Ye Olde Curiosity Shop: where Seattle gets weird
Published: May 19, 2009
Ye Olde Curiosity Shop's two permanent residents, Sylvester and Sylvia, live in glass cases. They're dignified and yet wholly approachable, and they pose for every photograph without complaint. Also, they're mummies. Genuine, honest-to-goodness mummies — each one hundreds of years old and as crusty as the day is long.
A fixture of Seattle's waterfront since 1899, Ye Olde Curiosity Shop began life as a private collection of curios belonging to J. E. "Daddy" Standley. He ran the museum and shop until his death in 1940, never charging an admission.
To this day, Ye Olde Curiosity Shop's exhibitions are subsidized by the sale of souvenirs and knickknacks — and constantly building upon the venue collection of Native American and Eskimo art, natural and anthropological finds, and stuff that's just plain impossible to classify.
It's a strange combination, but it works. Browsing Ye Old Curiosity Shop is a joy, and it's easy to lose hours there eyeballing the exhibits, dropping coins into the vintage arcade attractions (Love Testers, Cail-O-Scopes) and shopping for unusual souvenirs. The line between what's real and what's phony isn't sharply drawn (the "stuffed mermaid" is probably a fake), but the whole enterprise is so charming that you hardly care.
Sylvester and Sylvia aren't even the strangest entities on display at the shop. That honor surely falls to Ye Old Curiosity Shop's collection of shrunken heads or its three-eyed, twin-snouted pig or its petrified dog ("Petri-Fido").
There are those who'd make a case for the two-headed calf, the Jackalope and the idols carved from grains of rice — and they'd be right, too. There's something to freak out virtually everyone at this wonderful museum of the weird.
- by Geoff Carter, Seattle Reporter for HelloMetro
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