Uncategorized Archives

October 12, 2026

New York Sign Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	78 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	For me, the most meaningful sign at the Sign Museum was a folding-fan-shaped one for a defunct Lower East Side tattoo parlor called New York Adorned. Back in 2008, New York Adorned is where I got my one and so-far only tattoo. These serendipitous encounters, bumping into old acquaintances in unexpected places, are quintessentially New York, and I love when they happen.

Who cares about old signs? Like, old business signs, denoting stores, bars, restaurants, law firms, churches. Back in the day, they were hand painted, to a set of rules and customs and standards, or actually multiple different sets of rules and customs and standards depending on where one got one’s signs from. Usually they were neighborhood-centric. New York had bunches of sign makers, and the vernacular sign design here differed significantly from Philly signs, Boston signs, Chicago signs.

But, I confess, when I learned that the New York Sign Museum existed, I wondered who might care about such things. I mean, I care about them. But I love the quirks of New York City, and I’m a crazy museum completist. When I signed up for a tour and subwayed out to Bushwick, I expected that it’d be just me and the docent.

Au contraire. 20+ people turned up, on a random Friday afternoon, to learn something about the history of shop signs in New York. I suppose it’s only appropriate that a museum devoted to a form of advertising would turn out to have an excellent social media game. And it also helps that it’s earned some significant recent media coverage.

I saw the sign

The New York Sign Museum resides within one of New York’s new generation of artisan sign shops. Noble Signs was founded in 2013 by a graphic designer and a fabricator. As they created signs for new businesses, they kept finding old signs that nobody had bothered to remove. And, as the current owners of buildings and businesses generally had no use for the old signs, they were happy to have the Noble guys take them off their hands. Thus was born a collection, and where collecting and passion and expertise coincide, a museum will sometimes follow. As it did here, when the New York Sign Museum was born in 2019.

Like a good New York streetscape, the Sign Museum is a bit chaotic. You can only visit on a guided tour. That’s just as well, since when I visited only one sign (a neon one for a toy store) had accompanying wall text. The tour gives visitors an overview of the types of signs you’re likely to encounter on New York City streets, the craftspeople who created them in the past, and the kinds of work that Noble does today.

What’s on view at the Sign Museum

My tour opened on the workshop floor of Noble Signs, where an array of signs hangs on walls and suspended from the ceiling, over the tables and benches where active signmaking happens (except when tours are going on). The tour covered a variety of signs and the principles of sign creation, and the pragmatic approach to lettering to (usually) maximize readability and simplify language for a easily distracted and often self-absorbed New Yorkers.

The tour then headed upstairs, where signs fill a couple of dedicated exhibit spaces as well as the Noble Signs business office.

The tour covered major sign types, including:

Blade signs (the ones that hang out perpendicular to the storefront, easy to view from the sidewalk), now illegal in New York City.
Porcelain signs, with powdered glass fused to steel. Indestructible, unless you drill holes in them.
Vacuum signs, which mold plastic into three dimensional shapes for both strength and visual interest.
And of course neon…

The collection includes several great neon signs, and I learned something about the arcane alchemical arts of creating neon colors. Some colors just don’t exist anymore, the recipes lost to time. The sign for Queen restaurant, an Italian place in Brooklyn Heights that closed in 2020 (after 66 years!) is outstanding.

Signs as civic culture

The Sign Museum tour is also a tour of New York efficiency, pragmatism, and thriftiness, traits that extend all the way back to New Amsterdam. New York businesses often left old signs up. They just covered them with new signs, and/or repainted old business names with new ones. Some signs reveal palimpsests that trace the history of a storefront over years or decades.

It’s also very clear from the signs on view that in New York decorative branding usually takes a backseat to the simple words that describe what a storefront offers. “SHOES” “PORK” “LAWYER” — that sort of thing. New York signmakers optimized for short attention spans. It’s funny to think contemporary TikTokers have something in common with such an old-school and analog medium.

Sign history also traces neighborhood history. Our guide spent quite a while dissecting the design imperatives that shaped the sign for L&G Meat Market, which was a local Bushwick shop. Then he casually pointed out the bullet hole in the letter “A” in “MEAT,” which never got repaired, a relic of a more exciting time.

Signs of the times

It kind of warmed my heart that so many people were interested in old business signs. In this era where certain blocks of Broadway feel more like open-air shopping malls than Manhattan (oh, look, a Chipotle next to a Jamba Juice next to a Five Guys, across the street from a CVS next to a Panda Express, next to a Raising Cane’s…), the fact that people would schlep to Brooklyn to see signs from long-gone businesses speaks to a hunger for authenticity, uniqueness, even imperfection, that I love.

And the group engaged, people asked questions, they lingered.

The Sign Museum reminded me of a couple of other places. The Neon Museum in Las Vegas is an obvious sibling, though its open-air extravaganza of over-the-top casino signage from Vegas’s various heydays far exceeds what the Sign Museum can show in its shop. It also reminded me of one of my favorite New York City museums, Poster House. Both focus on often overlooked and typically ephemeral advertising media (though of course many people collect and study posters).

Should you visit the New York Sign Museum?

Neon palette at sign museum The Sign Museum’s current incarnation isn’t ideal. Having the Sign Museum reside in an active sign shop makes seeing the collection more of a challenge — the old signs have to give way for current projects. I did appreciate the tangible link from past to present. Seeing modern signs under construction, neon samplers, and the tools of the trade, keeps the collection from feeling like a relic of a lost past.

