That’s okay. There’s a lot I don’t know. I just try to take the learning mindset.
I love House on the Rock. we went every year when I was a kid. Always took quarters for the pneumatic orchestras and the fortune teller.
I’ve been to some really disappointing ones, like the Knife and Edged Weapons Museum in Intercourse, PA (basically some guy’s tiny second house showing his knife collection) and a museum on Uellong-do, South Korea, showcasing a couple of letters that PROVE Uellong-do and Dok-do belong to South Korea, not Japan. I went into these with low expectations.
One place that should have been much better was The National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington, DC. It’s closed now, I went there maybe 20 years ago. One problem with it was, it was less informative about crime than an average episode of Criminal Minds. The history of law enforcement is actually quite interesting, but this place focused on efforts to suppress things that were either no longer illegal or probably never should have been (like witchcraft, prohibition-era booze, and marijuana). They wisely did not focus on catching runaway slaves, which was the primary mission of most big city police departments in the US prior to the Civil War. Anyway, it seemed like a big missed opportunity. This was in the same neighborhood as the original International Spy Museum, which was awesome.
This is a common complaint; that and the fact that the painting is fairly small (20"x30"). If one is of small stature, all he’s going to see is the back of people’s heads. For my money, the Borghese gallery is a better bet just for the Bernini sculptures of David and The Rape of Proserpina.
My favourite artwork in the Louvre is the Victory of Samothrace.
This type of sculpture almost certainly influenced the iconography of medieval angels.
Fair enough, but the general public or wandering Doper wouldn’t know the name until the got to the museum.
That’s because that’s all thats left. When the war ended & everything in situ got ‘mothballed’, Bradbury recognized the need to keep a Laboratory open for multiple reasons. He moved the Laboratory across the canyon, allowing all of the MP expedient-built properties to be torn down, repurposing the real estate into the ‘townsite.’ With the exception of Fuller Lodge & Bathtub Row (the original boy’s camp facilities), there just isn’t much publicly-accessible ‘original Manhattan Project’ left after the AEC privatized things.
Tripler
I yield my soapbox.
You have just enumerated why MPNHP, Los Alamos qualifies for this thread.
To some, fair enough. To others, their expectations may be incorrect.
Tripler
It’s a “living museum.”
For all these things, it’d be neat if folks operating and later shutting down historic facilities had an eye to preservation for posterity. Often there’s neither budget nor management bandwidth for that. So stuff gets torn down, scrapped, etc., pretty much willy-nilly.
What if the US military in mid 1945 had decided to save a few each of every type of land and air vehicle used during the war and one each of every ship class and keep the whole thing in one place as a giant monument / museum about what it took to win WWII? And lots and lots of the books, manuals, and administrative records of teh war? Then that was crazy talk; now it’d be a godsend to historians.
I have just one brush with military history. I was affiliated with this outfit while it was being shut down in 1989 just as I was getting out of USAF: 474th Tactical Fighter Wing - Wikipedia. Those two events were not unrelated.
You can see from the wiki that this unit has a long and storied history going back to 1943.
The USAF Historian’s department contacted our leadership about what elements of the Wing’s heritage and memorabilia we wanted to preserve. The task fell to me as one of the general-purpose-git-shit-done guys on the Commander’s staff.
They said it all had to fit into a single banker’s style cardboard file box. Oops; so much for preserving anything. We can’t win if they won’t let us play. Cést la guerre.
We had only a short time to visit the Louvre, with just a few hours at the end of the day. They started closing galleries for the night, when I walked past the staircase that has Victory at the top. The guard told me the gallery was closed and to move along, but since I was standing there with my mouth agape, he understood, and let me linger for a few minutes. Merci beaucoup!