The photo could have been torn straight from the pages of an ethnological journal, except for one detail: a group of men in suits and derby hats stand watching from behind a low wooden fence.

Who were these tribespeople? Why had they been brought to America? What had become of them? That chance discovery turned into a full-blown obsession that took over more than three years of my life. There was something about the faces of the men, women, and children in the photograph, and their vitality, which drew me in. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. The idea that human beings had been exhibited a few miles from downtown Manhattan horrified and fascinated me; I needed to know more.

I discovered that in 1905 an American showman named Truman Hunt persuaded 50 members of the Bontoc Igorrote tribe to leave their homes in the far north of the Philippines and travel with him to America. He took them to Coney Island and instructed them to put on a “tribal show.” In return, he promised to pay them $15 each a month.

The Igorrotes, as they were known, became the hit of the summer season. They were written about in newspapers coast to coast, and inspired poems, newspaper cartoons, children’s puzzles, and advertising jingles selling everything from soap to cooking oil. They were visited by millions of ordinary Americans, along with famous singers and actors, anthropologists, and even President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice.

In newspaper reports, the Igorrotes were portrayed as either guileless innocents or vicious savages. The press wrote at length about the Igorrotes’ lack of clothes and described the tribe’s views on sexuality, notably the fact that they customarily had sexual relations before marriage and treated pre-marital pregnancy as a blessing rather than a disgrace. Elsewhere the tribespeople were invoked in articles about hard work and the simple life versus the complexities of modern living.

The Igorrotes weren’t the only people brought from distant lands to join the curiosities at Coney Island’s “freak show” in 1905. There were Eskimos, Somalis, and Irish farmers, too. But the Filipinos were by far the most popular, perhaps because of their perceived exoticism. The tribespeople’s bodies were covered in tattoos; they ate dog; and at home in the Philippines, they hunted the heads of their enemies.

At Coney Island, the tribe’s customs were distorted and shorn of meaning. In the Philippines, they ate dog on special occasions like weddings and funerals. But the dog feasts were so popular with the Coney crowds that their manager, Hunt, brought the tribespeople dogs from the New York City pound to eat every day. Hunt instructed the Igorrotes to build a head hunters’ watch tower inside their mock tribal village and took every opportunity to tell reporters about this particular bloodthirsty aspect of their customs.

Though exhibiting people in this manner seems abhorrent to us today, human zoos were nothing new in 1905. Nor were they an exclusively American phenomenon. For more than 400 years, “exotic” humans from faraway territories had been paraded in front of royal courts and wealthy patrons and at world’s fairs and expositions in England, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and Japan. Human zoos reached their peak in popularity during the age of imperialism as governments sought to gain popular support for their expansionist policies, and the public flocked to see their country’s new subjects up close. Far from being shameful hole-in-the-wall entertainment, people took their families to see human zoos, much as they would go to the movies today. In early-20th-century America, people were addicted to novelty and sensation, which provided a welcome escape from the daily grind.

Not only were the Igorrotes put on display at Coney Island to entertain people, they were also used to push the argument that America had a duty to protect, educate, and civilize “innocents” like them. Later, when the Igorrotes’ manager became embroiled in a national scandal, they were used to argue that America had no place in the Philippines at all.

The Igorrotes made Hunt a fortune in the summer of 1905, but the showman was spending the money as fast as they could earn it. Word reached the U.S. government that Hunt was mistreating the Igorrotes and withholding their wages. Fearing a scandal at a time when America’s presence in the Philippines was drawing criticism both abroad and at home, the government sent an agent to investigate. Hunt received a tip-off that the man was coming and took the tribespeople on the run, pursued by creditors, ex-wives, and Pinkerton detectives in addition to the government agent.

What surprised and intrigued me as I pieced this story together from declassified government documents, private and official correspondence, vital records, court transcripts, and thousands of newspaper articles, was that, 100 years after they first thrilled and scandalized America, the Igorrotes had been forgotten. They had simply disappeared from the public consciousness.

Why had America forgotten them? After thinking long and hard about this and discussing it with a wide range of people—scholars and anthropologists, Americans and Filipinos, including people descended from the Igorrotes—I believe there are two main reasons. First, popular culture is by nature ephemeral, and the Igorrotes were replaced by the next sensation. Second, the exhibition of these men, women, and children came to be seen as a shameful episode in U.S. history.

