AUBURN — Since opening Nov. 13, the New York State Equal Rights Heritage Center has welcomed 2,000 visitors.Â
Those visitors have discovered a center that's at once educational and architecturally elegant. To everyone else, though, it may still be a mystery. Auburnians know the center replaced a parking lot they used for the YMCA and Auburn Public Theater, and they know that they do or don't like how the building blends into the gateway to historic South Street. But that building has an inside, too.
With help from the center's visitor experience manager, Courtney Rae Kasper, here are five things you might not know about Auburn's Equal Rights Heritage Center:
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Auburn's Equal Rights Heritage Center: 5 things you might not know
1. The inside looks nothing like the outside.
Brooklyn architect nArchitects selected brick for the building's exterior because neighbor the Seward House Museum was the first brick building on South Street, Kasper said. The material also pays tribute to Harriet Tubman, as she and her family built their Auburn house using scraps from local brickyards. But when visitors walk inside the center, Kasper said, they're frequently surprised. Its stamped concrete walls evoke the work of I.M. Pei, and the mirrors at the top of them reflect the California cedar planks that comprise the ceiling. Meanwhile, until one steps into the center, they may not appreciate how its large windows frame nearby destinations like the Seward House, Memorial City Hall and Westminster Presbyterian Church. From the center, Kasper said, they look like portraits.
2. It presents the old in the newest ways possible.
The center is also a smart building and a geothermal unit, Kasper said, so its lights are timed and its floor is heated. Its exhibits are also highly technological. At several tablets located throughout, visitors can navigate menus about New York history and email themselves more information, as well as maps to sites they want to see. There's also a speech wall where visitors can listen to historic oration by figures like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and William H. Seward. Local artists and community members recorded the older speeches, Kasper said, while ones by Eleanor Roosevelt and Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul are original. There are two video walls, one with a map of historically significant locations statewide and the other with a timeline of organized struggles for rights. And, last, there's a song wall where visitors can listen to songs like "O Harriet the Brave," as sung by Genesee Elementary School fifth-graders, or a track from Auburn choreographer Sean McLeod's musical about the abolitionist. And because the center uses iPads, Kasper noted, they can always be updated as history is made.
3. It's for us as much as it's for them.
The center's 2,000 visitors so far have included ones from Alaska, Arizona, California and other states, Kasper said. But another 500 stopped in during the Miracle on Genesee Street and Holiday Parade festivities Nov. 24, and Kasper is booking school field trips into next fall. That's how it should be: Though it's informally known as a welcome center, the Equal Rights Heritage Center is just as much for Auburnians as it is for others who come to the city. Its front lobby offers information about local destinations and events in the form of brochures, two video walls with flyer boards, and, in the vestibule, a chalkboard map of the city where upcoming events are detailed. Kasper said even lifelong Auburnians may find they have a lot to learn about their hometown. "I learn something new every day from historians coming in here and sharing," she said.
4. Its exhibits are digestible but deep.
The information presented at the center is "snack-sized," Kasper said. Though it has more than 300 years of state history to cover, the center streamlines it while using the aforementioned technology to meet anyone's need for more. It color-codes its people and places: Blue for human rights, green for abolitionism and purple for women's rights. Those colors filter walls of important faces like Eliza Wright Osborne, who founded the Women's Educational and Industrial Union that stood where the Equal Rights Heritage Center does now, Kasper said. An original concrete retaining wall remains at the end of the center's courtyard, near the South Street sidewalk. The center also had help assembling its walls of historical banners, broadsides and posters from the Howland Stone Store Museum in Sherwood. The museum let the center reproduce some of its vast collection of women's suffrage posters, Kasper said. That means the posters have their own inherent history: On some, you can see where "7" is patched over the "5" in "1915," signifying how long women endured in hopes of earning the vote.
5. You can shop there, too.
5. You can shop there, too. In addition to its history and information about local events, the center also promotes New York food and beverages at its Taste NY market, operated by Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County. Kasper said the Auburn center can focus on Cayuga County-area producers, too, like Auburn's New Hope Mills and Jordan's Smokey Hollow Maple Syrup. There's a small stand for Doubledays merchandise as well.
Lake Life Editor David Wilcox can be reached at (315) 282-2455 or david.wilcox@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter .
David Wilcox
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