Museums in Harvard Yard

Harvard University sprouts out lots of museums. We visited two more of them today: the Museum of Natural History and the Peabody Museum of Anthropology.

We wandered through Harvard Yard (pronounced Haahvaahd Yaahd), with my dad asking directions at least once, because that’s what he does. I’m timid about asking directions, and sometimes I think he overdoes it. I rather think my mother—and perhaps my grandparents before her—have instilled in him a belief that he’s completely and hopelessly incompetent, whether it’s about following directions or using computers or whatever.

I say the above even though my dad’s choice to ask directions of the right person led us to the Museum of Natural History. We took the steps into a big brick Victorian building. The Boston & Cambridge bus tour conveniently covered two days and included free admission to this museum—all we had to do is show our ticket at the admittance counter. In this museum, we wandered through a huge room full of pretty rocks—crystals, gold, amethyst, etc. Some were huge chunks in glass display cases along the walls, and others were small pieces in nineteenth-century wooden display cases lined up in the center of the room. In the midst of all this was a case displaying very large, pointy crystals sticking up…and looking like they came from Superman’s planet.

The other room we explored (and my dad wasn’t nearly as interested in this one) was full of glass flowers and plants crafted by a man and his son from 1886 to 1936. They were Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, and they made nearly 4,400 of these detailed, realistic, and life-size plant sculptures, entirely from glass. The original purpose of the glass sculptures was to teach botany at Harvard; until then, students only had access to crude papier-mache or wax imitation plants and flowers.

The Museum of Natural History was connected to the Peabody Museum of Anthropology. We didn’t have to go outside to enter it, and we didn’t have to pay for admission, because we’d already gotten into the other museum.

The Peabody Museum has exhibits pertaining to the culture of Mayan and Aztec people and other Native Americans, and of South American cultures. I was especially fascinated by the bright and colorful appliqued projects of the Kuna culture from Panama, and I’d like to make something similar.

I thought about what it must be like to be a student at such a university: you can visit so many amazing museums, without even setting foot off your college campus.

Seventeenth Century Burial Ground

Yesterday I finally found an open gate to the seventeenth-century graveyard. It was fascinating--tombstones dating to the 1600s, 1700s, and early 1800s. Some were unreadable, but even some of the really old ones were still readable. I especially like the skulls with wings--now I know where Edward Gorey got the idea.

Many of these 17th and 18th century tombstones have charming images of skulls flanked by wings--probably representing the Angel of Death. Some have a face instead of a skull. 

Paul Revere's House

We visited Paul Revere's house--it was built in the 1680s and is still standing. The house has low ceilings on the main floor, a huge kitchen fireplace you could easily lie down in, and one room that’s furnished in gorgeous (Jacobean?) seventeenth-century furniture, the style of the original homeowner’s. The other rooms on display are furnished in late eighteenth-century style, as they were in Revere’s time. The attic is off-limits; it was the many children’s sleeping quarters. Revere was married twice; his first wife had nine children, and after she died, he married again, and his second wife also had nine children. I suspect one or both of them died in childbirth.

Bell made by Paul Revere. If he had made the Liberty Bell, it probably wouldn't have cracked. Inauspicious.

We got lost walking from Paul Revere’s house to the North Church where he sent out a signal. But eventually we found it, a simple white wooden structure with a tall belfry in front. It appears to still be in use as a church. The pews are separated by white paneled boxes with doors on which are plaques describing who is allowed to sit there, such as “Wards and Guests.”

Touring Boston, we passed a couple more graveyards--called burial grounds--from the seventeenth century. Paul Revere and other famous people are buried in them.

 Old North Church, where Paul Revere sent out a signal because the British were coming

I just realized Jane Austen would have had a field day writing satire based on my parents. For that matter, so would have Charles Dickens. But they're both dead, so I'll have to do it myself.

Art Museums at Harvard University

The Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University is under renovation and won't be completed until 2013. Across the street, the Sackler Museum of Asian and Middle Eastern Art has a few of Fogg's items on display--a room full of modern & post-modern art. The Asian & Middle Eastern art is upstairs--I took pictures of Buddhas, Hindu deities, and some Islamic tile. Gorgeous stuff. I also bought the museum's handbook to see a lot more of the museum's art, most of which is currently hidden away in storage.

 Islamic tile

 Stairs at the Sackler Museum

 A Chinese bodhisattva

 Buddha

Hindu goddess Kali dancing on Shiva

Image of one of the Buddha's disciples, probably his buddy Ananda

 Pablo Picasso

Georgia O'Keefe

Boston, Cheers, and Antique Shops

Today my dad and I took a bus tour of Boston and Cambridge. The tour guides/bus drivers were all quite amusing and informative.

The first stop on our tour of Boston was the Cheers bar. It’s in a beautiful neighborhood full of—you guessed it—really old buildings. Years ago my dad had said that Aunt Barbara owned an antique store next door to or around the corner from the Cheers bar, and many of her “customers” were people asking where the bar was located. However, carrying a business card we found at Aunt Barbara’s condo, we discovered that the antique store was located around the corner and down the street several blocks—it wasn’t as close as we had pictured it.

 The Cheers Bar, around the corner from Aunt Barbara's former antique shop

Interior of Cheers Bar, in the basement; the restaurant is upstairs.

We came to the address for what was formerly Mayfield Antiques, and it’s now a real estate agent’s office. It looked like nothing but a door in a narrow space—other shops appeared to be on either side of the door, so perhaps the office was upstairs. The agent, probably in his thirties and wearing a suit, happened to be on the doorstep while we stood looking up at the door and the black paneled number “49” above it. He talked with us (my dad, a retired newspaper reporter, can talk to everyone except my mother). He suggested we visit an antique store up the street named White and Crane (I think that was the name), because they had been in business forever and might remember Aunt Barbara and her shop.

We wandered further up the street—lined with beautiful old buildings with lots of paneling and brick and dormer windows and mansard roofs. Many of the shops were antique stores, so the competition must have been fierce when Aunt Barbara had her shop here twenty years ago. We came to the antique shop that had been in business a very long time (two hundred years, by the look of it), but it was closed for a long lunch break. The front was very dark paneled wood with big many-paneled windows displaying an impressive array of antiques.

One of the antique shops had, displayed in its front window, a large wooden cabinet, perhaps a sideboard, which contained among other things several sets of Stafford dogs. Another had a white china cat in the window, and another had a black china dog.

We backtracked to a Tibetan shop I had spotted and drooled over a block away, on the same side of the street as Aunt Barbara’s former shop. The Tibetan shop was in the basement, with its front window visible a few feet above ground. We stepped down into the shop, and I admired embroidered clothing and pillows and a good selection of books, particularly on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. The owner was a guy probably in his thirties who not only looked Tibetan but was carrying on a phone conversation in what sounded like Tibetan. I picked out three books about Tibetan women and begged my dad to get them for me, which he did. He chatted with the store owner and told him I’d been to Tibet, so we talked about that a little. I also looked around at other fabric items while my dad used the restroom. We returned to the tour bus stop, having decided we’d wait and have lunch someplace other than the Cheers bar because this had been only our first stop in Boston.