Human zoos fell out of fashion by the 1930s, replaced by other forms of entertainment like cinema and television. By the end of the World War II, classifying and displaying human beings as “civilized” or “primitive” was seen as a toxic form of ethnocentrism.

We no longer visit amusement parks and fairs today to ogle people who are different from us—though a knowing 21st-century version of the freak show still exists at Coney Island. But reality television continues to parade a stream of people deemed “freakish,” or “exotic” before fascinated audiences across the globe. The medium may have changed, and many people might not admit to watching these programs, but the human desire to look at people they see as “different” remains deeply ingrained.

More than a century after their show at Coney Island, a mere glimpse of the Igorrotes in a photograph charmed me. But their story is profoundly disturbing; lured to America to make a better life, they were widely betrayed—by their manager, by the U.S. government, and by the very society that fell in love with them. It is a story that makes us question who is civilized and who is savage.

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Our quiet residential street in South Park Slope, Brooklyn revealed nothing of the apocalyptic scenes playing out just a few miles to the north and south in Lower Manhattan and the Rockaway peninsula in Queens. A brief tour the next morning revealed some downed trees, broken fences, and damage to a few storefronts. Nothing felt dangerous until we saw the reports: the crane teetering over West 57th Street, the Con Edison plant exploding as half of Manhattan went dark, the devastating fires that decimated more than 100 homes in Breezy Point, a row of ambulances lined up to transport patients from a powerless hospital, and this haunting photo of water submerging the carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park, just a few stops from my apartment on the now-defunct subway.

Before moving to New York, I spent almost seven years in Southern California, where every summer and fall seems to bring wildfires. Residents in the flats go about their business unaffected apart from breathing in the smoke and ash, but a half-hour to the north, thousands of residents are getting displaced. One night, when I drove into Los Angeles from the east, the air was searing, and the only thing I could see in the dark on either side of the 10 Freeway were the mountains, which had become glowing infernos.

Californians exhibit a preternatural composure in the face of natural disaster (although of course it only takes a half-inch of rain to invoke total chaos), and over time I too developed a certain nonchalance about the prospect of fires, earthquakes, and mudslides. Danger, from a distance, often looks more dangerous than it does up close. People outside of Mexico might think the country is unsafe, while people inside Mexico think only Juárez is unsafe. Los Angeles looked deadly during the L.A. riots, but most Angelenos just watched them on television.

Then again, maybe distance makes us more, not less, realistic: I could have suffered the fates of unluckier fellow New Yorkers. I was just geographically lucky once more. My personal theory about being caught in the direct path of a natural disaster is similar to the one I hold about airlines losing luggage—the fact that it’s never happened to me means that I’m overdue.

When I’m no longer watching on from nearby—when it’s my turn to face a fire or flood—I hope that I respond with the grace, humanity, and stalwartness displayed by the first responders, medical personnel, and so many of the residents of New York City and the Northeast coast. But for now, as millions of people continue to wait out the darkness and water, my ecosystem thrums with everyday activity. People have been shopping, dining, walking their dogs, and trick-or-treating. With the fragile connectors that link the disparate boroughs and neighborhoods of New York City broken, we find ourselves planted on an island within an island. It’s a surreal ordinariness that brings palpable relief combined with a kind of survivors’ guilt.

Not that I fault anyone for returning quickly to old routines. It’s not callousness that drives us to carry on while others are suffering. Who wouldn’t want to return to work, make a morning coffee run, or dress the children up as superheroes to go out and collect candy like any other October 31? In any place, and under any circumstances, the human desire to reclaim normalcy may be the strongest force of all.

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When I first patronized the Gowanus Yacht Club (better known to its fans, and by my friends and family, as “the GYC”) in the early summer of 2007, I wasn’t impressed. It’s not impressive. The GYC is an outdoor bar wedged in a small corner of concrete at the intersection of Smith and President Streets, practically on top of a subway exit in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood. Customers crowd around uneven picnic tables hoping to catch the attention of the surly bartenders. It’s lit up by haphazardly strung Christmas lights. The menu is scrawled onto a chalkboard; when a keg runs dry, the beer is crossed (or smudged) off the list. The single toilet is down a dank flight of stairs. Visitors to the toilet must wash their hands with pink institutional soap stored in a ketchup bottle. My father declared it the worst bathroom he had seen in 20 years (he obviously doesn’t remember Gladstone, New Mexico). Overall, the GYC aesthetic is more white trash than white privilege—appropriate considering the bar’s namesake canal is a Superfund site.

