STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — The Alice Austen House has received a $250,000 grant from the Richmond County Savings Foundation (RCSF) to transform the grounds of the National Historic Landmark and museum once belonging to renowned Staten Island photographer Alice Austen.
In an announcement made on the grounds of the Rosebank site on Tuesday afternoon, the Alice Austen House was named the recipient of RCSF’s year-long, competitive Innovation Grant program. The program asked Staten Island organizations to submit their most innovative ideas for programs and projects. Forty submissions were received and — after three rounds of reviews — the Alice Austen House was selected as the winner.
“It came down to five finalists, and they all had really good proposals. but what separated [the Alice Austen House] was that you’re ready to go,” said Cesar Claro, executive director of RCSF. “We know it’s hard working through the system to get approvals, particularly for a project of this size. The quality of the portfolio, and the fact that you recently did a renovation, shows that things are really moving up in the museum, kind of put it over the top.”
The grant will help transform the exterior of the Alice Austen House, which will extend and support the work of the museum to serve the diversity of the community more fully. The outdoor environment aims to enhance community engagement among the most vulnerable Staten Island residents.
Plans include using large-scale outdoor interpretive panels, a community garden, functional seating, defined activity spaces, and the removal of barriers between the park and the surrounding community — hoping to inspire wider community participation.
“When I was able to bring home this reinterpretation of all of the galleries, it was really time to start thinking forward to the exterior space, and of course with COVID-19, the public — they came to us, they needed this outdoor space,” said Victoria Munro, executive director of the Alice Austen House. “It showed just how important the park space was to the community, yet so many of the visitors who I go out and talk to — because that was where we could have contact with people — did not know what the little white house was. They did not know who Alice Austen was, and her story is incredibly powerful.”
RE-ENVISIONING THE PARK
The Alice Austen House serves as an inspiration for young people, particularly young women and LGBTQ+ communities. It’s a nationally designated site of LGBTQ+ history, centering on the 56-year relationship between Austen and her life partner, Gertrude Tate.
“To not have any signage in the park, it’s incredibly problematic,” said Munro. “So part of this work is to remove the barriers to the park so that people feel welcome. It’s no longer a white picket fence, which Alice never had a white picket fence anyway, and really open up the driveway area, have large street front signage, so that people will understand that this is a community and cultural anchors for them.”
Working with a professional outdoor exhibition designer to re-envision the park, the Alice Austen House will activate the outdoor environment of the historic house as the gathering place that it was in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They will use Austen’s historic photographs to frame views and vignettes of the outdoor spaces — encouraging visitor participation in seeing and understanding the house “through Alice Austen’s eyes.”
Through designated areas for interpretive signage, as people will move throughout the park, they will learn about immigration history, women’s history, the history of the house, and about Alice Austen. It will also create a grounding anchor for the queer community garden, which is an affirming space that the museum uses in its work with teenagers.
A land acknowledgment will also be made to recognize Indigenous people — the Lenape — who initially lived on the land.
Since the museum and park are located in a residential neighborhood, there will also be exterior signage installed to help make it clear to visitors that the white home is a museum, and not a private residence. This will ensure that visitors approaching the museum know that it is an historic site in a public park.
The sign will also provide information about the significance of the historic grounds and location, which are integral to understanding the house and Austen’s influences.
Munro said she hopes that the design phase of these exterior upgrades will begin by the fall.
MORE ACCESS TO CONTENT
The park currently allows visitors to walk freely through the historic grounds, rather than restricting access to guided tours or workshops. This new permanent installation of exterior upgrades will continue to allow visitors to experience the grounds at their own pace — while also being offered more access to content through a self-guided approach.
Austen’s photographs will serve as the primary way to represent history on the interpretive panels, which will be shown through her visual record of urban portraits of immigrant workers, quarantine-related images, staged photos questioning gender roles, and historic Staten Island.
Interpretive text will accompany the photographs — grounded in scholarly concepts while remaining accessible to the public.
The scope of the project includes: house and park identification panels; at least nine interpretive panels; the removal of barriers between the park and community; informational signage; Austen’s contribution to photographic history; historic home history; Indigeneous land acknowledgment; New York City immigration history and Staten Island’s role; Staten Island women’s history; garden interpretations and spaces for artist interventions; and defined activity spaces, including the ecology of the waterfront.
Members of the RSCF board committee who interviewed the grantees and selected the Alice Austen House as the grant recipient were Gail Donovan, Jim Kelley and Godfrey Cartsens.
RCSF awarded an additional $355,000 to other non-profits that submitted to the Innovation Grant program. To date, the foundation has provided more than $70 million in funding to non-profit organizations serving the communities in which the bank operates.