Rooms of the Past

The theme of a trip to New York the past two days became Rooms of the Past. Each says something about the lives they contained and their relationships to the larger world of the times. At the Jewish Museum, there is a virtual 3D recreation of a 1938 Berlin apartment. It speaks of a comfortable family life in a small space, by present standards, just before that life disappeared. Hitler lurks off stage.

Also at the Jewish Museum, there is a virtual video re-creation of the Cone sisters' apartment in Baltimore, similar to the videos museums sometimes offer of ancient cultures. The sisters were early collectors of Picasso and Matisse, among other artists. Their rooms speak of refined wealthy luxury and modern artistic taste, supported by their brothers' textile interests in North Carolina, where the industry moved to escape Northern union organization. The southern textile workers lurk offstage.

At the Morgan library, J.P. Morgan's pristinely preserved study consciously copies the power of Renaissance palaces in architecture and art patronage. Like the Medicis, he controlled the financial world of his time, acting as a central banker in the 1907 financial crisis from that study, while the best Renaissance portraits looked on from the walls. The rest of the country at the time looms, not lurks, offstage.

At the Players Club on Grammercy Park, Edwin Booth's living room and bedroom are preserved in  poor condition within the now elegant club founded by his infamous brother John Wilkes Booth, who lurks offstage.

We stayed next door at the National Arts Club, home of Samuel J. Tilden, a wealthy railroad lawyer who became a reformist governor of New York and the 1876 Democratic presidential candidate, losing  by one vote in the electoral college.  The vote reflected the post Civil War Reconstruction turmoil because three Southern states sent duplicate delegations to the college, one black and one white. The house displays the Victorian-era opulance of a wealthy man. The still-persistent issues of race and politcal corruption lurk offstage.

Grammercy Park itself - then and now a locked, gated garden - offers an outdoor room that was a sanctuary from the hoi polloi of the city, who lurked on the other side of the tall iron fence. As residents of the Arts Club, we strolled the paths.

Around the corner from the Arts club and down Irving Street, we ate at Pete's Tavern, where O'Henry drank and scribbled in the same era. The tenement dwellers of his stories lurk offstage.

What stories do our rooms tell? Who lurks or looms offstage?