However, I came away wishing for more organization, better narrative flow, either in terms of chronology or borough or sign type or business type. To be sure, the tour was engaging. And there’s an argument that a mixed-up, idiosyncratic approach to displaying the signs replicates their natural habitat, back in the day. But more space would enable the Sign Museum to balance fun and education better.

Happy pig at NY Sign Museum That said, I am unequivocally in favor of supporting organizations that collect forgotten things, that elevate stories that might otherwise be overlooked, and that curate and conserve things that we’d otherwise lose. I felt an odd synchronicity that I visited the Sign Museum so soon after Amud Aish Memorial Museum.

Prosaic, efficient and taken for granted, business signs are a part of what made New York, New York. Once upon a time, small businesses dominated. You couldn’t just order a sign in your pick of 50 generic typefaces on the internet or at Staples Express. From that perspective, the New York Sign Museum tells a New York story as quintessential as the Museum of the City of New York, or City Reliquary, or Wyckoff House. Everyone who loves New York should go.

For Reference:

Address	2465 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn
Website	nysignmuseum.org
Cost	General Admission: $25 weekdays, $30 weekends (tour reservation required)
Other Relevant Links	Noble Signs The Neon Museum (Las Vegas)

August 24, 2026

Amud Aish Memorial Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	84 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	In its section on the Holocaust in Hungary, Amud Aish displays the contents of a small, battered case. It belonged to Magda Horowitz, who survived, and brought it with her. It contained, among other relics, a challah cover her sister Edit embroidered as a child. Magda wanted to be buried with the case, her last link to her murdered family. But after visiting Amud Aish, she brought the case to them, said she changed her mind, she didn’t want the story to be buried after all. The case is nothing, but the story is everything, and every other object at Amud Aish has a similar one. But this one stuck with me the most.

Amud Aish Memorial Museum is New York’s second museum of the Holocaust. However, this one is poles apart from the monumental, overwhelming, purpose-built museum on the shores of the Hudson in Lower Manhattan. Located in the farthest reaches of Brooklyn (at least, from my Manhattan-centric perspective), Amud Aish focuses specifically on the Orthodox community as both its subject and its audience.

I took a very long lunch recently to ride to the end of the number 4 train, then catch a 20-minute Uber ride to get to Mill Basin, where Amud Aish Memorial Museum occupies space in the corporate office of Americare Certified Special Services on the ground floor of a fairly nondescript multi-use building. There’s nothing on the outside that would tell you there’s a museum there. Indeed, it’s such a boring building I forgot to photograph it, so I have a screenshot from Google Street View instead.

Amud Aish exterior - from Google Street View

No exterior signage confirms that the building actually does house a museum, though there is a discreet sign inside the lobby, where the office receptionist will confirm that, yes, a curious, appointment-having museum-completist is the right place.

Unspeakable banality

Like the exterior, the offices of Americare are absolutely nothing to write home about. Like the vast majority of corporate offices, beige and blah to the point of being slightly dehumanizing. When I first read about Amud Aish, I reacted with, I’d call it polite skepticism, about the suitability of putting any museum, much less a museum on this topic, in a corporate office.

Visiting changed my mind. Why shouldn’t the Holocaust be remembered in some underused corporate space in a random office in a random corner of New York City? Isn’t that exactly the sort of place where the Holocaust happened? I mean, of course there were the camps, the operational, horrific, business end of things. But Amud Aish’s space made me think about the obsessive records the Nazis kept. The massive bureaucracy that kept the trains running and the camps supplied. It reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase about Adolf Eichmann. I cannot imagine a more banal place for exploring evil than a modern American corporate office.

That being said, the next time anybody complains to me about the state of their workplace, and needing to go in to the office however many days a week, I have a retort. “You may think you have it bad,” I will say, “But at least you don’t walk by the systematic dehumanization of the Jews and the murder of six million people on the way to the coffee machine or the photocopier.”

Amud Aish - U.S. newspaper coverage of Kristallnacht

What’s on view at Amud Aish

Chavi Felsenburg, Amud Aish’s Head of Acquisitions & Education, was kind enough to give me a personal tour of the museum (visitors must make an appointment for a tour in advance).

Amud Aish tells the story of what happened in Europe in a straightforward, chronological way. It begins in a small room just beyond the receptionist’s area, that conveys a taste of Jewish life before the Nazis, featuring report cards, school books, other ephemera. The Nazis come to power, Jews are increasingly stereotyped and demonized, and a hallway features a timeline of the step-by-step stripping of rights that led to Kristallnacht and, from there, to the ghettos, and from there to the camps.

Amud Aish, hallway timeline of the destruction of Jewish rights and privileges ahead of the Holocaust

An open space divided by photographic images of brick walls displays objects and photographs from the ghettos, then proceeds geographically, outlining what happened to Jewish people country-by-country (Germany, Poland, Hungary…) as the Holocaust unfolded. Detailed explanatory texts seem superfluous given a guided tour, but I appreciated being able to snap quick photos of them in lieu of taking notes.

