Free Williamsburg

Because, of course it is!

The whack heard ’round the world is set to be immortalized in a tiny museum in a Williamsburg apartment.

A pair of comedians are opening the Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan 1994 Museum in the hallway of their abode. The museum is meant to focus on a media machine that hones in on one scandal after the next, and the two athletes that got caught up in it, according to the museum curators, who were both seven when one of figure skater Tonya Harding’s associates attacked rival skater Nancy Kerrigan with a police baton.

“We want to focus on the cultural reaction and the media,” said Viviana Olen, who lives in the Williamsburg apartment with her friend Matt Harkins. “I had a sense of it as a child and then to revisit it as an adult, you realize how much the media left out.”

The pair first launched the museum concept as a joke Kickstarter fund-raiser with a goal of $75, but it garnered so much attention that they decided to really go for it, she said. The level of interest shows just how much the Harding-Kerrigan scandal resonated with Americans, Olen said. [Read more...]