…and the “Growing and Greening New York” exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York’s explains precisely why. MCNY has developed an exhibit detailing the city’s environmental challenges and how PlaNYC intends to address them.
The city’s admirable (if unpronounceable)PlaNYC initiative strives to “improve the city while confronting climate change,” focusing specifically on the city’s land, water, air, transportation, energy, and climate change. Mayor Bloomberg’s goal in creating PlaNYC is to enhance the quality of living and decrease the carbon footprint for today’s 8 million New Yorkers as well as the additional 1 million who will live there by 2030.
As the website details, some of PlaNYC’s goals include planting 1 million trees by 2017, ensuring every resident is a 10-minute walk from a park, achieving the cleanest air quality of any big city in the US, and reducing global warming emissions by 30 percent.
The exhibit walks the viewer through a day in the life of a typical New York resident, starting with the 7 a.m. shower, the 8 a.m. commute to work, 6 p.m. shopping, etc. Each of the 7 portions of the day/exhibit does an in-depth study on one focus of PlaNYC’s. For instance, the 7 a.m. shower section details how much water is used by New Yorkers daily, how it gets from the pipes underground to the residences and businesses above ground, how to save water with low flow shower heads, and so on.
One of the exhibit’s pieces of new media is the ActivStudio by Promethean. This interactive white board projects an image onto the screen and allows the user to further explore by touching the screen’s hot spots with the “magic pen.” While in theory very cool, the resolution of the screen was such that I had to back up about 3 feet to read it, then walk back to the screen again to touch it and continue to the next section. It would have been a wonderful medium for the content (the screen explained about the different species of trees in Central Park and their locations), but it was ineffective and disappointing.
“Growing and Greening New York” also had an indigestible amount of content. While viewing the exhibit, I was nearly asphyxiated by the word smog (though I admittedly spent the rest of the weekend spouting random facts to anyone who would listen). There was simply too much information to absorb. In the food/shopping section, for example, practically the whole of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma was crammed into one 6-foot-long table. If I wasn’t already naturally interested in the topic, I would have found it easy to breeze through the exhibit in 20 minutes (as many others did).
With no artifacts in the exhibit, and only a few historical references (to the city’s 160-year-old pipes, for example), historians may question the appropriateness of this exhibit in a traditionally historical museum. MCNY’s mission statement—“to explore the past, present, and future of New York City”—however, enables this museum to exhibit a wide variety of topics. I found the focus on the future very appropriate, given PlaNYC's mission and the nature of climate crisis in general; and any more content (be it past, present, or future) may have sent viewers' heads spinning and lost the audience completely.
What do you think? Does the focus on the future and lack of history diminish the historical authority of this museum? Does it attract audiences or lose them? Tell us what you think by clicking “comments” below!
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