The Lost Museum is my favorite museum right now, even though it doesn’t really exist. It’s an amazing Flash-based recreation of PT Barnum’s American Museum, lost to fire in 1865. Barnum’s Museum was a tour-de-force of oddities, curiosities, and humbuggery:
P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, located from 1841 to 1865 at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in lower Manhattan, has been long recognized by historians as a pivotal institution in the development of nineteenth-century urban culture. For a twenty-five cent admission, visitors viewed an ever-revolving series of “attractions,” from the patchwork Fejee Mermaid to the diminutive and articulate Tom Thumb. But the Museum also promoted educational ends, including natural history in its menageries, aquaria, and taxidermy exhibits; history in its paintings, wax figures, and memorabilia; and temperance reform and Shakespearean dramas in its “Lecture Room” or theater. Foreshadowing trends in American commercial amusement, the Museum was the first institution to combine sensational entertainment and gaudy display with instruction and moral uplift.
The virtual reconstruction contains such gems as a complete scan of an 1850 guidebook to the American Museum, articles from the period about attractions like the FeJee Mermaid, and background on the eccentric characters in Barnum’s living “collection.”
Link (Thanks, Kirby Bartlett-Sloan!)