Amud Aish - from ghettos to camps. Photos and artifacts

Side stories illustrated with immigration papers and an ocean liner menu reflect Jews who escaped, through foresight, luck, or help. There’s a fascinating bit, mainly told via text, about the escape route via Asia to Japan and later Shanghai, either by sea or via the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Resilience and Recovery

Then the story moves to the end of the war, to the liberation of the camps and the long, slow path to rebuilding lives in the wake of the Holocaust. The museum emphasizes the lengths people went through to keep Jewish traditions and education alive. For example, it was a huge problem figuring out how rabbis could bless second marriages for people who lacked proof that their first spouse had been murdered.

Amud Aish display: after the war

A final section of displays discusses some of the people who worked to make the world aware of what was happening and to help Jews escape. People like Mike Tress, Yaakov Rosenheim, and Recha Sternbuch. This space is divided into a series of displays featuring detailed text biographies and photographs, along with documents and artifacts, about each of these individuals.

Amud Aish section on heroes who saved lives before and during the Holocaust — Amud Aish display devoted to Yaakov Rosenheim, who helped thousands of Jews get out of Europe and supported the Kindertransports.

While Amud Aish is unflinching in the the facts of what happened, the overwhelming stats, it doesn’t dwell overly much on depicting the horror. There were mercifully few photos of mounds of dead bodies or living people who looked like skeletons. This is not for shying away from the horrors of what happened as much as it is a curatorial choice. “Amud Aish” is Hebrew for pillar of fire, as in the fire that guided the Israelites through the desert. A light in the darkness. Amud Aish is consciously more about how people survived than about how they died.

Priceless // Worthless

Most of the objects in the Amud Aish collection aren’t big showy things. They’re small, everyday, human items. A prayer book. A cloth to cover challah. A child’s shoe. Singed identity cards. Honestly, they seem like old crap from someone’s nana or bubbe. And, I mean, that is true, but it hits different when nana or bubbe have been through a genocide..

More than most places I’ve visited in my tour of New York museums, Amud Aish drove home to me how thin the line can be between the worthless and the priceless. Granted, that’s nearly always true — value is deeply subjective. Think about the fragmentary Greek sculptures at the Met, or the couple of centuries when nobody much cared for Vermeer. But the objects in Amud Aish’s collection make the point eloquently and powerfully.

Amud Aish - Protecting property iin the camps

In any other context the value of these objects would be trivial — sentimental at best. But these objects embody stories: a huge and terrible story, and also myriad small individual stories. They are tangible links to a horrific time. And somehow they survived against tremendous odds, when so much else, and so many people, did not. And now they rest, safe and cataloged, their stories recorded, in a museum embedded in a corporate office in a quiet neighborhood in the far reaches of Brooklyn.

I think when we met, Chavi and I were both expecting that she’d give me a a quick look around the place, a perfunctory whistle-stop tour. Instead, we ended up talking almost an hour and a half about Amud Aish and its purpose and the stories of the collection.

Chavi let me peek inside Amud Aish’s archive, an appropriately corporate Amud Aish - Archives storeroom lined with metal shelves. Banker’s boxes and archival containers contain documents, other objects, things Amud Aish has collected. Clearly, the museum could show more, tell more stories. But it’s small, scrappy, strapped for cash and support, and limited in space and person-power. For a place like this, just having the roof over its head is a victory.

What is a Museum?

When I started systematically visiting and writing about museums, I defined a museum as a non profit organization that has a physical space that aims to educate, and entertain at least a bit, its intended audience. That definition gave me a rubric for rating places without being overtly comparative about it.

But you can also define a museum, or at least judge its quality, in terms of curation. A museum is an institution whose purpose is to select and display, out of infinite things in the world, the things that are the most important, the best, the most symbolic, the most significant. The things someone needs to see if they want to know about… whatever. The history of immigration in America; the defense of the harbor; locks, locks, and more locks; the life of Antonio Meucci, an Italian immigrant who may have invented the telephone.

However big or small the subject, the success or failure of a museum comes down to the objects the curators chose to put on literal pedestals, and the stories people like Chavi Felsenburg tell about those objects to bring them to life for people who might be extremely distant in space and time from their creators and owners.

Amud Aish - death camp uniform Some of these things, I can’t believe anyone kept them. Amud Aish has one of those striped-pajamas uniforms that everyone knows from “Schindler’s List” or history class. It belonged to Chaim Schmidt, who was in Bergen-Belsen. It’s frayed, worn. stained. If I were Chaim, if I survived what he did, I would’ve burned it. With extreme prejudice. But he saved it, another small, tangible link. I guess to help prove that, yes, it really happened.

Should you visit Amud Aish Memorial Museum?

Photo (reproduction) looking out a Jewish window in Germany — 1932 photograph, Posner family menorah, Kiel, Germany

I think most visitors to Amud Aish are Orthodox school kids or members of the local Jewish community. Who else is going to schlep out to Farthest Brooklyn?

That said, any Jewish New Yorker should think seriously about seeking out Amud Aish. Anyone with relatives who went through the Holocaust will find it a worthwhile place to reflect.

For non-Jewish people? It’s a harder call. Those interested in the history of World War II, the Nazis, and the rest, might find it a valuable resource. So would any history buff who is interested in smaller stories, the specificity of individual lives.

Amud Aish Memorial Museum is tells its harrowing story in a space that turns out to be sort of perfect, although also sadly inadequate. Its collection is both trivial and priceless. I hope some foundation or rich benefactor embraces it so that it find bigger and better ways to tell the stories of its objects and the people who owned and cared for them. But I also hope that it never has a monumental, starchitect-designed home like the Museum of Jewish Heritage or the Holocaust museums in DC or Berlin or wherever. The stories Amud Aish tells are small and human. I hope its space continues to honor that, whatever form it takes.

