Some People Would Die To Wind Up at This Museum – washingtonpost.com
Normally I would shamelessly plug my own museum (and I need to do that soon) but this one caught my eye today. It’s right in the same neighborhood and I didn’t realize that it was happening. The National Museum of Crime & Punishment opens today on 7th Street NW here in DC – just a 1/2 block from my museum. Here’s a bit from the Washington Post review in today’s paper:
You know the names: Jesse James, Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger . . .
And the men who chased them. Wild Bill Hickok. Wyatt Earp. Eliot Ness. J. Edgar Hoover.
The prisons where their kind were locked up: Rikers. Attica. Leavenworth. Alcatraz.
And the ways they died: Bullets. Ropes. Firing squad. Electric chair. Gas chamber. Lethal injection.
These are the stories at the heart of the District’s newest tourist attraction, the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, which opens today on Seventh Street NW in Gallery Place. The for-profit museum — admission is $17.95 — gives an eerie gloss to these true-life tales of cops and robbers, almost as if you’re walking through a high-toned coffee-table book.
Throughout the three-story building, the museum presents a number of interactive displays. You can learn how to crack a safe, watch clips of famous movies such as “The French Connection” and take an electronic quiz to see if the movie squared with reality. In a simulator, you can learn how to drive police vehicles. Then you can stand in a police station lineup or step into an Old West jail cell.
That’s where the simulated experience stops. There are no pretend executions.
That’s right — $17.95 per head. YIKES! I find the price just a scary as the content.
Tags: Washington, DC, museum, crime, punishment, tourism
Musings from Sumigirl 
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