30 CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // JULY 2019
THE GOOD LIFE
This is just one of the
more than 70,000 non-liv-
ing items Levitan manages
at the collections building
of Discovery Place Science.
Since 2014, the collection
has resided in a separate
space, a few buildings over
from the main museum—
a place most visitors
never see, one for curious
minds and those gener-
ally impressed by the old,
weird, or wonderful. It con-
tains items Levitan designs
for the main museum dis-
plays but mainly serves as
a resource for professional
and amateur researchers around the globe.
Here, linear time seems to collapse—where
from just one shelf in one cabinet, ceramic
gurines molded by the Mayans look back
at you from across 3,800 years.
Levitan seems to do her own tricks with
time. She’s only 31 but possesses the exper-
tise and presence of someone much older.
As I ask a question, she nods thoughtfully,
then answers it thoroughly and easily. In
2007, when she was an undergraduate stu-
dent at Washington College in Chestertown,
Maryland, Levitan took a summer archaeol-
ogy course because it oered double credit at
the same cost. The course introduced her to
the thrill of discovering the long-hidden, and
she never looked back.
She studied in Peru and England but even-
tually came back to the United States in- She’s been the collections manager at
Discovery Place for two years; before that,
she held a position that involved taking
exhibits from the museum to schools that
couldn’t aord eld trips and teaching to
classes and groups from schools that could.
“I knew if there was some way to not sit at
a desk for the rest of my life, I’d be happy,”
Levitan says. “I never wanted to work at a
museum, because I thought that’s what it
would be.”
Not this one. Each item here is carefully
labeled with archival-grade ink and paper,
and each has a story. Levitan knows most of
them. She is the only full-time employee for
the collection and relies on one part-time
colleague and a group of volunteers to help
with preservation and maintenance—like
hand-cleaning the museum’s three iconic
bears. Their goal is to publish the entire
catalog online to make it more accessible for
researchers.
Items here have come from all over the
world through purchases or trades with
other museums and eld collections, or
from private donors such as David Grant,
professor emeritus at Davidson College.
He has volunteered with Discovery Place
Science for more than 34 years and donatedThe Passenger
Pigeon’s Swan Song
The Discovery Place Science
collection contains more than
70,000 non-living items. There are
gurines from antiquity, ancient
stone weapons, gold and precious
gemstones, great beasts preserved in
their nal pose. But its crown jewel is
none of those. It’s a pigeon.
At the back of the collections
building is a locked door, and inside
that room is a locked cabinet,
and inside that cabinet is a sealed
glass case. In the oce are letters
of verication from the American
Museum of Natural History and
the Smithsonian Institution. It is
temperature and humidity controlled
and monitored via Bluetooth. All of
this is for item BD-276, a juvenile male
passenger pigeon collected in upstate
New York in 1884 and purchased by
the museum in 1965.
In the 19th century, passenger
pigeons were the most abundant bird
in North America. There are stories from
the time of ocks so large they took
hours to pass overhead, of shouted
conversations that had to compete
with the beating of wings overhead.
“The stories go,” Robyn Levitan says,
“that you could hold up a stick, swing it
around your head, and hit at least one.”
Humans hunted passenger pigeons
for centuries, using everything
from large nets that caught several
hundred at a time to stones they
hurled at low-iers. Their ubiquity
bred the assumption that they would
be impossible to over-hunt. But post-
Civil War railroad expansion enabled
the commercial hunting industry, and
passenger pigeons were killed faster
than they could breed.
The last sighting of a passenger
pigeon in North Carolina was in 1894.
The species ocially became extinct
on September 1, 1914, when the last
one died at the Cincinnati Zoo.
The feathers of Discovery Place’s
passenger pigeon have faded a bit
over time, but you can still see the
delicate slate blue of his wings and
his shieldlike, copper-hued chest. He
stands eternally on a branch, a time
traveler here to caution us about a
creature that disappeared from Earth
more than a century ago and was
once as common as a housey.
Robyn Levitan
peers at old
photographs
of a waterfall
through a
19th-century
stereoscope
(above). The
Discovery
Place’s non-
living collection
includes a
preserved
mountain
lion (opposite
page) and a
breastplate
from an
indigenous
Jivaroan tribe
in Ecuador
(right).