While a hip, young concierge helped her, she became distracted by the outlandish spectacle behind him: a wall overflowing with hundreds of wild-haired troll dolls, psychedelic paintings of troll dolls, and obscure troll ephemera including play sets and VHS tapes of a children’s show called “Trollies.”
“So, we have a few room options,” he said, interrupting her reverie. “Are you sensitive to street noises?”
“Actually, yes I am a little bit,” she said.
These exchanges continued through the day, but quietly tending to the trolls was a petite woman with long black hair known as Reverend Jen, and she was eager to share her encyclopedic knowledge about the dolls with anyone interested. For 16 years, Reverend Jen managed a sprawling version of this installation in the cramped living room of her sixth-floor apartment on Orchard Street. She called it the Lower East Side Troll Museum, and it became a wacky downtown landmark accessible by ringing her buzzer. Fans of the kitschy dolls, which became popular in the 1960s, made pilgrimages from around the world to visit her collection. But when she was evicted in 2016, the museum abruptly closed, and an oasis of strange vanished from the Lower East Side.
Since then Reverend Jen, 46, has been adjusting to life outside the neighborhood. She was an eccentric Lower East Side artist known for wearing elf ears and carrying around a Chihuahua she had named Reverend Jen Jr. She now lives in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and though she still has the elf ears she rarely wears them. But she’s revived the troll museum at the Ace Hotel as part of the Outsider Art Fair, which ended Sunday.
“The troll museum is probably the silliest idea I had in my life,” she said. “But people responded to it, so I have to keep it going. If more people carried out their silly ideas, then the world would be a more interesting place.”
If resurrecting a troll museum inside a boutique hotel seems like an unjust fate for an anarchic downtown institution, Reverend Jen’s fans avoided such cynicism. Lindsay Rootare, 26, had visited the original museum and saw the hotel installation Tuesday night. “The troll museum was squashed and taken away from her so suddenly,” she said, “so any chance to get to see it now is important.”
Reverend Jen also seemed pleased to bring the trolls out of retirement, even if her exhibition space is located awkwardly behind the hotel’s front desk. “I’m really excited to be doing this because the last few years haven’t always been so great,” she said. “When I ring buzzers at my old building, I realize no one I know is left. It feels like an anvil on my chest.”
Boxes of trolls still sat Thursday in Reverend Jen’s apartment in Sheepshead Bay, where she now resides in a complex beside the Belt Parkway. She wore colorful troll-themed leggings as she sipped a beer and reflected on the tumult she’s faced since her eviction. She was briefly homeless, her boyfriend died of brain cancer and Reverend Jen Jr. died. At one point, she checked herself into a psychiatric ward. “It’s been tough,” she said. “But just like a troll, I’ll always fall on my own two feet.”
Before she became Reverend Jen, Jennifer Miller acquired her first troll as a child in Silver Spring, Maryland, when she bought one at a mall. “I’d need a lot of psychologists to explain it, but I guess I liked that they were always happy and smiling,” she said. She started collecting trolls seriously as a teenager and moved to New York in 1990 to study at the School of Visual Arts. She settled into the Lower East Side shortly after.
In 2000, she started the troll museum in her magenta-painted living room. “New York was already getting boring, and the troll museum was a way to make it less boring,” she said. Before long, locals became accustomed to giving tourists directions to her apartment. But Reverend Jen’s life unraveled after 2013, she said, after she lost her longtime job at the nearby Tenement Museum, and she later started having health problems. Soon, she fell behind on her rent.
When a city marshal served her eviction papers in 2016 she was wearing only a bath towel. Friends and artists helped move boxes of her trolls out onto the street. “I already felt like the last bohemian clinging on,” she said. “Part of me knew it wasn’t going to last forever.”
These days, Reverend Jen works odd jobs like baby-sitting and cleaning houses. She hasn’t adjusted to Brooklyn and detests taking the subway into Manhattan. “I stay in New York because I couldn’t exist anywhere else,” she said. When she was asked to revive the troll museum, she eagerly started organizing her trolls and asked her mother to ship more trolls from Maryland.
As evening approached, Reverend Jen prepared to transport trolls into Manhattan for the art installation. “You shouldn’t just buy a troll,” she said. “A troll should come to you. That way it has a story.”
She pulled a troll from the box. “This is Haunted Troll,” she said. “I found him on eBay after some family in Canada became convinced he was cursed. Their hot water kept turning on and off.” She retrieved another. “I got this troll in the mail with a note explaining he was found walking around the Nevada desert muttering: ‘Reverend Jen. Only Reverend Jen can save me.'”
With a couple bags of trolls in tow, Reverend Jen started walking to the subway station in the cold. During the train ride, as the trolls rollicked beside her, she considered their meaning outside the Lower East Side.
“I lost the troll museum,” she said. “But the troll museum is a state of mind. And I’ll still always be there.”