Amud Aish - Display — Recha Sternbach artifacts at Amud Aish Memorial Museum

For Reference:

Address	5923 Strickland Avenue, Brooklyn
Website	https://www.amudaish.org/
Cost	General Admission: $25 (recommended donation.) Advanced reservations required for tours.
Other Relevant Links	A great, personal story about a Japanese diplomat who helped Jewish people escape to Asia

August 3, 2026August 3, 2026

Jewish Children’s Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	113 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	In March of 2026, the Jewish Children’s Museum launched an escape room themed on the Book of Exodus. Designed for older kids and adults, operating in teams, the escape room requires reservations and a separate admission. I got to peek inside during my tour, and I’m obsessed with the idea of solving puzzles to get out of Egypt. I hear the exit even has a dramatic water feature that simulates parting the Red Sea!

The Jewish Children’s Museum (JCM), slightly over twenty years old, occupies a tall, purpose-built, contemporary building on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, across Kingston Avenue from the world headquarters of the Chabad Lubavitch movement of Judaism.

Jewish Children's Museum Facade

The museum as an unfortunately tragic backstory. Ari Halberstam was 16 years old in 1994 when he and some other kids accompanied the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem M. Schneerson, who needed eye surgery in Manhattan. On the way back, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, the van Ari was riding in was attacked in a hate crime, and he was killed.

Ari’s mom, Devorah Halberstam, became a crusader against terrorism and anti-semitism, and a proponent of tolerance. Reasoning that kids aren’t born hating anyone, and that the best way to nurture tolerance is to instill understanding, Ms. Halberstam co-founded the Jewish Children’s Museum, which is dedicated to Ari’s memory.

I heard this origin story from Sarah Leah Bronstein, Group Programs Director at the JCM, who kindly gave me a tour of the museum recently. I’m grateful to Sarah and Chaya’le Strassberg, JCM’s Marketing Director for the tour, and for talking with me about the museum and its mission.

Dreidel, Jewish Children's Museum The very modern building — nothing obviously traditional or historically informed about it — features a giant mural made up of photographs of children (Ari included) and a huge steel dreidel sculpture, both of which help indicate the building’s purpose. Inside, the museum houses two main floors of permanent exhibition space, as well as a theater, two restaurants (one meat, one dairy), temporary exhibition space, and a few surprises (like the aforementioned escape room).

The curators of the museum approach Judaism along two axes: traditions and history, with one floor of exhibit space devoted to each.

Traditions and Culture

Good works at the Jewish Children's Museum — Visiting the ill (and writing get-well cards)

We started on the traditions floor. The first thing a visitor sees leaving the elevator is the “World of Good,” which explores Judaism’s view of good acts. Things like visiting the sick, respecting your parents, being kind to animals, giving to charity, not letting things go to waste, all illustrated in more or less interactive ways. I found this a smart way to approach Judaism, since, yes, these are specifically Jewish requirements, but they’re also things that any kid from any background will recognize and understand.

From there, visitors proceed to a kosher grocery store and kitchen. I’ve observed before and I’ll observe here again, kids love playing store, and children’s museums tend to support future retail careers.

Sabbath and Holidays

Past the kosher supermarket, other areas on the traditions floor cover:

A hallway timeline that quickly and dramatically covers the six days of the creation of the world. Which logically ends at the seventh day and…
A Shabbat dinner, featuring candles, a giant challah kids can crawl through, and an equally giant matzoh ball soup (no swimming). I watched an animated, talking bottle of wine in a video embedded in a ginormous wineglass, something I’ve never encountered at another children’s museum.
A gamified explanation of what you can and can’t do on the sabbath, and how that’s changed over time. This installation featured myriad lights and buttons, reminding me of Mission Control, if the mission were staying on the right side of the law.

Sabbath dos and don'ts through time, Jewish Children's Museum

New Year for Trees, Jewish Children's Museum The Traditions floor culminates in an impressively thorough overview of the Jewish holidays, designed as a village. Naturally it includes holidays like Hannukah and Yom Kippur and Passover that I reckon almost any New Yorker will know. And it also covers ones that I know less well but am fascinated by. Tu B’Shevat, the New Year of trees, features a somewhat creepy and ent-like animated tree, who explains that holiday.

5,786 Years of History on One Floor

The other floor of exhibits focuses on Jewish history, starting with Abraham’s tent in the desert with its four doors. Enter the tent and visitors meet Sarah (Abraham’s wife, not my tour guide), who welcomes them. She says she knows they’ve traveled far, most likely including by elevator. Which made me smile.

40 Years in the desert, Jewish Children's Museum — Are we there yet?

From there, the visitor follows a roughly chronological path through Biblical Jewish history. Highlights for me included:

The aforementioned Exodus escape room,
A fun light-up map illustrating the 40 years of wandering in the desert, and
An interactive moment where guests must cooperatively “blow” seven shofar to make the walls of Jericho fall.

Shofars and Jericho (post walls falling), Jewish Children's Museum — Jericho, after the walls fell

A section on the Land of Israel follows, and then “Sages Through the Ages,” a gallery that discusses the canon of Jewish law and the great scholars who have set the tone of interpreting the Talmud and the Mishna over the centuries. Even here I was impressed by how the curators have found ways to take a rather dry, academic topic (for me anyway) and bring it to life through animation and interactivity.

