The Birthday Underground
Constructing wunderkammern as mobile experiences.
Today is my birthday. As a kid growing up in Mexico City, my favorite birthday activity was to have pancakes for breakfast at Shirley’s (a diner located near my school) and/or fondue at the Chalet Suizo in Zona Rosa, which to me was the ultimate luxury. At the entrance of the restaurant was an antique coin-operated doll-house musical-automaton-diorama which always fascinated me.
These days, what I look forward to is a ritual that Dannielle Tegeder (who, as most know, is my better half) and I have observed over the course of 20 years, when we started dating.
When either of our birthdays arrive, the non-birthday partner develops an entire day of mystery activities throughout the city, mostly befitting our joint interest in the strange and unusual. As people who use their eyes as their job and see so much, for special occasions like these we are drawn to unusual visual culture, anthropologic interest, underground, and even kitsch. For good measure, the surprise tours are combined with hedonistic activities more in line with traditional birthdays (like going to a dinner or lunch at a fancy restaurant or going to a spa). Fortunately, in New York City the possibilities for finding odd and unusual places is seemingly inexhaustible: 20 years after we started this tradition we continue encountering new sites.
Neither of us can exactly recall how this ritual started, but one of my first recollections of it was taking Dannielle by surprise to the Museum of Sex in Manhattan, which had recently opened to the public. I haven’t been back ever since, but still remember an exhibition of silent porn films on view at the museum—also known as stag films or blue movies.
One initial (and logical) impulse, which has remained core to the tradition, is to take one another to see unusual or strange museums and collections. Dannielle has found some of the greatest gems. One is The Burns Archive, located on a brownstone on 38th street that holds the largest collection of medical photography in the world (1 million prints). The collection was assembled by Stanley Burns, an ophthalmologist who has been collecting daguerreotypes, vintage photographs and negatives of medical and forensic photography since the mid 1970s. The collection includes
gruesome imagery of executions, 19th century photographs of medical students posing (and sometimes cos-playing) with corpses and human limbs, and Victorian postmortem photography. The collection is closed to the public but one can schedule a paid private tour with Burns himself, who sometimes is accompanied by his adult daughter. Our tour was raucous, a bit surreal and at times hilarious, with Dr. Burns constantly arguing with his daughter while giving the tour around the house, overwhelming us with information and taking out disorganized cardboard boxes of countless prints from various closets throughout the house haphazardly labeled with general topics. Burns was a consultant for the HBO series The Knick, an HBO historical drama series taking place in a fictionalized version of the Knickerbocker Hospital in New York at the beginning of the 20th century.
Another museum to which Dannielle brought me is Torah Animal World, located in Borough Park in Brooklyn. The museum was assembled and opened in 2008 by Brooklyn rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch with the mission to show, in taxidermy version, every single animal mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Like Dr. Burns, rabbi Shaul offers the tours himself narrating the story of Noah’s Ark, surrounded by taxidermized lions, zebras and crocodiles, and then conducting visitors to a second floor where he shows “authentic” Roman and Egyptian artifacts from the biblical era (he did show us “certificates of authenticity” for the items that he had purchased online). These collections are what I would term “organic postmodern”: earnest museological experiments that, had they been made or conceived by an artist, could be construed as institutional critique.
On another occasion, Dannielle took me to a mysterious building in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. As we went up the stairs, I felt that we were heading to do a drug deal. We knocked at the door. Behind it was Brazenhead Books, a speakeasy used bookstore, run by the now late Michael Seidenberg. Seidenberg used to run a legal, street-level store, but had to go underground into his apartment after he could not afford the storefront’s rent. The bookstore, which had excellent and hard to find titles, had no website or any public contact information; the address was a highly guarded secret amongst New York’s literary elite. Once you arrived, Seidenberg would welcome you and sometimes reward you finding him with a scotch. The level of conversation at the store was unusual; it was visited by erudite scholars, literary critics and authors (in line with the 1970s vibe of the locale, smoking was allowed). During my visit I remember Seidenberg discussing how Philip Roth was a customer, and how he would drop everything whenever Roth called to summon him: “whenever Philip Roth calls you, you go.”
These day-long marathons require the careful confection of a diverse menu of experiences, specifically connected to our personal interests. On July 12, 2012, I took Dannielle to Piet Mondrian’s grave —an artist who plays a central, and practically holy, role in her aesthetics. Mondrian, who died in New York, is buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. The tombstone of this giant of 20th century art is alongside hundreds of other identical nondescript markers, so it is almost impossible to find it (we had to ask a cemetery employee to help us). It was a very moving and poignant moment for both of us. I often told the anecdote to my colleagues at MoMA, and I thought it had not registered in anybody’s mind. But a few years later, a group of MoMA’s chief curators also went to the cemetery, accompanied by New Yorker magazine, to check it out. Mondrian’s grave is one of those things that have been around forever in plain sight and should be no revelation, but they don’t become visible until someone (in this case, me) points them out.
