New York can be a magical place 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 to choose from: Everything from small and quirky, to elegant gems housed in historic mansions, to preserved Lower East Side tenement apartments and hands-on experiences that might surprise even longtime New Yorkers.
“Going to the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the American Museum of Natural History is fantastic. But they can be like a big super-sized 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 elevator shaft in a downtown alleyway. (Both museums are closed for the holidays but reopen in spring.)
At other small museums you’ll find a cozy, 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 (New York City was the seat of U.S. government in those days.) Or you might make seltzer or solve math puzzles.
Here’s some of what’s happening at NYC’s “other” museums:
227 W 27th St.
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. The current show, ”Africa’s Fashion Diaspora,” runs through Dec. 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.
Neue Galerie
1048 5th Ave.
This museum, housed in a 1914 Gilded Age mansion that was once home to society doyenne Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III, focuses on art and design from Austria and Germany. Its…
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