Tackling the Holocaust

The floor concludes with more recent Jewish history, as well as a fun Noah’s Ark play area for very young kids. I wondered how, if at all, a children’s museum would attempt to tackle the Holocaust. You kind of have to, right? But, it’s impossible to tell how much parents or teachers might or might not have told young visitors about that chapter of history, and also difficult to level-set for disparate ages and maturity levels.

Ghetto exhibit, Jewish Children's Museum

Amidst the walk through Jewish history, there’s a grey wall that looks like a ghetto. A small hallway behind that wall features phone receivers, small images, and a few artifacts. The space is less about what happened to six million Jews, and more about how people going through that unimaginable time did their best to keep their traditions alive.

Building a menorah out of scavenged spoons, finding ways to keep Kosher, baking matzoh at a time and place when being caught doing so was a death sentence. The stark space marks a strong visual departure from the colorful design and carnival atmosphere that pervades the rest of the museum. It’s a good indicator of the care and thought that went into JCM’s design.

Activity, Interactivity, and Hyperactivity

We wrapped up my tour of the museum upstairs, with, unexpectedly, a small climbing wall that, as a kid moves horizontally across it, recaps the history lessons from downstairs. And an outdoor terrace offers a 6-hole mini-golf course that covers the major milestones of Jewish life. A hole under a huppah for marriage, that sort of thing. I regret not playing the bar mitzvah hole, so that I could proudly tell everyone I have become a man.

Mini Golf, Jewish Children's Museum

Finally, we stopped into the temporary exhibition this summer. Kosher Wonderland offers an indoor, food-themed play area. Kids can enjoy a veggie ball-pit, a fishmongers where they can sort kosher from non-kosher plush sea creatures, slide down a giant inflatable cake, and much more. Not a single bacon double cheeseburger as far as the eye can see.

Kosher Wonderland at Jewish Children's Museum

The curators and designers of the JCM took care to pack in both activity (to burn off excess energy) and interactivity (to help hold attention spans). Everything has a gamified, interactive element. The lesson on the seven fruits of Israel takes the form of a water gun game, where visitors can compete to get their chosen produce basket to the top first. (Go, pomegranate!)

The 7 Fruits of the Holy Land, Gamified, Jewish Children's Museum — The Seven Fruits of the Holy Land, gamified. I’m team pomegranate all the way

Keeping up with the kids today

Sages through the ages, Jewish Children's Museum Sarah Leah and I talked about how some of the exhibit designs from twenty years ago are showing their age. Mainly that relates to attention spans. Some of the videos and other interactive elements feel long to young visitors today, where they did not back in 2004. And fashions and tastes have changed enough in the past couple of decades that some of the videos look dated. (Though not as dated as the unintentionally hilarious biopic of young “Teedie” at the Theodore Roosevelt House.) Finally, a number of screens at the museum are just screens, and of course everyone (kids especially) tends to assume that every screen today is a touchscreen. Updating installations, exhibits, and videos to keep up with changing times challenges all museums, regardless of topic or target audience.

Kids being, universally, sticky little monsters, they sometimes treat the exhibits and displays roughly. So not every installation works all the time. But that’s to be expected given the audience. I was more impressed by how much worked, and how cleverly the museum uses different kinds of interactivity. And I deeply prefer good, old-fashioned, mechanical, and tangible displays to exhibits where everything is digital and screen-based.

Who is the Jewish Children’s Museum for?

Sarah Leah and I also discussed the unique challenges posed by the varying audiences that the JCM addresses. Kids as the core audience, of course, and simultaneously the grown-ups who have to interpret and hopefully also feel engaged by the place. But it also has to serve both Jewish visitors and non-Jewish ones (and both kids and grown-ups in each category).. Curators would have an easier time if JCM just spoke to people in the know, but it has to be approachable and engaging to people who don’t know anything about Judaism, while not being too basic for those who grew up immersed in the history, culture, laws, and traditions.

Find the leavened bread, Passover display, Jewish Children's Museum — Find the leavened bread before Passover!

As a New Yorker for over 30 years, I think I can claim a little Jewishness by cultural osmosis. I’m at least superficially familiar with many of the traditions and the Bible stories covered by the museum. But I learned a lot, too. Sukkot, for example, has always been a bit of a mystery to me, to say nothing of tree new year.

The plants you need for Sukkot — Selecting the four species for Sukkot

Should you visit the Jewish Children’s Museum?

Anyone with kids around 8-12 should consider checking out the JCM. Its exhibits are well thought out, cleverly designed, and a lot more fun than I expected. I think the Jewish Children’s Museum potentially has an opportunity to institute periodic grown-up nights for curious non-Jewish New Yorkers who want to learn more about Judaism but don’t have a good place. Unless that happens, though, please only visit if you have kids with you.

Heads up that the Brooklyn Children’s Museum is also in Crown Heights. I didn’t love it, and the size and scale of both BCM and JCM would make for a very ambitious, dense single day, both for grown-ups and kids.

When I mentioned the Exodus escape room to my circle of work friends, they thought it would make an interesting team-building exercise. None of us is Jewish, but we’re all New Yorkers to varying degrees. And we’ve all seen “The Ten Commandments,” or at least “The Prince of Egypt.” So maybe I’ll get to take a shot at parting the Red Sea.

