‘Lucy,’ Titanic star in exhibits

The Associated Press | July 4, 2009

NEW YORK – New York City has a new exposition center that will primarily launch large-scale, experiential exhibitions.

The Discovery Times Square Exposition is now open with two blockbuster shows. One recounts the poignant story of the Titanic and the other the discovery of the 3.2 million-year-old fossil known as Lucy.

The 60,000-square-foot space allows “Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia” and “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition” to be shown simultaneously. But each has its own admission price and can be seen separately.

“Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia”

About half of the show is dedicated to the culturally rich 5 million-year history of Ethiopia as the Cradle of Mankind, beginning with the Kingdom of Aksum in the first century and ending with the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.

Through photos, interactives and displays, visitors will learn about the ceremonial ritual of making Ethiopian coffee (an hourlong process), the nation’s connection to Rastafarianism and the return of the 1,700-year-old Axum obelisk to Ethiopia from Italy.

The second half of the exhibition deals with the story of human origin through charts and large interactive displays. The highlight is a 47 million-year-old primate fossil nicknamed Ida. It was discovered in Germany in the 1980s and amazingly shows an opposable thumb and big toe and stomach contents.

But Lucy is clearly the star of the show. Forty percent of her bones are intact, laid out in a glass case in a dimly lit gallery that is surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling panoramic mural depicting 6 million years of human evolution.

She is the most complete adult human ancestor to be found and fully excavated. A life-size replica of what she might have looked like stands nearby.

Donald Johanson, who made the discovery in a remote region of northeastern Ethiopia in 1974, said Lucy “sits on a very pivotal point of the family tree, between a very apelike creature and what looks more like us.”

Through her discovery, scientists were able to establish that human ancestors walked upright before evolving a big brain. Or as the show’s curator Dirk Van Tuerenhout put it: “We walked upright before getting smart.”

Standing only 31/2 feet tall, she died at age 11 or 12, which classifies her as an adult because biologically she had stopped growing, Johanson said. She got her name from the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” which was playing on a tape recorder in Johanson’s Ethiopian camp shortly after her discovery.

“Lucy’s Legacy” has previously been exhibited in museums in Houston and Seattle, but the New York show offers 20 new artifacts, including Ida.

To criticism that Lucy is too fragile to go on tour, Johanson said, “It was a decision of the Ethiopian government to travel her … to share the evolution of seeing a fossil like Lucy.”

Johanson, who attended Wednesday’s preview, said a black box was designed to protect her, and a curator is assigned to assemble and disassemble her.

“Titanic: Artifact Exhibition”

As visitors enter the exhibition, they’re handed a “boarding pass” with the name of a passenger on the RMS Titanic. They’re told to hold on to it. A memorial wall in the last room of the show will tell them whether their passenger perished or lived. It’s a chilling experience and a powerful reminder that the many displayed artifacts – pulled from the ocean floor of the ill-fated luxury liner – tell the story of real people and of a tragic moment in history.

The exhibition, which opens Thursday, is arranged chronologically, from the ship’s conception and construction (it took 10,000 workers and three years to build the “unsinkable” ship) to sailing and its destruction on April 14, 1912, after striking an iceberg. More than 1,500 people died; 706 survived.

The show distinguishes authentic artifacts from replicas by displaying them in glass cases. Room re-creations – based on blueprints, elevations and research – lend the exhibit a surreal sense of what it might have been like aboard the luxurious cruise ship. The grand staircase – reproduced to scale – is an opulent example of a bygone era. An example of a small third-class cabin with its set of bunk beds against that of a spacious first-class cabin complete with stained glass windows and upholstered chairs offers a window on the contrasting accommodations.

Yet, the third-class rooms “were a level above other liners of the time,” with passengers sleeping on real mattresses instead of ones made of straw and having access to toilets and running water, said John Zaller, creative director of Premier Exhibitions, a major provider of museum-quality touring exhibitions.

Ambient lighting and music add to the authentic atmosphere.

An outstanding amount of the items on display that were retrieved from the doomed ship – china, personal belongings and ship fittings – are remarkably intact or preserved.

A particularly eerie artifact is the docking bridge telephone box. The ship’s lookout used it to strike the Titanic’s bell three times to call the bridge. When the bridge officer answered, asking “Yes, what have you seen? Iceberg right ahead,” the lookout replied, “Thank you,” and then hung up.

The exhibit leads up to the moment of the disaster, which is recreated in a video by Discovery Channel. There’s also a model of an iceberg that visitors can touch “to bring home to them how cold it was” for passengers thrown overboard.

Zaller said he hopes the exhibition gives visitors “a meaningful interaction with one of the greatest maritime disasters of modern history.”

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