I Survived the Museum of Interesting Things!

Plus! Jake answers reader questions!! New Jerseys of the World!!!

Hello everyone,

Welcome to Issue #187 of CAFÉ ANNE!

So in the wake of last week’s story about my fellow Buffalo native Jake Rich and what it’s like to live in Times Square, readers had a slew of follow-up questions which Jake answered yesterday in a phone call.

First, my neighbor Shelly wanted to know, “How did he get that baby grand inside the apartment?”

Jake said that many people, like Shelly, assume he hired a crane to hoist the piano through his picture window. The truth is less dramatic—he hired a piano moving company that removed the lid and legs and hustled it up two flights of stairs. The cost? $1000. On the other hand, he’d just found the piano for free on Craigslist, so it all worked out.

Two readers, JEBNYC and Helen wanted to know, “What’s his rent?”

“Wow! A lotta people want to know that,” said Jake. “They sure do. Yep. I get that question all the time.”

And then he clammed up.

Rob in Fort Greene wondered about his music. Jake directed me to this recording on Soundcloud, though it’s from 2011. Expect some new tunes soon!

From CK Steefel in Seattle: “With that picture window over Times Square, has he ever rented out his place on New Years?” Jake said he’s never rented the place out for anything: “I have a great relationship with my landlord and they don’t want other people in it. It’s more important to maintain a great tenant relationship than make a little extra money.”

And finally, the very curious Appleton K. in Michigan wanted to know: Why would Stevie Wonder need a keyboard player? How did the big party turn out? Are there neighbors who complain about the noise from Jake’s gatherings? Do the Bills stand a chance against the reinvigorated Patriots?

Stevie Wonder, it turns out, often tours with a backup band of 40 musicians including a keyboard player who fills in when Stevie is playing other instruments like the harpejji. The party, Jake continued, was a fantastic blowout—videos coming soon! And no, he doesn’t get noise complaints because his only “neighbor” is the tenant downstairs, a theater company. Jake doesn’t throw parties when the theater has productions scheduled. As for the football outlook, “The Patriots are a flash in the pan,” said Jake. “The winds of destiny are at the back of the Buffalo Bills!”

That’s right. GO BILLS!

In other news, huge BILLS MAFIA shoutouts to our newest paid subscribers Tobias B. and Ken B. That’s enough $$$ to attend the upcoming Bills vs Jets game in…oh wait, no it isn’t. Can you believe the price of tickets these days?

I am very excited for this week’s issue, of course. We’ve got a visit to the Museum of Interesting Things featuring its even more interesting proprietor, Denny Daniel. Please enjoy.

Regards!

Anne

NYC EXPLORERS CLUB

I Survived the Museum of Interesting Things!

Confronting a wax cylinder phonograph!

Despite several requests from readers over the years, I did not want to write about the Museum of Interesting Things. I don’t like museums, for one, and I don’t care much about “things.”

But last month, I received an email from Annie G. in Gramercy, reporting on her recent visit to the museum with her kids. She urged me to go. “Calling it a museum is a stretch,” she wrote. “He is just a guy who has a bunch of cool old things in his crowded apartment and likes to show people.”

“There’s an interactive activity that involves opening his mail,” she added.

Now this sounded more up my alley!

To visit the museum, located in a glossy, high-rise, doorman building near Broadway and East 8th Street, you have to make an appointment. When I called to confirm my visit last week, I told the proprietor, Denny Daniel, that while I’d be writing a story for my blog, he should treat me as he would any museum guest.

“You mean I beat you senseless and throw you out the window?” he said.

Hahaha!

But Annie G. had survived, apparently, as had the dozens of museum visitors who’d left reviews on Google and Yelp. Most gave their tour a five-star rating, and raved about Mr. Daniel.

“The best thing about the museum is Denny himself,” wrote one. “You pays your money and you takes the ride!”

When I took the elevator up to the 12th floor and found apartment P at the end of a very beige hallway, Mr. Daniel was waiting at the door.

“This way! Welcome, welcome!” he said, sounding like a carnival barker. “Welcome to the Museum of Interesting Things!”

“Wow!” I said, looking around his apartment.

I’d been expecting a neat display of exhibits. But the place looked like the home of the world’s most eccentric hoarder—a jumble of antique gadgets, toys from the 1970s, photos, books and records. Amidst the seeming chaos, I spotted everything from a gum ball machine and a mechanical cash register to a ticker tape machine, a giant megaphone and a Peewee Herman doll.