Rebecca at the Well, Jewish Children's Museum — Rebekah at the well

For Reference:

Address	792 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
Website	jcm.museum
Cost	General Admission: $17 for adults; $19 for kids
Other Relevant Links	The story of Ari Halberstam’s murder, via Lubavitch.com

July 7, 2026July 14, 2026

Bronx Children’s Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	52 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Any good children’s museum needs a some quiet spaces to balance the rambunctious ones. Bronx Children’s Museum, has named one of these quiet spaces Sonia’s Corner. As with so many museum halls and galleries, it’s named after someone, though in this case not a plutocrat or gajillionaire donor. And, actually, not one person but two. Two of the most prominent advocates for the BxCM happen to be named Sonia. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is one. Sonia Manzano, actor and author, is the other. “Sonia Who?” you’re probably thinking. You know her, though. For the past half-century and more, she’s played Maria from Sesame Street. It’s just a room, essentially (a nice room!). I didn’t even take a photo of it. But think about these two Sonias. One shaping the laws of the country and the other an unfamiliar name but someone who everybody who grew up with a TV in the last 50+ years knows and loves. Any corner that brings those two Sonias together is a good corner.

A Power House Museum

The Bronx Children’s Museum (BxCM for short) occupies the second floor of a castle-looking, century-old brick building in Mill Pond Park, a, skinny stretch of land sandwiched between the overpass of the Major Deegan Expressway and the Harlem River.

Bronx Children's Museum - Exterior

The building has a fascinating history, so I’m going to digress for a minute. Mill Pond Park, on the bank of the river, exists on the site of the former Bronx Terminal Market, which opened in the 1920s as one of the city’s main wholesale food markets. The Power House, built in 1923, generated electricity to provide refrigeration for the market. So, the fact that it now houses a museum makes it a sort of sibling to the Tate Modern in London.

Bronx Children's Museum - View from afar Like so many things in the Bronx, Bronx Terminal Market went into decline, rendered obsolete by the larger and more modern Hunts Point Market. This entire area fell into disuse and decay. Its rebirth happened because of nearby Yankee Stadium.

When the City firmed up the plan to build the new Yankee Stadium (it opened in 2009), it set aside $64 million from the project to build Mill Pond Park on the former market’s riverfront land. Almost $14 million of that funding went to restore the Power House, which today houses a tennis center, restrooms, and office space. And it also provides the home for the Bronx Children’s Museum. Bronx Children's Museum - Exterior

A Nomadic Museum Puts Down Roots

The Bronx Children’s Museum was founded in 2005. For the first five years it lived a nomadic existence, putting on events and doing community outreach. A conceptual museum, rather than a physical one. It graduated from there to being a mobile museum-in-a-bus, and then in late 2022, after over a decade of planning and development, it opened in its permanent home in the Power House.

Bronx Children's Museum - interior view

BxCM occupies over 10,000 square feet on the second floor. Its design follows the modern aesthetic of high ceilings and exposed ductwork, with large windows looking out at the river, and abundant amounts of beautiful blond, knotty, engineered wood that forms interior walls and, in places, floors and ceilings as well. The spaces are curvy and flow organically, defining areas without dividing the space. Doors and walls close off a few rooms (like Sonia’s Corner and classrooms), but mostly visitors can see the whole space from any point in it.

Bronx Children's Museum - Restroom — BxCM – restroom

Every corner of BxCM is designed to engage and delight. Even the stairwell, which is bright and lively, and the restrooms, which pay homage to the Bronx River… I imagine using the bathroom there feels a bit like peeing outside).

Arguably, I didn’t see the museum at its best, visiting after hours on a Friday afternoon. John Boudreau, BxCM’s Director of Strategic Partnerships & Branding was kind enough to give me a private tour. For my past children’s museum visits (Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn), I’ve borrowed friends’ kids, but nobody was available for this visit. BxCM has strict and totally understandable rules: neither unaccompanied adults nor unaccompanied children are allowed. Bronx Children's Museum - Stairway

That said, I didn’t have a hard time imagining the place buzzing with young ones. If I’m honest, having it to myself, not filled with noisy, sticky little monsters, was fine by me. I am deeply grateful for the tour, and I felt lucky for the time talking with John about the purpose and role of children’s museums generally, as well as the role that this specific one plays for its community.

John also told me that at the end of each museum session it holds a parade. All the visitors march through the space to say good-bye to it. I am a little sorry I didn’t get to see one of those. And I sort of wish the Metropolitan Museum of Art would adopt the custom.

The Space

BxCM uses its curvy spaces well. One section focuses on sciency stuff. It includes a few small critters in aquariums, and a build-your-own beaver lodge, since beavers once lived on the Bronx River (and occasionally still do). The biggest and fanciest exhibit presents a river in miniature, with actual water. Cloud shaped fixtures rain water down to a long, winding table where kids can learn about canal locks, build bridges, and float boats downstream to the ocean. I wanted to play with it very much.

Bronx Children's Museum - river experience — BxCM’s miniature river

Another space replicates elements of a Bronx neighborhood, with a casita, shop facades, a vegetable garden, and a “book bodega.” Playing store is a common feature to children’s museums. It’s odd to me, though there’s nothing wrong with preparing for a job in retail.

Other spaces encourage kids to stretch their creativity. An enchanted garden has costumes for pretend and storytelling. An artist’s studio recreates the actual studio of children’s book illustrator C.G. Esperanza. (Esperanza also did the art for the stores in the neighborhood.).

