Good Guys, Bad Guys and Spies, All Wrapped in ‘Edutainment’
WASHINGTON — “If I told you what secret documents I had in my briefcase,” I said in response to a jocular inquiry from a fellow visitor at the International Spy Museum here this week, “I’d have to kill you.” And if I did that, I added silently, I might end up in a homicide exhibit at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, which opened in May a few blocks away. After spending a morning there, I wasn’t sure I was ready to return.
It isn’t that the new crime museum isn’t worth seeing. Its 28,000 square feet contain a Who’s Who of history’s bad guys — pirates, gangsters, bank robbers, serial killers — encompassing Blackbeard, Lucky Luciano, Jesse James and John Wayne Gacy. It features punishments like the colonial-era pillory (a model offers the requisite photo op for adventurous heads and hands), as well as the Tennessee electric chair affectionately nicknamed Old Smokey that was responsible for 125 executions. (No comparable photo op is offered.) And its law enforcement artifacts range from an 1862 Colt police revolver to a wax figure of J. Edgar Hoover.
To read complete article by Edward Rothstein go to NYTimes .com
