Washington Square Park has never been called boring, but one Villager is putting in the effort to bring a bit of extra interest to Holley Plaza each week. Meet Denny, founder and curator (or ringleader, depending on the day) of the Museum of Interesting Things.

Every Tuesday you can find Denny with his caravan of curiosities making his way to set up for another night out in his favorite park. “I’ve been coming to Washington Square since I was a kid to watch my cousin and his Beatles cover band perform by the Arch,” Denny recalls fondly. “It was a haven for me, some of my earliest memories are being eight years old watching the crowds gather for him and dreaming about going to NYU…which I did by the way! I graduated with two degrees, my ceremony was here in the park.”

Now Denny is the one fascinating crowds of children and adults alike with his wide array of aptly named Interesting Things: Edison cylinder record players, a Nickelodeon, the list goes on…and is ever growing. Denny actually sourced his most recent acquisition right here in the park: “A regular museum goer, he goes by SpiderMan, came over with a Fender Strat to add to the collection. You don’t get much more quintessential Washington Square Park than that.”

It’s a very full-circle moment for the man who used to skip out of fourth grade to watch buskers and read poetry on the same park benches he sets up by today. “I’m sanctioned now! Somebody tell my mother.” But the magical energy of those illicit afternoons is precisely what Denny is working to bring to the park every week. “I’m bringing some curiosity, a little of the unbridled joy this park has always represented,” Denny says, “There’s something about the energy and the history of the museum that pulls people in. I like to stir up the curiosity inside their soul. It’s a very real experience, interacting with items that were invented and used for up to a hundred years or more.” Just a few minutes at the museum and it’s easy to see what he’s talking about – people are drawn to him like moths to a flame. It’s hard to resist playing with a rotary telephone when the buttons are just begging to be pushed. And when was the last time you walked by a camera obscura without being drawn in by the fascinating physics? But Denny himself is also part of the magic, gently encouraging you to engage and feel comfortable. “I love getting people started with a little bit of story and seeing how they run with it,” says Denny. “I remember one pair, a man and his grandson, who had come to the park to see the Holley statue because the man was also an engineer. They didn’t know I would be there, but the museum got them talking and I got to watch as he told his grandson so many stories.” Interactions like that are a tangible manifestation of his mission, igniting the passion in others that he feels in himself.

It’s those kinds of experiences that make the effort of bringing the museum from its indoor location out into the park worth it. And it certainly takes effort: each week, Denny packs up a different assortment of priceless artifacts, squeezes them into a train of carts, and rolls into Holley Plaza. Even on the best of days it’s a masterful juggling act, but the park community is always ready to step up. “One day the wind and terrain teamed up and started to knock my items over faster than I could catch them,” says Denny, “before everything could hit the ground a bunch of skater kids had hopped off their boards and caught the record player, the mutoscope, all of it.” Now when they see him coming, they don’t wait for things to fall – they start helping him set up, peppering him with questions the entire time. “Now I tell them, you’ve run off and joined the circus, and they laugh.” But what better place to join the circus than Washington Square Park?

Do yourself a favor, and make your way to Holley Plaza on a Tuesday night between 6:30-8pm. Find Denny, and let him spark your curiosity. Even if you forget all the names, places and dates he tells you, his positivity will linger and you will definitely have an experience to remember.