Still Life Melissa Milgrom (notion reading list .txt) 📖

me the memo, and she did. It was addressed to exhibit developer Sally Love and said this:

Removing the murals is a straightforward conservation project with little in the way of technical challenges. Even the presence of lead white ground is not particularly a problem, because done properly, cutting the murals into panels would be accompanied by very focused, at-source, HEPA Type I dust extraction. The same would be true if the plaster or any other part of the substrate were found to contain asbestos.

In 1999, the museum, disregarding Hawks's memo, began to dismantle North American Mammals. "The dioramas had been constructed as part of the building, and it was going to be outrageously expensive to preserve the background paintings," James G. Mead, curator of marine mammals, explained to me one day by phone. He paused, collecting his thoughts. He was very sad to lose them. "So ... they ... didn't ... get ... preserved."

I'm not particularly sentimental, but it seemed rather scandalous for a powerful institution such as the Smithsonian to trash its dioramas. Dioramas are irreplaceable; the Akeleys and Hornadays of the world are long gone, as are the intimate localities they painstakingly selected, then preserved for posterity. Some museums preserve their dioramas at all costs. In 2006, for example, following extensive documentation and conservation, the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa transported nineteen dioramas from the 1950s and 1960s from one wing of its four-story granite building (also built in 1910) across an open atrium and reinstalled them on the other side. Remarkably, the museum remained open to the public the entire time.

Before North American Mammals was demolished, Mead and Hawks attempted to save the mountain sheep diorama, with its Canadian Rockies habitat and sheep personally collected by renowned paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott. The former director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Walcott had also served as Smithsonian secretary, and Mead called him a "museum man." The diorama didn't get saved. Neither did Life in the Sea. The mounts for both halls, however, were removed and stored in Newington, where museum officials said they'd stay until a new facility became available at the MSC. That didn't necessarily happen.

Take the eighty-nine-foot blue whale, for example. When a museum demolishes a hall, it hires outside contractors to do the work. As part of the contract, they are given salvage rights: that is, they own the stuff they remove—electrical wires, panes of glass, eighty-nine-foot-long blue whales. The whale in question was constructed in 1956 under the supervision of the whale biologist Remington Kellogg, who later served as assistant secretary of the Smithsonian. It had a huge fiberglass shell over a wooden structure and resembled an old aircraft. It dominated Life in the Sea for thirty-six years.

Although Mead knew that Life in the Sea would be replaced by the new Sant Ocean Hall, he didn't think the specimens would be destroyed. He had a good reason to think this. You can't just remove and sell a museum specimen; it first must be deaccessioned. In the museum world, deaccessioning is a formal process that requires certain paperwork and procedures. None of that had happened. But one day Mead heard, to his utter dismay, that the contractor had put the whale up for sale on eBay!

Mead was bewildered. Never in his thirty years as a museum man had he encountered such a ridiculous scenario: a gargantuan fiberglass whale on eBay. It might have been funny if the whale weren't such a treasured specimen. Mead wanted to keep the whale—at least its tail, head, fins, and flippers—for future exhibitions. Because it hadn't been deaccessioned, the salvage contract could have been nullified. "But everyone at the museum would have had to have agreed, and there wasn't an agreement," he explained, somewhat woefully. Meanwhile, the contractor, who had to take the whale off eBay because it was too big to remove from the building, heard about the dispute. He then filed suit for and was eventually awarded possession of "the object" (the whale). "It was his, and he was going to take it out. And we didn't get the tail, and we didn't get the flippers, and we didn't get the head. And I think the head, the tail, and the flippers ended up in a dumpster," Mead said.

"If the blue whale at the AMNH were torn down, the whole city [of New York] would protest," I said wishfully, remembering how the AMNH had given its whale a new navel when it renovated the Hall of Ocean Life.

"We loaned them our forms," Mead said. "That blue whale is a virtual duplicate of ours. The American Museum's is ninety-four feet—they stretched it, because they could then claim they had the longest model."

"Now they have the only one," I ventured.

"No. The National Science Museum in Tokyo has a life-size blue whale, and they are the only two in existence."

On Wednesday, November 15, 2003, the Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals opened. People in tuxedos and evening gowns sipped cocktails in the museum's grand rotunda as acrobats rappelled down the gleaming marble walls—a dreamy ballet reminiscent of Cirque du Soleil. It felt historic to be present for the opening. A more elegant and distinguished group of people was unimaginable, and the renovation was stunning.

I scanned the crowd for John Matthews, Ken Walker, and Paul Rhymer, but I couldn't find them. In the center of the rotunda, however, I saw the famous Fenykovi elephant, which had been unveiled in 1959. (I had read somewhere that a top Smithsonian administrator had demanded that its anus be sewn shut so that it wouldn't offend anyone at a previous opening.) Everyone was loose and happy and celebratory, eager to see what hadn't been seen in this place for decades: something new.

Secretary Small got up onstage and welcomed everyone to this momentous event. While he spoke, my mind was filled with David Schwendeman's stories of the ribbon cutting for the Akeley Hall of African Mammals in 1936. How exciting it must have been