Museum Pages: Setting as Mood in the Old Gem Hall

An interviewer recently commented that New York feels like a character in my work. This is not the first time someone has said this, and I always take it as a good thing—a sign that I’ve achieved my goal of making the city feel tangible and present, more than an inert backdrop or the broad strokes of a familiar setting. But I don’t think of the city as a character; it’s more ever-present than that. Characters may come and go from scene to scene, essay to essay—but New York is part of everything I write, infusing the perspective and the prose, whether I’m directly describing it or not. New York, I think, is the mood of everything I write.

When I was a kid, the Gem Hall (officially the Hall of Gems and Minerals, though nobody ever called it that), was one of my favorite parts of the museum (second only to the taxidermy dioramas). The hall was dark and cavernous, making it easy to imagine yourself as an intrepid explorer, venturing into unknown caves to discover and unearth the sparkling treasures yourself. Some cases were on raised platforms, so you could climb up to them like approaching a shrine; others recessed in the walls, dark except for spotlights on the rocks, so they looked endless behind the displays. The whole thing was, inexplicably, carpeted. It was strange and delightful, and most importantly, it succeeded in its purpose of inspiring awe for the natural wonders it held.

When I heard a few years ago that the Gem Hall was being renovated, I groaned with anticipatory disappointment. My husband Soomin is also a city kid with cherished memories of the old Gem Hall, so we were both apprehensive when we finally went to see what they’d done to the place, after I put it off for a long time. And we were right to be. It’s now… just a room. An exhibit hall like any other, with marble floors, regular glass cases, and bright lighting. The gems themselves are still beautiful, the giant geodes still impressive, but the magic is gone.

As so many things do when two or more New Yorkers are involved, this trip to the museum turned into a conversation about how the city has gone to shit. Been stripped of its character, sanitized, flattened, eviscerated. The weird dark purple carpeting of home replaced with the anonymous slick floors of monoculture. We walked through the new hall, shaking our heads and gesticulating wildly with disgust and outrage while the gems twinkled all around us.

While Soomin and I ranted about the Gem Hall’s carpet—which became a stand-in for every beloved bar and restaurant that’s closed, every old friend priced out of their neighborhood—part of my brain was, as always, also thinking about writing. Specifically, I was thinking that the gems in the Gem Hall used to be characters playing out an exciting story in a rich setting that imbued the scene with texture and meaning. Now they’re in a literal embodiment of the “white room syndrome” that’s evoked in writing workshops to critique a piece of writing’s lack of discernible setting. And I could think of no more perfect example than the renovation of the Gem Hall to demonstrate what is lost when a setting is left vague and generic: What’s missing from the new Gem Hall is not just a carpet—it’s the specificity, idiosyncrasy, and weirdness that the carpet imparted. It’s the surprise of walking into an exhibit in a museum to find the room dark; the instinctive hush that would fall in response. What’s missing is mood.

As we left the museum in a huff, a theory started to germinate in my mind about the link between setting and mood—or at least, about setting as a tangible embodiment of mood; setting as mood’s most visible form.

The old Gem Hall, looking moody and magical

When people talk about what’s special about New York, they often reach for things that are not actually specific to the place: bodegas (other cities also have corner stores), density (Manila and Mumbai make NYC look downright pastoral), nightlife (try Berlin), etc. etc. Of course, what’s actually special about New York is much slipperier—it’s an attitude, a feeling, a mood. A specific vibration in the air that makes you feel alive and alert and a little bit insane.  

This intangible quality is what has always drawn people here in droves, and it’s why those of us whose internal rhythms are permanently tuned to it get so pissed off whenever another bar we loved closes or another ugly glass building goes up or another chain store opens, or the carpet in a museum exhibit hall is removed: These changes all throw off the vibe. The mood. We reassure ourselves and each other that the city has been in constant flux since the Dutch colonists first bemoaned that New Amsterdam just wasn’t what it used to be. But still. I once woke up sobbing from a dream that I was on the M14 bus going up Avenue A, and out the window I could see the Avenue A I remember from decades ago, now long gone. I recognized it from the light, the texture, the mood more than any individual details. But the bus wouldn’t stop and let me off. You can’t go home again, etc.

In everything I write, I am forever pressing my face against the glass of that bus window, trying to capture the bygone world beyond it. Not just as a backdrop against which the story plays out, but as the texture of the story itself.

The idea of setting as character is intended to elevate setting, I think, from something inert to something active. But New York is not an inert setting, not for me at least. New York is the weird purple carpet of the old Gem Hall, ever-present in every story played out by the gems in their cases, providing not just a backdrop but the mood.