On a misty Sunday evening, in a spacious SoHo loft, a handful of patrons sprawl across velvet green sofas (early arrivals) and perch on plastic black chairs (late arrivals) to watch a series of 16mm films about the history of New York. Sepia-toned images on a projector screen show synchronized dancers prancing around the roof of Radio City Music Hall, ant-like figures skating across a frozen lake, and ducks waddling through a Central Park pond.
This is “Secret Speakeasy,” a weekly event hosted by the Museum of Interesting Things, a traveling exhibition of antique objects that founder and curator Denny Daniel has paraded around greater New York for over a decade.
“Huzzah! Huzzah!” cries one man as a majestic shot of the Brooklyn Bridge comes into view.
Between films, Daniel offers brief historical asides. He wears a black tunic, black blazer, black jeans, a black fisherman hat and three bronze pendants around his neck. Every few seconds, he yanks his reading glasses off his face, then gingerly replaces them, only to pull them off again a moment later. Short and slight of frame, with hollowed brown eyes and leathery skin, he walks with a hurried, purposeful gait.
After screening a surrealist parable emphasizing the powers of Congress, Daniel unveils a related object that elicits delighted gasps from the audience: a plastic figurine of the famously anthropomorphized scrap of paper from “I’m Just a Bill.” Swaying, Daniel croons the Schoolhouse Rock tune a capella, then passes the toy around to the crowd.
“There’s thousands more items at the Museum,” Daniel says giddily. “I could fill this entire building!”
* * *
Three days later, Daniel slouches on a couch in his East Village apartment, which doubles as the Museum’s in-person gallery. Packed with objects dating back hundreds of years, the apartment smells unsurprisingly musty. To move through the space without knocking anything over, visitors must carve a careful path. “I would love to have, eventually, a physical location,” he says, ankles crossed, hands folded in his lap.
Daniel says that the Museum has “three different flavors”: one, traveling exhibitions that visit schools, libraries and hospitals; two, people coming to his apartment for a “private show”; and three, the Sunday Speakeasy in SoHo.
The Museum owns somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 objects, according to Daniel, most of which are stored in his apartment. He acquires them at antique stores, on the internet or by donation. This rule of three also applies to how visitors learn about the Museum: via social media channels, his website or word of mouth.
He declines to reveal his age, but eagerly offers his birth date and Zodiac sign; he’s an Aquarius. “I’m teaching kids, and I wanna be timeless,” Daniel semi-explains. “Even NYU didn’t know my age.” (An alumni biography posted on the Solomon Schechter Queens website cites 1980 as Daniel’s middle school graduation year, making him about 59.)
On January 29, sometime in the 1960s, Denny Daniel was born in Queens to a homemaker and a real estate businessman/shoe designer. Daniel’s legal name is Daniel Levy, but since founding the Museum, he has used Denny Daniel, citing privacy reasons that he would not explicate.
“In school, I was a painfully shy kid,” Daniel says. “But I also had this side of me where I loved talking to people.” Interacting with classmates could be a chore, but Daniel always thrived with strangers.
Daniel studied international economics and politics at New York University, where in the autumn of his freshman year, he struck up a friendship with Jonathan Lawit, who, in recent years, has aided Daniel in various performances.
“He just nails it,” Lawit says of Daniel’s showmanship. To Lawit, the Museum “calls to mind the child in all of us, the fascination of discovering something interesting for the first time.”
During and after NYU, Daniel started throwing parties at his parents’ home in Queens (“We’ve got a huge house”). He was also developing an interest in antiques and liked discussing his new collectibles with his friends. These gatherings planted the seed for the Museum.
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After graduation, Daniel worked as a freelance videographer and considered becoming a lawyer; he says he was admitted to an unnamed law school in California. But ultimately, he decided to devote all his energy to launching the Museum.
He performed his first show for grade schoolers at Solomon Schechter, his former school, in 2009. “It was a secret,” Daniel says. “I didn’t tell anyone in my family about it.”
Even now, Daniel avoids discussing the Museum with his family. “My family partially thinks what I do is crazy,” he says. “They don’t believe in it.”
His mother, Sylvia Levy, however, takes a more positive perspective. “Not everybody is capable of building what he did,” she says. “I’m very proud of him.”
“I don’t think he’s changed much since childhood,” she adds. “I think he’s the same sensitive person. Don’t forget, he’s the baby in this house.”
* * *
The most unique piece in his collection, Daniel contends, is his Edison Cylinder record player, which also serves as the Museum’s logo and is stamped on every advertising pamphlet. Asked how much the early phonograph set him back, Daniel grimaces.
“I don’t ever like to go into numbers,” he says. “Then it becomes about money and capitalism, and I want it to be about idealism.”
His oldest item? “Well, there are dinosaur bones,” Daniel says. Those aside, he has “an oil lamp from the era of the temple in Jerusalem.” (A catalog file for the lamp dates it at 60-70 A.D.)
Patrons pay $15 for a private apartment tour and $10 to attend the Sunday Speakeasy. He says he receives thousands of visitors each year. Yet, from time to time, he also cat-sits for extra cash. Daniel says he bought his East Village apartment; it helps that his family owns the SoHo building where he hosts the Speakeasy, a remnant from his father’s time in real estate.
Daniel is no stranger to financial woes. At the start of the pandemic, he says, the Museum was $40,000 in debt. Somehow, Daniel says, he managed to pay off the sum, salvaging his collection.
He’s vague about how, but in April 2020, Daniel’s father, Shelomo Levy—a man he called “amazing” and “a hero”—died.
“I still don’t know how I did it,” Daniel says. “It’s like nature dropped money off of the sky.”
* * *
Josh Sanford, a Gen Z Museum patron, was “honestly pretty skeptical” of Daniel at first. He visited the Museum on a rainy March day for a personal tour.
“It was well-rehearsed, I’ll say that!” Sanford says with a laugh. “I was like, this person has a very niche interest—which is cool! But when he got into his personal…I don’t know what to call it…demons? It was a bit uncomfortable. I was like, that’s an odd business strategy.”
Daniel’s presentation devolved into a series of rambles about intimate personal matters, Sanford recalls, including the loss of an important romantic relationship, the death of his cat and his mental health troubles.
“Not to discredit his entire gig,” Sanford adds. “I think he is really into what he does. He just seems like he has a lot going on.”
* * *
Back in his apartment, Daniel groans when asked to identify a favorite item from his trove—a task he considers impossible.
After a few deep breaths, he names one: “A ballot to vote for Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 election.”
But, Daniel sighs, “It’s not here anymore. I used to carry it around, and I think it got stolen.” Now, he never carries a bag; he keeps all his belongings in his pockets.
How would he set up the brick-and-mortar Museum of his dreams? “It’d be in genres,” says Daniel: a History of Photography room, a History of Music room, the General History of Invention room, a Quack Medical Room (“Just for fun!”) and “Oh! A history of toys!”
Moreover, “it should be much bigger than it is. I want more eyeballs on The Things,” Daniel says. He ultimately hopes the museum will outlive him.
“When I die,” he says, “I want the Museum to be donated to the city. It needs to be part of the fabric of the city where I grew up.”
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