The sad news that Baltimore’s wonderful American Dime Museum is to close down has prompted me to Flickr a few snaps that I took there in 2003. I remember it being dusty, odorous and brimming with wonders. They’re planning to auction off many of their displays – let’s hope they go to a good and public home.
Via Boing Boing
Museum of oddities couldn’t find acceptance
By Jill Rosen The Baltimore Sun; February 10, 2007
BALTIMORE — This time it’s for real.
After struggling to persuade Baltimore and the world to believe in its homage to the grotesque, freakish and phony, the American Dime Museum’s strange, seven-year show has come to an end.
Soon, the entire collection will go to auction — every shrunken head, every bizarre biological specimen, every mummy.
“To the bare walls, as they say,” says Dick Horne, the museum’s owner, curator and biggest fan. “No offers refused.”
In the past few years, the museum’s faithful have grown accustomed to word that the dusty space was closing — only to find out that wasn’t so much true. But Baltimore, a city that prides itself on an organic quirkiness, couldn’t sustain what had to be its strangest attraction.
“We’re losing another great piece of Baltimore personality,” says homegrown filmmaker John Waters. “It was esoteric and great and hilarious and very fitting for this city. Maybe it was just too good to be accepted by enough people.”
The American Dime Museum opened in 1999, a vehicle to showcase (and justify) Horne’s obsession with turn-of-the-century curiosity venues and the circus freak shows they evolved into.
Horne, 65, stands in the museum’s dimly lighted front room, hands jammed into the pockets of a black leather jacket, talking about why he’s giving up. In a word, it’s money.
And he thought that, despite “having the best collection of human hair art anywhere,” the museum would never obtain a corporate grant. “If I had a lot of money,” he half-jokes, “I’m not sure I’d give it to me.”
People will find as many as 400 oddities for sale at the auction on Feb. 26. Everything — literally — will go.
The tiny, leathery boots of an Idaho boy who was sucked right out of them and into his chimney in “a strange vortex” — never to be seen again.
A not-larger-than-life-yet-still-quite-large wax reproduction of Daniel Lambert, a 793-pound Englishman who died in 1809 at age 39.
The Olfactory Recognator, invented in 1918 to retain odors “for future enjoyment (or revulsion).”
Then shrunken human heads stuffed into dome-shaped glass jars. George Washington’s eyelashes. The flesh-eating toad from Madagascar (“extremely dangerous”), the homunculus, the severed hand of Spider Lillie, a prostitute who offed her clientele with poisonous spider eggs she hid in a ring.
The crumbling mummies will, of course, come with their handcrafted display cases.
None of these extraordinary objects is real. Many, Horne has painstakingly crafted of wood, wire cloth and glue. As he likes to say: “They’re better than real.”
Recently, a group of Johns Hopkins students taking a course on museums crowded in among the narrow aisles packed with so much stuff. “You folks are gonna have the honor of being the last to tour the American Dime Museum,” Horne eulogizes, looking down on them from the staircase landing. “See it before it disappears into a cloud of something — we’re not sure what.”
After an hour or so of gawking and giggling at Horne’s bounty, the students file out, leaving the museum empty and the curator with time to ponder what, if anything, the Dime Museum’s demise says about Baltimore. Is it possible for a city to become a little less real even as it becomes a little less fake?