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1 World Trade Center and Gateway Plaza in a thunderstorm. July 2, 2014.
(Photo: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)

Governors Island

Nineteenth-century wedding gowns in the exhibit "Tattered and Torn (On the Road to Deaccession)" on Governors Island. (Photos: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)

Michael Levinson's pug dog, Sylvia, was asleep. She was snoozing on the 36-inch-long train of the wedding gown worn by Mrs. John H. Linsley when she married on Oct. 23, 1877 in the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. - "then considered the most luxurious hotel in America with over 800 rooms," according to a nearby sign.

Levinson didn't mind Sylvia's choice of a resting place. Though Mrs. Linsley's cream-colored silk-satin gown trimmed with pearls and lace would have cost a fortune at the time, it is badly stained in back and too frayed for any museum to consider owning it.

It is part of an exhibit of 19th-century and early 20th-century couture that Levinson and his partner, Rodney De Jong, have assembled for display on Governors Island this summer. They call it, "Tattered and Torn (On the Road to Deaccession)."

All of the clothing in the exhibit was donated by major museums to Levinson and De Jong's non-profit organization, Empire Historic Arts. It came from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Saratoga Springs History Museum (where Levinson is in charge of acquisitions), the Schenectady Museum and the Hershey Museum.

There are five wedding dresses in the exhibit plus an assortment of other clothing including a purple velvet cape trimmed with ermine, a maternity costume, a summer gown and hat from c. 1780, ballroom fans, undergarments, shoes, blouses and more. All of it is exquisitely made.

The exhibit is being staged in a mid-19th-century home in Nolan Park on Governors Island that is one of several built to house officers of the U.S. Army, then quartered on the island. Levinson said that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant lived in that house before he was elected president of the United States.

Paint is peeling from the walls because of damage from a burst water main and because of the high humidity on the island. Swaths of netting suggest cobwebs. It looks like the house summoned up by Charles Dickens for Miss Havisham, the wealthy, middle-aged spinster in Great Expectations, who had been left at the altar and who wore her decrepit wedding dress for the rest of her life. The peeling paint is an expressive foil for the clothing. Both suggest the lives and dreams of people long dead.

"Tattered and Torn" occupies two floors of the house, with manikins in the otherwise empty rooms and even in the closets.

Levinson was trained at the School of Visual Arts and went on to a career doing display windows "for every couture house in New York - Bergdorf, Saks, Cartier, Bonwits, Tiffany's." He brings that background and that sense of drama to the "Tattered and Torn" exhibit.

"I curate like a display artist," he said. "That's because it's my job to sell history."

"Feel free to open doors," he tells his visitors. Touching garments is not prohibited. We encourage photos."

"Fantastic!" said Elizabeth Norment, an actress, as she descended the staircase from the second floor. "It's strange, wonderful and humorous," she said. "My friend and I just happened to wander in here. We opened this door to a magical world!"

Another visitor, Suellyn Friedel, who lives on the Lower East Side, said, "What an extraordinary exhibit!"

"Oh, my gosh! Well done!" said Monica DeLardi, a real estate broker in Lower Manhattan.

"Typically, that's the reaction I get when I curate outside of museums," said Levinson. "It allows me to break the rules. My focus is on entertainment and education."

Levinson knelt down to show two of his visitors the stiff, horsehair petticoat under one of the wedding dresses. They touched it with admiration and awe. Levinson told them that that dress would have cost around $125,000 in today's money.

Levinson explained the condition of the dresses by saying that most of them would have been packed in attic trunks. "They might have been on the top and the roof leaked, damaging the top garment," he said. "Garments below would have been in perfect condition."

The exhibit will be on Governors Island through Sept. 28. It is open on Saturdays and Sundays and holiday Mondays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

In the spring, the show will be staged in the Plumb-Bronson House museum in Hudson, N.Y. After that, Levinson and his partner plan to donate the garments to the Fashion Institute of Technology for use by students who are learning how clothing of this kind was constructed. There, it will be taken apart, the last stop on a long journey.