Kill the time, not the other way around

I had heard about the archaeological dig on Governors Island, south of Manhattan, from a few friends who had gone. Heard about the small hamlet recently discovered, a window into a forgotten world of the 1950s. My friends had gushed about the experience, saying that it was the coolest thing that they had done all summer.

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, my friend Nicky and I boarded the Governors Island Ferry and went to check out the lost hamlet of Goverthing.

Upon entering the archaeological site, we are told that we must wear a brightly colored vest and a hard hat—for safety. Nicky is not pleased.

“Do I have to wear one?” she asks the short girl behind the counter.

“I mean… I’m supposed to make you wear one…”

Then, another voice from behind the counter that I can’t hear.

The girl again, “She does?” turning back to Nicky, “Sorry, you have to wear it.”

Hard hats on our heads and safety vests velcro-ed in front, we make our way though a temporary museum set up in a large adjacent room. The small exhibit explains the history of Goverthing with newspaper clippings, faded photos, found artifacts and a model built to scale.

Discovered by Dutch explorers hundreds of years ago, by its demise in 1954, Goverthing was home to 25 residents, a snow globe factory and a gas station. Its residents lived under the control of the United States military, who had a large base on Governors Island.

The snow globe factory was one of the largest of its time and exported snow globes to the entire East Coast. We see many snow globes ranging in complexity, starting simply and becoming more and more elaborate. Many of them commemorate life in Goverthing. A particularly interesting one reads: “Drink some rum when you see black snow.” It sports black snow instead of white and is Nicky’s favorite.

We see old photos of Goverthing’s gas station attendant, a Navy man who fell in love with a beautiful woman, nicknamed aptly the Nightingale of Goverthing, after a hit single (the recording financed by the snow globe factory). Soon after its minor success, she left the Navy man and ran away with the snow globe factory truck driver.

The Navy man’s loneliness drove him to create intricate birdhouses around his gas station, inadvertently starting “The Plague of Birds.” We see elaborate inventions that the residents of Goverthing used to fend off what became massive bird attacks. It eventually leads the military to condemn the settlement on the island, and in a covert operation they evacuate Goverthing and bury it under a large pile of sand.

It lay hidden for 50 years. Uncovered earlier this year by a private company scouting for a suitable place to build a theme park, it is in surprisingly good shape and an excavation by a Belgium company began in March.

Oh and there’s one more thing. Wearing our hard hats and safety vests, Nicky and I stroll out onto the ruins of Goverthing and upon entering the hamlet it becomes obvious that the whole thing is an elaborate and extremely entertaining hoax.

Perfectly aged tops of lampposts, street signs and houses stick out of the ground. There’s a water tower, a church, the famed snow globe factory, and the gas station, exactly as it was laid out in the exhibition. I am face to face with the statue of the owner (on the top of the snow globe factory) who is proudly smiling. He holds a snow globe and if you shake his hand he winks. “Kill the time, not the other way around” it says below his statue—an archaeological expert explains that it was his favorite saying and the motto of the factory.

I smile as I notice that two containers near the snow globe factory read “snow” and “water”(presumably the ingredients of a snow globe) and that the chimney still works.

Knowing it isn’t real does not make exploring the hamlet any less enjoyable; instead, I would say more so. The jukebox in the gas station still plays both the Nightingale of Goverthing’s songs and it’s hard not to imagine the Navy man sitting there painfully listening to them over and over as he builds his bird houses.

I went to imagine a forgotten world, and found the experience of a creative mind, with layers upon layers of details, a story so imaginative that you really wanted to believe it, even while knowing whole-heartedly it wasn’t true.

Zac Stuart-Pontier