The exceedingly rare "furry trout" - of the type widely exhibited in dime museums in the 19th century.
 

There are very few galleries or museums that would consider a monkey's head sewed to the body of a fish and encased in a dusty old iron aquarium to be their pièce de résistance.

But then, of course, most museums aren't curated by sword-swallowers who happen to have perfected the art of pounding eight-inch spikes up their nose while allowing scorpions to crawl haphazardly about their face, either.

Enter the Freakatorium, owner Johnny Fox's labor of love and a tribute to the vast menagerie of snake ladies, sideshow "giants," dwarfs, armless knife-throwers and conjoined twins that inhabited the dime museums and freak shows of the Bowery in lower Manhattan during its heyday during the late 19th century and early in the last.

Accumulated during his 20 years on the road as a sword-swallower and street performer, Johnny Fox's collection is certainly eclectic (and, sure, not just a little freaky). There are myriad old posters and photos of famous freaks from days gone by: Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy; the 8-foot-4 ½-inch giant Al Tomaini and his wife, the half-woman Jeanie (the "Strangest Couple in the World"); Crocko the Crocodile Girl and the Tocci Brothers, who had two heads and four arms set atop two legs and who shared a single reproductive system ("Hey! Mind your own business, buddy").

Much of the memorabilia harkens back to the days when extravagantly mustachioed barkers would post themselves outside of dime museums on the Bowery and urge the gawking spectators to "step right up" and pay their way to see the marvels that awaited them behind the heavy curtains.

Marvels such as the headless lady, a trick which depended on the angling of mirrors, or curios like the mummified Egyptian cat, which was found between the walls of a tenement that construction workers were demolishing, counted on the audience suspending their disbelief long enough for them to dig a few coins out of their pockets.

And the fish with the monkey's head? That's an actual Fiji Mermaid, one of the many elaborate hoaxes that toured with P.T. Barnum's great freak show and provided the foundation for the raucous showman's enormous entertainment empire.

It would be impossible to visualize the Freakatorium without its greatest asset, the intrepid Johnny Fox, himself. Holder of the unofficial Guinness Book of Records' record for most swords swallowed (16, though Guiness closed the category at 13, for some unknown reason), Fox still tours when he's not officiating at the Freakatorium.

With the help of his partner, Jean-Jacques Chaltielis, and the Freakatorium's hermaphrodite archivist, Sage Blevins, Fox's ultimate goal is to move the Freakatorium into a bigger space on the Bowery, where he intends to install his museum, a performance space and a beer/wine bar.

"The Bowery was the focal point for entertainment at the turn of the last century, a place for people to go and unwind from the stresses of city life," says Fox. "Now the place is in a sorry state - we want to bring that same sense of mystery and wonder back to the Bowery."

Mirrors were used to produce stunning effects such as these.

 

Freakatorium (El Museo Loco) is located at 57 Clinton Street between Rivington and Stanton on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

  


Meet your curator, Johnny Fox.

That's MISTER Freak to you, pal.

Author Luc Sante, in his book about New York's underbelly, "Low Life," writes that the esteemed showman P.T. Barnum first got his start on the Bowery in 1835, where he exhibited an old black woman alleged to be the 161-year-old wet nurse to none other than the father of the country, George Washington.

The woman died only a few months after her debut and Barnum went on to found a string of museums and traveling shows that flourished throughout the 19th century, exhibiting freaks, spectacles and hoaxes right up until his death in 1891.

Typically, one's first thoughts about the sideshow carnivals and dime museums is that the freaks exhibited there were often cruelly exploited by abusive managers and handlers, but Fox believes that the vast majority of them were treated fairly - even as equals.

"These freaks made guys like Barnum tons of money," said Johnny Fox, owner of the Freakatorium in New York. "He had no reason to mistreat them - and, in fact, Barnum made the freaks tons of money, too."

Indeed, according to Fox, freaks at Barnum's shows made so much money that, when Barnum lost his fortune after his two American Museums burned down in the 1860's, top acts like Tom Thumb (who lived in an enormous estate outside of Bridgeport, Conn.) helped restore him to his usual prosperity.

Evidently, there is more to these exhibits than meets the eye.

 


Barnum's Fiji Mermaid. Fished straight out of the Hudson River, folks! Really.

All photos on this page courtesy of Freakatorium.

 
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