And Mr. Daniel, in his deerstalker cap and ripped black jeans, looked like a punk rock Sherlock Holmes.

Denny Daniel!

“If you want, you can put your bag by the door and your jacket on the 100-year-old anesthesia machine,” he said.

My private tour started with a wax cylinder phonograph from the 1800s. Mr. Daniel urged me to give it a crank and shook his head when I screwed it up.

“You’re like a millennial. You don’t know clockwise!” he said. “Nobody knows what clockwise is anymore. Nobody has a clock!”

I cranked the other way and a tinny tune emerged from the horn. “The woman you were hearing was Ada Jones. Not Etta James, but Ada Jones,” said Mr. Daniel. “She was kind of a Lady Gaga for 1902.”

This launched a six-minute discourse on how the ear works, how the phonograph produce sound, and how it doubled as a recording device to replace dictation secretaries.

Next, the Mutoscope—an early, coin-operated, single-viewer motion picture device that works like a large, hand-cranked flip book.

The Mutoscope!

“Take this quarter, little girl, put your quarter in there.” Mr. Daniel offered a coin to insert in the slot, then paused. “Wait a second,” he said. “Does your mother give you permission for a quarter? Are we safe?”

“My mother’s dead,” I said.

The movie, a clip from Metropolis, spurred another lengthy exposition from Mr. Daniel, this time touching on HG Wells, sweat shops, robots, the Red Scare, AI, environmentalism, Luddites, George Carlin and Mr. Daniel’s late father, a shoe designer with 15 factories in Brazil supplying Thom McAn, Macy’s, and Bloomingdales.

But it was the pinhole camera that really got him going. I learned about Renaissance and Baroque art, caveman paintings, the physics of light, the fact that he attended both NYU and Oxford (“and got straight As!”), and the passing of his beloved cat, Tristan—all tied together with a bad joke about New Jersey.

He picked on New Jersey, Mr. Daniel confided, because I live in Brooklyn.

“When people from Jersey come here, then I pick on Brooklyn,” he said. “When I meet people from Staten Island, I pick on Staten Island.”

“The problem,” he continued, “is I get people from Dubai and all over the world, and then they don’t get my New Jersey jokes. So you know what I did? There’s a New Jersey in every country in the world, so I made a list of all the New Jerseys.”

He showed me a handwritten file. “It’s five pages, double-sided, you can’t photograph it,” he said. “You can’t because I’m going to publish a book, The New Jerseys of the World, and it’s compiled from the 15,000 people on my email list and what they picked. And it’s literally insane. I’ve got France, Albania, Russia, Utah, South Africa.”

“Dude, can my story include a little chart with just a handful of them, please?” I begged.

“Nope!”

Mr. Daniel knows how to handle a guest. He’s been giving museum tours for nearly 20 years. But the collecting of “things,” started well before. The NYC native, who grew up in Forest Hills, started with vintage Beatles albums and Spider-Man comics. After college and stints in the family shoe and real estate businesses, he got into graphic design, DJ’d at local radio stations and sang in his goth band, Sofia Run, at clubs like CBGBs.

The museum idea was spurred by friends’ birthday parties in his apartment where he regaled guests with stories about favorite finds in the collection.

“I realized that those stories were interesting and educational, but they also got people to be positive and curious again,” he said. “So for about two years, while we were doing those parties, I started collecting with a little more of a purpose.”

He hit a crossroads in 2007. While toying with the museum idea, he was also considering law school—he’d been accepted to a school in California. He tested the museum concept by giving a presentation at his childhood elementary. The kids went nuts, the Queens Chronicle gave it full-page coverage, and that was that.

“It made them so excited and inspired them,” he said of the students. “I said, ‘There’s something here that I think nature is pushing me into, that might be what I’m meant to do.”

He’s since had thousands of guests traipse through his apartment at $20 a head—mainly families and couples on dates. He’s also given presentations at schools, seniors centers and libraries, not to mention a long stint at the Coney Island sideshow.

And yes, he manages to make a living.

“So you invented your own occupation,” I observed.

“I did!” said Mr. Daniel.

By this point, I was feeling a little overwhelmed with information and suggested we view just a couple more items. Mr. Daniel picked a 3D photograph viewer from the late 1800s and a primitive, fire-lit projection device called a Magic Lantern. “It was used as the first PowerPoint!”