I also took Dannielle to other pilgrimage art sites, such as Joseph Cornell’s house in Utopia Parkway (also in Queens), and, more obscure, the Nicholas Roerich Museum in the Upper West Side (Roerich was a Russian theosophist and mystic, and the museum is just as enigmatic as he, his works and his ideas were).
On the darker side of the spectrum, I once signed us both up for an interview at a mortuary school. We walked into the office of the school, with Dannielle not having any idea as to where we were. I told Dannielle: “just follow my lead”. We were received by a school administrator who interviewed us in a strange office, asking us why we wanted to be forensic technicians. “We have always discussed it at home and have shared this interest all this time” I said. Dannielle played along perfectly. The administrator proceeded to tell us about the program and how and when we would get to dissect human bodies.
One of my own holy grails for these birthday projects had always been Treasures in the Trash in East Harlem. Sometime in 1985 Nelson Molina, a Department of Sanitation worker, found an interesting painting in a dumpster; he thought was too good to throw away and he brought it to the upper floor of the massive garage where he worked. The garage held dozens of garbage trucks, but the upper floor was mostly empty. Shortly afterward, other sanitation workers started bringing objects that they had found and considered of value for Molina to add to the collection. These included artworks, instruments, trophies, dolls, store signs, and practically anything one can imagine. But the “museum” is not open to the public, and I struggled to find Molina anywhere. Finally I realized he had a Facebook page, and contacted him that way. He replied, cryptically, but seemed open for us to visit the collection. He never gave me a phone number so we had to continue corresponding via Messenger. I was able to make an appointment but until the last moment I wasn’t sure if we would ever get in. We waited awkwardly in the dark, dusty and smelly sanitation garage. At some point, Molina did show up and took us through a stairway that led to the upper floor of the building; this led to an office and gym for the workers, and then the immense loft. The scene felt to us like the treasure in the cave scene of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves: Treasures in the Trash is a collection of 40,000 items rummaged from the trash over a period of four decades by hundreds of sanitation workers from all over the city. Molina, a self-effacing and nonchalant city employee, does not see himself as a curator, collector, or expert of any kind. Yet, he has built something extraordinary: an vast anthropological portrait of New York City and a microcosm of popular culture that should be part of the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
It would be impossible for me to list the hundreds of odd museums and experiences we have arranged for each other over the course of two decades. They have included a UFO museum, a workshop of fabric flowers in Hell’s Kitchen, the embalmed body of Mother Cabrini (the only mummy on public display in New York), a Masonic temple tour, a visit to the largest kaleidoscope in the world, Chico McMurtrie’s robotic church in Red Hook, Richard Kostelanetz’s gigantic art library and bookstore in Ridgewood which he only opens to the public once a month, the Book Barn in East Lyme, Connecticut, and , during the height of the 2020 pandemic (quite a challenge for Dannielle to produce) an outdoor performance of Walt Whitman’s poetry in Red Hook’s ferry landing. In correspondence, I produced a surprise play using Dannielle’s painting titles (some of which are a paragraph long) at Residency Unlimited, in 2021.
We have also ventured to other cities, doing tours in Mexico City (Museo del Juguete Antiguo, Museo de la Tortura), Philadelphia (The Wagner Institute of Science, the Arlington Cemetery Museum of Mourning Art and, of course, the Mutter), Detroit (Heidelberg Project, a visit to the famous abandoned Packard automotive plant) and last year Dannielle even managed to get me to Iceland where we did volcanic tours (and I got interesting Icelandic used books). One of the most memorable birthday culminations, was the rainy evening in 2017 when Dannielle and a friend, wearing mysterious horse masks, took me on a cab ride to a beach in Brooklyn between Rockaway and the Gerritsen Inlet. Amidst the storm we haphazardly and laughing had a rapidly disintegrating birthday cake on the edge of Glass Bottle Beach in Dead Horse Bay.
One day Dannielle and I will have to co-author a book (or do an exhibition, or both) about the Birthday Underground. I am not sure whether these rituals are art or not, but the question is irrelevant. They are opportunities to use the marker of birthdays to set time aside and, with these heightened experiences that are simulating to the mind and to the senses, celebrate being alive, which is what birthdays should be about. But they are more than simply a quest of the uncanny: they are expressions of love for one another. I often think of the lines that Oliver Sacks wrote when he learned he only had a few months left to live: “ I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world […] Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
And now, if you excuse me, I have to take off for a new birthday dark journey into light.
Happy Birthday Pablo! You should definitely do a compilation of these places and experiences!