Church of Our Saviour Deacon Randolph Lucas, “because Behold! New Lebanon has not been open from the beginning.” That caused confusion, and “when people get confused they get upset,” Lucas added.
Jagat Pandey, while not exactly confused or upset, was one of those residents with a lot of questions. “What guarantees will our local people have,” was one of them. Would they end up one day like the Holtzmans? “What if they are doing the same thing here?” he asked.
Wasch, who is treasurer of Behold!, said, “This meeting is about Behold! and not about the Tenement Museum,” noting that Behold! has no interest in owning property to begin with.
“I used to be Town Supervisor,” pointed out ex-Town Supervisor Margaret Robertson, “served twelve years in the government, been around town a lot, everyone knows me. Never knew a thing about Behold! until I read a newspaper article.”
Robertson also felt it in poor taste that the residents of New Lebanon had to pay to go to the museum events that surrounded them. Behold! does offer 10% ticket discounts for residents of New Lebanon, Canaan, East Chatham and Stephentown. It was 50% last year, but Robertson pointed out that Museums and events in Berkshire County often have special days where residents of that county can go for free. “There is a lot of dissension because people feel left out and ignored,” Robertson said.
Allard said mistakes will be fixed. A second community meeting will be scheduled halfway through the season to get residents feedback early enough to react when they still have time to fix things. “I can only apologize for what happened in the past,” Allard ended the meeting saying, “but I can promise we are going to make it better in the future.” [/private]