When Things Are Going Really Well We Are A Cabinet Of Curiosities

The Staten Island Museum doesn’t need anything fancy like a cohesive theme:

The little museum two blocks from the Staten Island Ferry terminal, formally known as the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, is celebrating its birthday, and its status as just about the only general-interest museum left in the city, with a weirdest-hits show, an homage to the age-old notion of a museum as a cabinet of curiosities.

In the main room of the exhibition, which opened last week, a pickled star-nosed mole shares shelf space with the first blue grosbeak nestling found in New York City, a jar of squid eggs and a four-headed chicken born on a Staten Island farm in 1914. All the items are organized, Mr. Johnson said, according to a rigorous scientific principle: “People like looking at dead things in jars.”

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The curved brown object that was originally labeled a musk ox horn is actually an ironstone deposit from a local cliff. The thing that looks like the innards of a baseball is a hairball from a cow’s stomach. Another horn was labeled “tusk from wild boar which I shot in Louisiana swamp but not until he had killed my dog” and signed Charles Roome Parmele. Mr. Johnson offered no information on Mr. Parmele.

Much of the exhibition is assembled from castoffs from larger museums in other boroughs. A slab rich with dinosaur fossils was trash-picked decades ago from the American Museum of Natural History by a Staten Islander who worked there, Mr. Johnson said. “He had this in his backyard for many years,” he said.