March 21–28, 2002
All About Benjamin
Revisiting Franklin Court, a museum trapped in time.
Christina Felice
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ARCHIVES .
March 21–28, 2002 All About BenjaminRevisiting Franklin Court, a museum trapped in time. Christina Felice
If you propose to go Underground, you must do so by means of The Ramp. The Ramp is more than a conveyance; it is a slow descent, a whisper of things to come, a seduction into Underground consciousness. The first thing you notice, however, is not very seductive: burnt orange. This is the uniform color of the tiles, the walls, even the ceiling. This sickly, lecherous hue stirs you up with memories of shag carpeting, love seats and corduroy pants. You’ve barely begun your journey Underground, but The Ramp has already sent you into a burnt-orange haze. Ten feet farther Underground you encounter The Mural, which portrays a young Ben Franklin and his future wife Debbie just on the verge of meeting. Ben is striding down Market Street, 17 years old, his own man at last. Pretty Debbie stands in a doorway, peering out from beneath her bonnet, both demure and lascivious. The scene contains a charge of transgression, a notion of rustling skirts and smeared powder. You experience a prurient rush that is entirely inconsistent with schoolbook history. The year is 1723, but the sexual revolution is about to descend on Ben and Debbie. As you continue moving down, you become aware that The Ramp is uncomfortably steep for walking. That’s because it’s built for wheelchair users, who can glide on this underground highway like cars full of seekers looking for the real America. The Ramp can be seen as egalitarianism at its acme, a challenge to timid models of democracy that satisfy themselves with oneman, one vote. This is a bold new democracy, asking us to come together as equal beings and try to work things out. You’re disappointed when you see the first room of exhibits. You probably didn’t expect these cream-colored walls and hardwood floors, and you certainly didn’t expect a room where every exhibit stops well short of being, well, exhibitable. A whole wall holds dull replicas of Franklin’s possessions; the opposite wall has clumsily executed paintings. Then there is the Glass Armonica, Franklin’s musical invention that looks hopelessly tuneless and embarrassingly phallic. You begin to wonder what crazy sensibility curated this room, what unbalanced individual wasted public space on so many things that are ridiculous, botched or dull. But then your ear tunes in to a quiet tape loop of piano and woodwind music… The woodwind carries a lighthearted melody, suggesting that the fathers of our country weren’t such the serious men as you might’ve thought. The piano is morose, suggesting deep funks and self-doubt. Then it dawns on you that this room has its own skewed theme: It appears to revere artifacts while questioning their value, appears to honor the great while making them human and frail, appears to exhibit history while skewering the whole notion of exhibition. In short, this is The Conventional Room, a strategic bone thrown to the World War II types who still controlled the nation’s purse strings in the ’70s. Meanwhile, the museum’s real intended audience, by the time they reach the end of their visit Underground, will have completely forgotten the beginning. You forget it in an instant, for now you’ve entered the dark soul of the Underground: The Hall of Mirrors and Light. It is a small room, mirrored on all sides and dominated by a neon device that emits syncopated stabs of green, purple, pink, blue and red. The mirrors cross-reflect the light into infinity, and all the prurience you felt on The Ramp surges back and gives your heart a jolt. You almost believe you’ve stumbled into a pornography district. PEEP. LIVE GIRLS. STOPLESS TOPLESS. Only gradually do you realize that the neon words are these: CITIZEN. STATESMAN. AUTHOR. SCIENTIST. PUBLISHER. PRINTER. INVENTOR. DIPLOMAT. Franklin never seemed sexier. The porno connection is presumably lost on children, but they love this strange dark place. One young fellow takes it all in and says, "Cool." Another, full of approval, opines that "this is weird." Only when The Hall is clear of children do you realize that, because of the way the mirrors are positioned, short people can see more levels of reflection than tall ones. Gimmicks are not wasted on children. You leave behind the dazzle of The Hall and emerge into The Big Room. If The Hall is the museum’s soul, The Big Room is its heart. It is a large, dim space full of scampering children, harried parents, slow-footed oldsters, noise. It’s pure subterranean chaos. You begin your circuit at the centrally placed diorama, whose railing, set at elbow height, invites you to lean and linger. A bugle flourishes, a Union Jack drops from above, a trap door opens, and tiny wigged figures surge up from the floor. A tick-tocking clock creates a dire mood, and a recorded voice sets the scene as the House of Commons, London, 1766, where Ben Franklin, brave patriot, is trying to stave off war. The recorded narrator is full of doubt and nerves. Where is the ’40s-era Voice of God who trusted absolutely in right and might, who did not allow us to descend into anxiety and fear? Here, Underground, we do descend; we suffer through moments of trial and suspect that darkness might be our reward. Then suddenly — peace. A decade later we will fight our war for independence, but for now Ben Franklin has delayed the crisis, and he’s done it while only a few inches tall. Textbooks taught you to immortalize the great, to suspend your powers of judgment, but the Underground Museum encourages critique. Here, you think for yourself. Here, you are as big as anyone. Now it’s time to discover the telephone bank—the very glory of the collection. You see 52 phones mounted on posts and a telephone directory displayed on the wall. You squint at the numbers, struggle with a creaky old phone, dial a number and get no ring. You begin to suspect that the whole system stopped functioning in the ’80s. Finally, though, Immanuel Kant takes your call and without so much as a hello, announces that "Franklin voss see Promeseus of hees times." Click. It doesn’t matter that you can’t remember much about Prometheus, because now you’ve reached John Keats at home. "Franklin was a philosophical Quaker," he says. "Full of mean and thrifty maxims." Whoa — what’s so bad about Quakers? Balzac, Hume, George Sand — each speaks a dictum in a plain, human voice: frail, pompous, whiny, wise. This beautifully intentioned phone bank, so ridiculously out of date just a generation after its creation, disarms you with its lovable silliness and soothes you with its kind proffered hand. Now a little girl wanders by announcing that George Washington sounded like some other guy. He probably did. A movie remains. To reach the theater you shuttle down a ramp (self-referential; a literary flourish), reading through a wall-mounted timeline of Franklin’s life. You learn that when Franklin ran away from an apprenticeship at the age of 17, he’d already invented swim flippers. You’ve never liked the man as much as you do right now, but you are weary, and it’s with half a heart that you listen to Ben and Debbie narrate their lives together, their love, their sorrows. The screen goes dark. You crawl up into the strange light of day. Franklin Court, 314-322 Market St., 215-597-2760. 
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