But that summer of 2007 was incredibly hot. So without air conditioning in my apartment, I started going to the GYC more often. The umbrellas provided shade, and the surly bartenders brought cheap, cold beer to me at my uneven picnic table. Friends came, and we often met new friends chatting while waiting in line for the single toilet. Burgers went for $5, and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon for $2.50. While still not impressive exactly, the GYC was an outdoor oasis for Brooklyn’s sad apartment dwellers. As fall came, I unhappily realized that the GYC was going to close for the winter. I attempted to stave off the inevitable by wearing progressively thick layers of clothes. Yet in late October, it closed.

I impatiently waited all winter long for the GYC to reopen. After weeks of Internet rumor-mongering, it just opened again one clement spring day—as it did for the next five years. I moved into bigger apartments (trading up from a windowless room to a converted closet with a window and finally to a room where I had a bathroom of my own)—never with any outdoor space—but the GYC remained my backyard. It’s where I went to celebrate taking my LSAT the second time (the first time was too much of a disaster even to drink), and then a few years later after I took the New York Bar Exam. Just before I moved last month, I said my farewells with my best friend there. Mostly, I just went there anytime the weather was good enough and I wanted to be with friends. I eventually discovered that the GYC serves the best PBR in town, and the bartenders aren’t surly at all—as long as you spend at least two years cultivating them.

As I’d expected, the Asheville Yacht Club didn’t measure up on my maiden voyage: it’s inside, open all year round, and the bartenders are attentive. But I think it might eventually. I didn’t use the bathroom while I was there, but judging from the divey tiki vibe, I imagine it’s similar to the GYC’s. So there’s potential.

Elizabeth A. Newman is a native of Ponca City, Oklahoma, and currently resides in Asheville, North Carolina. She really doesn’t spend that much time at bars.

*Photo courtesy of Elizabeth A. Newman.

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Until 1940, when the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch opened nearby, Pratt’s library was known as the Pratt Free Library. It was the first general lending library in the borough, and cards were available to all people over the age of 14. For those too young for borrowing privileges, the building also housed a children’s library with an elaborate Romanesque portico and colonnade leading to a separate entrance. Looking up into the windows from the street today you can see nothing but shelves of books. Inside, the open stacks are designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, the floors are made of leaded glass tiles, and florid cast bronze shelving rises through all four levels. The collections are bathed in natural light, given the place of honor that books relegated to the basement stacks of a typical library are denied.

I am not and have never been a student at Pratt Institute. I’m a high school teacher and an expired Friend of Pratt Library, which means that four years ago I paid $100 to have a slip of yellow paper bearing my address and thus proving that I am part of the zip-code community. I joined when I was in the throes of working through a master’s thesis on Chaucer’s dream poems. This meant that most days I went straight from school to the library and stayed there until it closed at 11:00 p.m. Some days, tired from running around the classroom or overwhelmed by the difficult balance of work and graduate school, I’d put off my own research and pull whatever books were shelved the closest to my seat. I would read about the origins of lacework, early New Jersey glass factories, and methods of log cabin construction. In the end, the decorative art focus of the library shaped my final product and my thesis explored the poems’ material world: interiors and architectural adornment.

On the night that I finished my thesis there, I remember not wanting to leave right away because the closing chimes had not rung yet. A little over a year later, as I finished the final chapter of my first novel, my legs had become so cramped that I cleared part of a shelf so I could perch my computer at chest height. In the midst of typing my final sentences, I stood intertwined with the structure of the building. The shelves on either side of me were filled with periodicals on house restoration. As Marianne Moore reminisced about the Pratt Free Library in a 1960 essay for Vogue, “In the stacks, related items in a subject often became more important than the original quest.”

It has been more than 70 years since the library was officially closed to the public and 30 years since the porch of the children’s library was moved across campus to where it now sits, half ruin, half relic, a few feet from the great modern facade of the gymnasium, a stairway to nowhere.

In idealistic moments I wish that this haven were open to everyone again. But I know that would disrupt the placid stacks and obscure the odd titles that nowhere else see the light of day.

K. Abigail Walthausen is a high school English teacher and poet who lives in Brooklyn.

*Photo by K. Abigail Walthausen.

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