Bronx Children's Museum - art space

And of course,, there are also those quiet spaces, like Sonia’s Room, and a dedicated space reserved for toddlers and very young children, who may not be ready to navigate waterways or operate a retail establishment.

Books Abound

Throughout the whole museum, books abound. Sonia’s Room, the young kids’ space, other nooks and corners all are stocked with them. I appreciated how much this museum stresses the value of sitting down and reading — or being read to. John Boudreau observed to me that the Bronx had no dedicated children’s bookstore until the Book Bodega within the museum opened. He also said that BxCM has given away over 5,000 books since opening. Bronx Children's Museum - Book Bodega

Like all children’s museums, BxCM has to speak to kids directly, but also to parents and caregivers. Each section of the museum includes ideas for “Play” “Learn” and “Go” geared for adults. They suggest things kids can do in the space, things they can learn there, and then other places in the Bronx or around the City to see the ideas in action. And, it almost goes without saying, all the museum’s signage is bilingual English and Spanish.

Should You Visit the Bronx Children’s Museum?

For a Manhattanite, the Bronx Children’s Museum is not the easiest place to get to via mass transit. If you have a kid, or you are a kid yourself, is the Bronx Children’s Museum a place worth visiting?

I think it’s well worth a visit. The design, the way it executes its mission, its love for its young patrons and empathy for their parents and guardians all impress. Like the Bronx Museum of the Arts, it welcomes people who may not think museums are for them. John told me that some people bring their kids weekly, or even more often. Though I am not in BxCM’s target demographic, I’m still glad that it exists to make its young visitors more aware of the nature and cultures of the Bronx, of New York City, and of the world.

Bronx Children's Museum - Entry

Finally, just south of the Bronx Children’s Museum is the future home of the Hip Hop Museum. That institution should open sometime in 2026. I’ve been excited about it for years! I’m not sure it’ll make a strong double-bill with BxCM, but I bet the two neighbor museums will devise awesomely creative joint programs.

For Reference:

Address	725 Exterior Street, 2nd Floor, Bronx, New York
Website	https://www.bxcm.org/
Cost	General Admission: $14 for adults, $8 for kids
Other Relevant Links	Hidden Waters, the companion blog to Sergey Kadinsky’s book, “Hidden Waters of New York City,” discusses the Mill Pond that Mill Pond Park is named after, as well as the Power House. The NYC government’s website on Mill Pond Park Oneill McVoy, the museum’s architects’ page on the (multiple award-winning) project Beavers in the Bronx River

May 24, 2026June 24, 2026

New Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	172 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The New Museum’s re-opening exhibition featured a wall of art by a Barcelona-based Pakistani artist named Seher Shah. Drawings made of ink, pencil, and graphite dust, they are detailed, austere, formal, monochrome, serene. They remind me of blueprints, or musical notation, but twisted, aged, warped by time. The New Museum, Seher Shah, various works They are not the most on-theme pieces for the show, they’re definitely not the showiest, but after seeing them, I reached out to a Mumbai-based gallery that represents her, got a digital catalog of her work, and actually bought a piece, which is currently in transit from London to New York.

This essay on the Newest of the New Museum’s incarnations replaces the original one I wrote in 2017. The last time I wrote about it, the New Museum had just turned 40. Back then I suggested that based on its curatorial politics a better name would be The Progressive Museum. Which I concede would make a terrible name for a museum these days. No sense painting a bullseye on one’s back.

The Old New Museum

Marcia Tucker, a curator at the Whitney in the 1970s, felt that new and emerging artists didn’t get a fair shake at established museums (this despite the Whitney Biennial). She therefore set out to create an institution specifically for, well, the new. And thus another art museum was born in New York City. To ensure things stayed new over time, the New Museum decided that it wouldn’t have a permanent collection. Shows come, shows go, but there aren’t any greatest hits to visit time and again.

Now almost 50 years old, the New Museum is in many respects even less accurately named than it was in 2017. For the moment, though, “new” rings true, as the museum reopened in March 2026 after being closed for two years to expand, adding a prismatic new next-door space to its existing stack of boxes on The Bowery.

I wasn’t a big fan of the Old New Museum. I liked it okay, respected what it did, but found the architecture unwelcoming, not so user-friendly, windowless and personality-free with absurdly high ceilings and utilitarian stairs. Back when I reviewed it the first time, it had already spilled over into an old building next door. Now that building is gone and something newly new (for now anyway) is in its place.

The New New Museum

Why expand? The museum decided it didn’t have enough space to put on the shows it wanted to. It’s now added 60,000 more square feet, so, hopefully space won’t be an issue again for a while. In addition to the lack of space, the quirky Old New Museum lacked many of the amenities that museums think they need to have these days:

A cafe or restaurant (very fancy restaurant in this case);
One of those bleacher/ stairway thingies that people can sit on and that can be used for lectures or events;
Cool high-up indoor-outdoor space with a view, for throwing parties for rich patrons; and
An iconic museum staircase for the Insta or TikTok or whatever.

Much like the new Studio Museum in Harlem, the New New Museum now checks those boxes. I remain skeptical of super-deluxe architect-driven expansions, but the New Museum’s does help make the building more visitor-friendly, without overly diluting the austere forms of the original.

