One of New York City’s most unusual attractions is in danger of closing: the Troll Museum, run out of a Lower East Side apartment since 2000, is facing eviction, reports Gothamist.
New York is a city known for its quirks, but the Troll Museum is in a class all its own. A psychedelic, 1960s-era girl’s bedroom frozen in time, the tiny institution is decorated in a hot pink color scheme and full to the brim with plastic Troll dolls. Dressed in a wide variety of costumes, their hair in every color of the rainbow, the bright-eyed Trolls cover nearly every surface of the apartment.
Rev Jen at the Troll Museum.
Photo: Courtesy the Troll Museum, New York.
The museum is the work of Jennifer Miller, better known as Reverend Jen, who serves as curator and proprietor, operating the institution out of her rent-controlled apartment. An artist, poet, and mail-order minister, the eccentric Rev Jen, known for sporting plastic elf ears, is now putting out a call for help.
To keep the Troll Museum’s doors open, Rev Jen has launched a crowd-funding campaign with a $5,000 goal on GoFundMe. She currently owes three months back rent, having lost her job a year ago. The fundraising campaign describes the “horrendous crap” that has “sent the Troll Museum on a road to ruin,” including “encroaching gentrification and a rent raise.”
The page also laments that the Lower East Side’s “sense of imaginative avant-garde lunacy is disappearing thanks to greed,” and accuses the museum’s landlord of looking to replace Rev Jen with “a wealthy bro who would pay double.”
The Troll Museum.
Photo: Courtesy the Troll Museum, New York.
While the Troll Museum is definitely more than a little odd, keeping it open would certainly support Rev Jen’s efforts to “keep NYC weird.” As the impassioned fundraising plea concludes, “Think about it: If NYC were full of normal people, would anyone want to visit?”
Watch a short video about the Troll Museum:
