press: WHAT'S BEING SHARED ABOUT MARTY'S COLLECTION

MARTY RASKIN IS A ONE-MAN “ANTIQUES ROADSHOW” SPECIALIZING IN NEW YORK CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Raskin’s collection is a sentimental journey through his school days. Over the years, he has picked up enough school memorabilia to fill his three-bedroom apartment in New York City. Raskin even turned an entire room into a replica of an elementary school classroom that includes a row of wooden desks with inkwells, a regulator clock, a window pole and a teacher’s reading chair. 

Marty Raskin, Historian, Education Memorabilia shares and discusses items from his collection

 "A retired teacher turned his Manhattan apartment into a shrine to his school years. Now he’s expanding his collection citywide, to showcase his love for all things vintage public schools."

"Not many former wards of New York City’s public schools would cherish a splinter that pierced the rear of their public school principal in 1942, but Martin Raskin, it is safe to say, is in a class by himself. Who else would recreate his old Brooklyn elementary schoolroom in a bedroom of his Upper East Side co-op"

 Join us at the City Reliquary on Thursday, October 24 from 6:30-8:30 pm to celebrate our new exhibition P.S. NYC: Artifacts from NYC Public Schools 1850-1970! Marty Raskin, the inspiration for this show and longtime collector of Board of Education memorabilia, will be on hand to discuss his time attending and working in NYC’s public schools and how he has come to amass this wide-ranging archive. 

 "School was very important to me, it's my whole life," Raskin recalled. And that shows at Raskin's apartment where there are hundreds and hundreds of items of New York City public school memorabilia, which he has been collecting for years."

His most interesting find has to be a splinter which P.S. 202 founder and principal Charles G. Eichel removed from his rear in 1942. “He was an idol in East New York,” says Raskin of Eichel, who died in 1976. Eichel had seen it fit to keep the specimen in an envelope in the East New York Savings Bank, labeled "File Accident Reports." On it read the note “Sat down in my office chair — 258 — splinter entered my buttocks — cleaned it with yellow soap and applied iodine.”