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Most of us have visited the Brooklyn Museum — and breathed the rarified air of Rodin, Leibovitz, and Mueck — but Brooklyn has another museum, and it’s far more peculiar. It’s called Brooklyn’s Other Museum of Brooklyn, otherwise known as BOMB.
BOMB — housed in a 150-year-old brick building at 102 Steuben St., between Myrtle and Park avenues in Fort Greene — is a museum of modern artifacts, the disposed belongings of a rapidly changing, materialist society.
“This is the lobby,” said Scott Witter, owner and curator of BOMB, showing off a pile of what others might call junk.
There was the pole from a colonial rope bed, a pedestal sink, a washboard, a 1930s-era car jack.
“Most everything came out of the trash,” said Witter. “I’ve been Dumpster diving for 30 years.”
The heart of the two-year-old museum is on the second floor, lined with antique mirrors and sad-looking stuffed animals.
In the central gallery, Witter has neatly arranged hundreds of artifacts along the walls, the center of the room taken up by an 1880s wood-burning, oak-barrel stove, and a 1920 Briggs and Stratton Flyer — a lightweight, five-wheel automobile.
Witter is an unlikely looking curator for an unlikely museum. He combines the stocky good looks and plaid shirt of a lumberjack with the leather vest and black jeans of a biker. He expresses his empathy for the discarded, his regard for the beauty of little things, in his watery hazel eyes.
“I’ve spent most of my adult life rebuilding things, so I have to be able to see what I can glean from what’s left,” said Witter, who has a degree in architecture from Pratt Institute.
Witter has rescued stained glass from the 19th-century meat market that once sat on Fort Greene Place; one third of the facade from the demolished Long Island Railroad Terminal; a clock that survived a garage fire and, though blistered, still ticks; and artifacts from the fight to save Admirals Row, a collection of dilapidated 1800s-era mansions that the Navy Yard plans to demolish.
“I know Admirals Row could be rebuilt — I’ve rebuilt worse,” said Witter, whose museum gets a couple hundred visitors per year, roughly 400,000 fewer than the other Brooklyn Museum. “Each one is a unique mansion.”
But Witter is no modern-day Fred Sanford. He’s cut back on his Dumpster diving in order to prevent too much clutter, and there are at least a few things that he won’t collect.
“[I don’t collect] fine silver,” said Witter. “Or gold.”
Brooklyn’s Other Museum of Brooklyn is open Tuesdays, 7–9 pm.
©2007 The Brooklyn Paper
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