Already been to New York’s major museums? Try something different, like the city’s smallest museum or a Viennese coffee shop experience.
New York can be a magical city for museumgoers. It can also be overwhelming and overcrowded at times, especially at the biggest, most famous museums.
Luckily, the city has scores of great museums, everything from elegant gems housed in historic mansions to preserved Lower East Side tenement flats and hands-on experiences that might surprise even long-time New Yorkers.
“Going to the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the American Museum of Natural History is fantastic. But they can be like a supersized coffee drink, while we’re more like a cup of espresso,” says Alex Kalman, director of two of the city’s tiniest museums, Mmuseumm1 and Mmuseumm2.
One is built into an old lift shaft in a downtown alleyway.
At other small museums you’ll find a cosy, Viennese-style coffee shop; kosher Jewish comfort food like bagels, blintzes, herring and house-cured salmon; and edgy gift shops to rival MoMA’s famous one.
You could view the chair that George Washington sat in before giving his inaugural address to Congress. You can even make seltzer or solve maths puzzles.
Here’s some of what’s happening at New York’s other museums:
The Museum at FIT
Tucked inside the Fashion Institute of Technology, behind the big sculpture in front, is the city’s only museum solely devoted to fashion. And it’s free. “Africa’s Fashion Diaspora”, currently showing, runs until December 29.
“It’s about Africa as an idea that continues to inspire designers from Africa and also those whose ancestors came from Africa,” says museum director Valerie Steele.
Opening in February is “Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities”, exploring connections between cabinets of curiosities and fashion.
227 W 27th Street
Neue Galerie
This museum, housed in a 1914 Gilded Age mansion that was once home to society doyenne Grace Vanderbilt, focuses on art and design from Austria and Germany.
Its Cafe Sabarsky is a destination of its own, with 1912 upholstery, period decor, and a grand piano in the corner used for cabaret, chamber and classical music performances.
On view now are “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” and “Austrian Masterworks from the Neue Galerie”.
The museum “transports you to Christmas in Vienna”, says director Renée Price. “We dress up our 1914 historic landmark building with wreaths and ribbons, evoking a prior era … Delight in some apfelstrudel and savour our hot chocolate with rum in Café Sabarsky.” Pro tip: the cafe is quietest at breakfast time.
1048 5th Avenue
The Jewish Museum
Not far from the Neue Galerie. On view now are “Illit Azoulay: Mere Things”, the first solo exhibition in a US museum dedicated to the Berlin-based artist, and “Engaging with History: Works from the Collection”.
Other displays include the Tel Dan Stele, a 9th century BC stone monument fragment containing the earliest mention of the royal House of David outside the Bible.
The gift shop features an impressive array of menorahs, dreidels, Hanukkah candles and speciality gifts, including works by artist Oded Halahmy. There’s a cafe with updated takes on traditional bagels, blintzes, herring and house-cured salmon.
There is also Hanukkah-related family programming.
1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
One of the city’s two Smithsonian museums, the Cooper Hewitt focuses on innovative design. Its gift shop rivals MoMA’s, and it has a private garden and small restaurant.
The museum is housed in the former home of industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie. Completed in 1902, the mansion was one of the first in the city to have a residential Otis passenger lift. It was also among the first homes to feature central heating. It is now LEED-certified and features other cutting-edge technologies.
A major exhibition “Making Home: Smithsonian Design Triennial” explores design’s role in shaping concepts of home. It sprawls over the entire mansion and runs until August 10, 2025.
2 East 91st Street
The New York Historical
A great way to learn more about the city’s history, including the fact that George Washington was inaugurated here. A permanent gallery on the fourth floor features a detailed recreation of the White House Oval Office in Washington, DC, where presidents have worked since 1909.
The Meet the Presidents Gallery traces the evolution of the presidency and executive branch. Also on view is the chair from Washington’s inauguration at Federal Hall, on Wall Street, the only presidential inauguration held in New York.
Other current exhibitions include “Pets and the City”, “Fred W. McDarrah: Pride and Protest”. There’s also a permanent “Gallery of Tiffany Lamps”.
170 Central Park West
National Museum of the American Indian
The other Smithsonian in town, it’s at the lower end of Manhattan inside the Alexander Hamilton US Customs House, now a city landmark. Admission is free, and current exhibitions include “Jeffrey Veregge: Of Gods and Heroes”, “Native New York” and “Infinity of Nations”.
The gift shop features authentic Native American art, crafts, apparel and jewellery from a wide representation of groups, in addition to books by and about Native Americans.
1 Bowling Green
Tenement Museum
With something for all ages, the Tenement Museum is housed in two preserved tenement buildings, one from 1863 and the other from 1888. Each flat is a kind of time capsule, telling the story of a different immigrant or migrant family who lived there. The museum also offers walking tours of the area.
“What is unique about the Tenement Museum is that it shines the spotlight on ‘ordinary people’ – working-class families who never imagined they’d one day be the subject of a museum,” says Tenement Museum president Annie Polland.
“Whereas at the MoMA and Met you see great art, and at the AMNH you see dinosaurs; at the Tenement Museum you immerse yourself in real stories and consider what it means to be American,” she said.
Certain flats – Italian, German, Puerto Rican – are decorated for Christmas.
103 Orchard Street
MoMath (National Museum of Mathematics)
A hands-on museum with all kinds of maths-oriented puzzles and thought-inspiring curiosities, like a tricycle with square wheels that rides smoothly on a zigzagged surface.
In an exhibition called “Human Tree”, visitors can make successively smaller images of themselves that combine to make a “fractal tree” that sways in response to their movements.
225 Fifth Avenue
Brooklyn Seltzer Museum
An interactive museum and factory tour run in partnership with the city’s oldest seltzer [soda] works, a family business now in its fourth generation.
The museum, inside Brooklyn Seltzer Boys’ active factory, is “dedicated to preserving and promoting the effervescent history of seltzer water”, and celebrates “the manufacturing of seltzer, the science of seltzer, and seltzer as a cultural force in New York City and the world beyond”.
Not to mention, guests can spritz each other with seltzer.
474 Hemlock Street, Brooklyn
Associated Press