“Oh no!”

We examined an old catalogue of Magic Lantern slides which led to long discourse on Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and spirit photography.

I told him I was ready for the grand finale—the promised opening of the mail. Every visitor gets to unbox a new acquisition for the collection.

“But I want you to hear about two more items!” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t do any more items.”

“But this was given to me by the company that did Pee-wee’s Big Adventure!” he said, pointing out what looked like an old-fashioned movie projector.

Mr. Daniel and the Moviola!

It was a Moviola, the first device for motion picture editing, invented in 1924. “If you touch this machine, you’re touching a machine Tim Burton would have touched,” he said.

I smiled politely.

Mr. Daniel lowered his voice to a near whisper: “I said, if you touch this machine now...”

“Don’t make me touch the machine!” I said.

“If you touch this machine...”

“I don’t care!”

“If you touch, if you touch...”

“I don’t—”

Thank God, Mr. Daniel’s phone rang, and he had to take the call. “I’m being interviewed right now,” he told his caller. It was his brother, reporting on their mother, who is ill. Everything was okay.

Mr. Daniel insisted on one more item, an organ grinder’s organetto. “And here it is, the tin cup that the monkey held,” he said, handing me the container.

“Really,” I said, taking the cup. “That’s very cool.”

“And you know what that makes you?” said Mr. Daniel.

“Wait, don’t tell me, don’t tell me,” I said.

“A monkey.”

The Opening of the Mail was a bit anticlimactic. Mr. Daniel sat me on his living room sofa and shot a video as I cut the packing tape on a large box.

It contained 15 reels of film that he’d bought from “a cool film guy named Tommy.” He’d be using them for his monthly Secret Speakeasy events showing vintage movies. This was not super interesting to me, but Mr. Daniel went bananas, taking them out one-by-one for inspection, crowing like a kid at Christmas, which was delightful to observe.

Mr. Daniel inspects his new film reels with a magnifying glass

I was hoping to ask a few questions before leaving, but just then, the buzzer rang. It was the next guest. “I thought they weren’t coming, but I guess they are!” said Mr. Daniel.

The visitor was a very blonde mom from Queens with a thick European accent and her two very blonde sons who looked to be about eight and twelve.

I suggested we continue our interview the next day, but Mr. Daniel insisted that the boys at least hear the story of his education.

The young men sat on the floor and listened attentively as Mr. Daniel explained that while attending a private high school in Queens, he went behind his parents back and used money he’d saved up from working at a Carvel to take classes at NYU. “I was getting straight A’s,” he said.

While he eventually got busted, it all worked out. He was able to continue at NYU, enrolling in a special new program...

“I’ll hear the rest later!” I interrupted, fearing that the interview was holding up the family’s tour.

Mr. Daniel addressed the boys. “So what you guys want to do when you get to college is do what I did,” he said. “Take a summer session in a university somewhere else. I went to Oxford. You can go to Oxford, Cambridge, but make your mom pay for the best university that there is out there.”

“And you’ll want to pay for it,” he addressed the mother, “because when you get to be a senior at 80 years old, they’re the ones who are going to be buying you the diapers. You put them in Oxford, they can get you better diapers.”

The mother nodded and smiled.

Our final interview happened over Zoom the next morning, with Mr. Daniel in his childhood home where he is taking care of his mother.

“The designer here, believe it or not, was Joan Rivers’ designer,” he said. “So these curtains behind me—these are the same as the curtains from Joan Rivers’ apartment!”

We chatted about the future of the museum and its 6000-item collection. The dream, of course, is to house it in its own building and then leave the entire enterprise to the city so “the people” will guard it forever.

Most anyone can realize their dream, he said, if they bring all their enthusiasm to the table. “No matter what it is, people will sense that passion and love what you do for the passion,” he said.

And yes, he still sometimes contemplates going to law school. But I think the odds of that happening are about the same as the odds of me returning to touch the Moviola.

PS My chat with Mr. Daniel got me thinking about the New Jerseys of the World. Where I grew up, near Buffalo, the local New Jersey was for sure Cheektowaga, the suburb featuring the massive Walden Galleria mall, the airport, Interstate 90 and thousands of post-WW2 ranch houses. What’s the New Jersey of where you grew up—or where you live now? Leave a note in the comments!

CAFÉ ANNE is a free weekly newsletter created by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. Subscribe to get the latest issue every Monday.