Weird Attractions: USA
Last updated: 02/10/2006 - 09:43
There are a few outlandish museums and attractions in the USA...
Museums used to have a reputation for being old and stuffy, much like their exhibits. Nowadays, museums are vibrant, fascinating places, giving insights into history, culture and learning. That doesn't mean - however - that there aren't still a few oddities out there. Here's our guide to some of the more outlandish museums around the US.
The Glore Psychiatric Museum
Exhibit One: 63 buttons, 453 nails, nine bolts, 115 hairpins, 42 screws and 942 various pieces of metal. All 1,446 pieces were inside the stomach of a patient in State Lunatic Asylum No 2 in St Joseph, Minnesota, 70 years ago. Such items make up the most memorable exhibits in the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St Joseph, a state-funded operation in a former mental hospital and America's largest museum dedicated to mental illness.
The museum takes visitors across the wide span of historical treatment of mental illness, from the days when primitive holes were carved in skulls to release demons, to artefacts of more contemporary treatments, such as patients' paintings or self-portraits.
There are rough wooden replicas of 500-year-old devices: a dunking booth, a cage and a giant hollow wheel in which patients were forced to outrun their insanity. Mannequins model white straitjackets and gingham mitts; one is tied to an electroshock table, one to a stake with cardboard flames licking its feet.
Among the more modern items on display is a Zenith television containing 525 garbled letters written on scrap paper, discovered in 1971. A patient believed that he could communicate with the characters on TV by stuffing letters into the set. Some of the letters that were extracted are exhibited on a board so that visitors can read them.
The museum also seeks to demonstrate the increasing sophistication of treatments for mental illness and the often-ignored fact that there are cures and help available to most of the mentally ill.
Follow this link for more information on the St. Josephs Museums Inc. - which aside from the Glore Psychiatric Museum (featuring the History of Psychiatric Care through the centuries and the History of the St. Joseph State Hospital) also include: The Black Archives of
St. Joseph (featuring the History of the African-American Community in St. Joseph), The St. Joseph Museum (which features American Indian Cultures exhibits) and the Wyeth-Tootle Mansion (a Victorian Mansion situated at 1100 Charles, which is under restoration).
The Museum of Dirt
Here's where it all gets a bit creepy and stalker-like. In this American museum - to be found in Boston M.A - are samples of dirt, gleaned from celebrities in a scary serial-killer type of way.
The Museum of Dirt features a collection which includes:
Eastern State Penitentiary
Visited by the likes of celebrated author Charles Dickens, and prison to criminals like Al Capone, the gothic Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where the regime was based on rehabilitation, through solitary confinement, is a must-see. Once the site of brutal solitary confinement, the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia is now an unmissable historic site.
Pictured (right): The gothic Eastern State Penitentary, in philadelphia, is a disturbing must-see.Confinement
Charles Dickens, Alexis de Tocqueville and numerous other 19th century writers and intellectuals visited Eastern to comment on its radical 'Pennsylvania System' of confinement.
The system was based on Quaker belief in the rehabilitative power of isolation. After visiting the prison, Dickens wrote: "The system is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement, and I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong...". The system only ended in Pennsylvania in 1913.
The prison opened in 1829. Its first inmate was Charles William, serving two years for theft. The first woman inmate was received in 1831. Amongst the famous inmates at Eastern State Penitentiary was gangster Al Capone, who spent eight months there in 1929-30.
The architects of Eastern State Penitentiary wanted their building filled with the 'light of God'. The building is lit by more than 1,000 skylights, accentuating the haunting, beautiful atmosphere.
The massive, gothic facade of the Penitentiary stands in stark contrast to the building's church-like interior. The penitentiary was built on farmland nearly two miles outside Philadelphia. Eastern State quickly became, at one point, the most expensive American building of its day, and the most famous prison in the world.
Follow this link for a first-class 'virtual tour' of the prison buildings.
The exterior was designed to intimidate - implying a physical punishment. Eastern was in fact the world's first true penitentiary, a prison designed to encourage penance and genuine regret in criminals. The city grew to surround the massive walls, and today the penitentiary stands five blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art - well worth a visit if you're in the neighbourhood - tucked into a quiet Victorian neighbourhood.
Eastern State Penitentiary closed as a working prison in 1970, and fell into disrepair, before being renovated by the City of Philadelphia and re-opening as a historic site in 1994.
Museum of Questionable Medical Devices
It would seem that the medical world has got a lot to answer for, if you visit the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices in Minneapolis.
Take, for example, one of its most popular exhibits, The Psycograph, an antique phrenology machine. Phrenology was created by Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall and was a fashionable way to determine personality characteristics in the 19th century. According to - long dicredited - 'psuedo-science' of phrenology, different parts of the brain were 'organs' that controlled various character traits. If your head is bigger in one area, you have more of that trait. But if it's flat, there's nothing in there.
Henry Lavery patented the Psycograph in 1905. His first machine had an amazing 1,900 parts, but, sadly, didn't actually work. About 25 years later, he had mastered the machine and psycographs were the latest craze, featuring in department stores and theatre lobbies during the Great Depression.
Another fabulous, if questionable, device on display is the foot-operated breast-enlarger pump. Even before Pamela Anderson was out of nappies, women wanted to be her. In their quest for king-size cleavage, four million women in the United States spent $9.95 each on the foot-operated breast-enlarger pump in 1976. The device caused bruising...and nothing more. The device consists of a pump, clear plastic tubing and three cups - all in large sizes. The user creates a vacuum by pumping the pedal with the foot.
Other devices on display in this truly extraordinary museum include:
The website (see links) has many explanations of what these devices were meant to do to benefit medical science.
For more information, follow this link to the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices website.
The Museum of Bad Art
You might not have thought of Boston as the art critic capital of the world, but evidently it is. The good people of Boston have taken it upon themselves to select and collect the worst art in the world at The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA).
MOBA - operating under the mission statement: 'Art too bad to be ignored' claims to be the world's only museum'dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition and celebration of bad art in all its forms'. This is a collection of truly weird drawings, bizarre paintings and crazy sculpture.
The collections divide neatly into three parts: portraiture, landscapes and 'unseen forces'. The latter (as the museum's website proclaims, concerns: "...expressing as it does the full scope of the human psyche..."
If you're planning a visit - or even if you're checking out the website (see links), please do note that some works may not be suitable for children.
Follow this link for more information on visiting the The Museum of Bad Art in Boston - or to view the extensive online gallery.
Follow this link for a few less outlandish attraction and places to visit in the US.
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