A small but absorbing specialist museum tucked into a Victorian house a block from the plaza. The collection spans fans from 17th-century Europe to early 20th-century Japan — ivory, silk, tortoiseshell, feather, and painted paper, each carrying more social coding than you'd expect from a folding accessory. Fans were status symbols, courtship tools, and a woman's way of signalling across a crowded room in an era when that was all she could do.
The curation is thoughtful, with enough contextual explanation to make the fans legible as objects of history rather than just pretty things behind glass. The museum is free or near-free by donation. It's easy to spend an hour here without feeling you've rushed anything.
story: "In 18th-century European courts, a woman's fan was as carefully read as her expression — there were published codebooks for what each movement meant: a fan held in the left hand meant 'I wish to get rid of you,' one drawn across the cheek meant 'I love you.' Whether anyone actually followed the code is debated, but the fans in this collection suggest the stakes were high."