He realized that there was a hollow space under the boards of the student coat closet, and that coins and other objects glinted from within.

Bobby began poking around in the closet gap during our ten-minute morning breaks. He developed a way to grab items using colored pencils as chopsticks, and his classmates were quick to join him. Before we knew it, one student had extracted a 1912 baseball card for catcher Gabby Street, during his year on the New York Highlanders. Coins of all sorts, including many no longer produced, movie ticket stubs (10 cents at the now-vanished corner theater!), old schoolwork, an amazing array of candy and gum wrappers, and so much more gradually emerged from under the closet floor, thanks to the patience and ingenuity of my students.

I quickly realized that this project had immense potential to connect us with our neighborhood’s past, and named it “Closet Archaeology.” My students began excavating other classrooms’ closets, researching the items we found, and even connecting with their forebears. For example, a lawyer in Florida named Alan Lederman no longer recalled that he had lost $2 in an envelope in 1959, but he was delighted to learn about it when we extricated it across the hall, and shared so many memories of his time in our school building.

Closet Archaeology has continued and evolved ever since, as each new group of students has participated in excavating more and more closets. We exhibited many of our finds at City Reliquary and at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan in 2017 and 2018. Students have written letters to “kids of the future” and placed them under the boards for later discovery, and have expressed their growing love of history as they touch and learn about the objects handled by kids of the past.

Below, you can see examples of some of these objects. Coming soon is a dedicated website in which images of all the artifacts, to be joined by more finds in the future, will be accompanied by information we have researched about them. The images will also be searchable and sortable.