Chrysler Museum

When I first visited the Norfolk Museum ten years ago, I recalled it as a not very appetizing collection of six hundred silver teaspoons and ten dull paintings. The Mariner's Museum at nearby Newport News had easily outcharmed it with a fine array of ship figureheads. So I almost missed the big change, a warning to snooty Phillyphiles like myself. I was flying off the last day of an Allegheny Airlines Liberty Fare.

I had been testing the parameters of that godsend for museum freaks like me, having in my two weeks flown the line's furthermost extremities--Minneapolis, Memphis, and Boston. I planned to fly down to Norfolk, turn around to D.C., and spend the day in chains at one of the many Smithsonian fiefdoms. Waiting for a flight, I picked up some Norfolk brochures.

Wait a minute! It was now the Chrysler Museum, in a brand new and very interesting building. Whoops. I took the limo into town and have never been sorry since. It seems that Chrysler's sister Bernice married Edgar Garbisch, and they became that epochal couple who practically invented American folk art as they filled their estate on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with indigenous goodies. Oi vey. Did they ever! And didn't some of these riches end up at Chrysler? You can bet your Shaker scoop they did.

And another thing. What architectural style do you associate with Bernice's bro Walter? Art deco, indeed. And the patron of that (to me) grandest structure after Louis Sullivan's bank at Owatonna and John Portman's Plaza at Ren Cen in Detroit, is the Chrysler Building.

So why shouldn't he have collected all sorts of deco, large and small, and given it to Norfolk? He did. It's there. Folk art and deco. Two good reasons to get on the next flight to Norfolk, and stay there. There are many other good reasons, you'll see. (Chrysler, bless him, collected everything.)

--from 20 Museums You've Never Heard Of/Horizon Magazine 1981