The Future of Humanity

The New Museum has re-opened with an absolute banger of a show. But, funnily enough, I can never remember what it’s called. I keep telling people it’s “The future of humanity something something something.” In reality, the show is called “New Humans: Memories of the Future.”

The whole expanded building is jam-packed, overstuffed, even, with different artistic takes on man — sorry, ‘human’ — and machine, human and nature, cities… it’s almost too big of a theme to make for any kind of coherent exhibit, especially for a museum of contemporary art. It’s encyclopedic in ways that New Museum shows historically weren’t. It’s got pieces in it from the 1800s, for heaven’s sake — the polar opposite of “new.” With that vague “future anything” conceit, practically anything could be included. And given the vast space, practically everything was.

The curators leverage the museum’s old and new spaces well — I never felt lost, for all that I did feel like I was taking in a lot. I especially enjoyed a narrow, intensely cobalt blue, space that told a capsule history of the early days of computer art. Again, it surprised me the New Museum did it, that 80s-era stuff is resolutely memories of the past at this point, not the future. But I enjoyed it just the same.

The show mixed very cerebral and political takes on being human with crowd

pleasers (an HR Giger alien, an inexplicably skinned E.T.) It was jarring in an interesting way to see a monumentally important piece like Jacob Epstein’s “The Rock Drill” from 1913 just a couple of rooms away from Simon Denny’s jokey 2019 sculpture that realizes a sketch from an actual Amazon patent for a cage to keep human warehouse workers safe from their robotic co-workers (to be clear, the human goes in the cage, not the robots).

What’s the New New Museum For?

Despite its vast ambiguity, I really liked… I’ve already forgotten the name again. Future…Humans? It offered lots to think about, balancing visions of the future of humanity from the present with ones from the 1910s, 1960s and even the 1880s. It was comprehensive, reflective, and well curated. Was all of it perfectly on-theme? No, it sprawled too much for that. But if I were a New Museum curator I’d be reveling in having the space to sprawl, and I’d be itching to attempt something this big. It was super serious and academically impeccable.

It was the least contemporary show I’ve ever seen at the New Museum.

Indeed, my slightly snarky take after seeing it was that it felt like a MoMA show, not a New Museum show. Nobody goes to the New Museum for deep historical context. At least, they didn’t at the Old New Museum. To me, the New Museum is supposed to be gonzo and over-the-top and strident and its shows are supposed to make me a little angry. I hope future shows will get back to doing that. New York already has one MoMA, and one is enough. (And, yes, I’m counting the Guggenheim.)

So, here’s hoping that after this show the New New Museum goes back to being very contemporary, hip and edgy, off-the-wall.

Should you visit the New Museum?

I return to my opening notion that the New Museum needs to rebrand. But what would it more accurately call itself? The Newish Museum (rhymes nicely with the Jewish Museum)? The So-Called New Museum? When I have a better idea, I’ll email them.

The New Museum is good at its job. Anyone with an interest in art, and particularly contemporary art, should go, with a caveat. Given the lack of permanent collection, once Future Humans (or whatever) ends, your mileage will vary depending on what is filling all that space on The Bowery.

New York offers a surfeit of places to see contemporary art. If whatever the New Museum’s curators are doing doesn’t excite you, I’d recommend MoMA’s Queens outpost, PS1 over the New Museum. It’s a great old building for new art. Or the Whitney makes a good choice, and you get the High Line as a chaser. Or you could always spend an afternoon visiting galleries in Chelsea.

That said, if you’re just a tiny bit conservative and you like art that pushes your buttons, riles you up, even ticks you off, I can almost guarantee that whatever’s on at the New Museum will do that better than any other institution in New York. (Barring a Whitney Biennial.) If you’re super progressive and want to find a fortress of your people in embattled times, the New Museum is definitely that.

Fans of contemporary architecture should also visit. Although I didn’t love the original 2007 New Museum building from SANAA, I respected its defiant eccentricity. A stack of boxes that resolutely refused to check the boxes of required museum features. The new addition makes the whole New Museum more user friendly and easier to navigate, in addition to adding many square feet of space. It’s also an interesting example of a very contemporary intervention grafted onto an already very contemporary original building, something that doesn’t happen all that often.

The New Museum, old and new buildings kiss

The Twentieth Century

I can’t end without mentioning my runner-up “best thing I saw or learned” at the New Museum. Ironically (or maybe not), it was one of the oldest things in the exhibition.

Albert Robida was a French cartoonist who lived from 1848 until 1926. In 1883, he published a series of cartoons titled Le Vingtième siècle (The 20th Century). The New Museum show includes a series of these delightful science-fictional visions of life in the coming century. The most on-point image is “The Tramway at the Louvre Museum.” It’s absolutely a memory of the future. A sharp, witty comment on mass tourism, how people (mis)use museums, and how tech disrupts the way we interact with art. Look at the happy tourists, zipping from photo op to photo op and then on to the next landmark or monument. Sometimes the old and the new are actually the same thing.

Albert Robido, Page from La Vingtiême siêcle

For Reference:

Address	235 Bowery (near Prince Street), Manhattan
Website	newmuseum.org
Cost	General Admission: $25 (pay what you wish on Thursday evenings)

February 28, 2026February 28, 2026

Studio Museum in Harlem

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	115 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The new building lets the museum show off far more of its collection than it could before. And yet, the best thing I saw this visit is the same as it was in 2017. Barkley L. Hendricks’s captivating “Lawdy Mama” from 1969 is an extraordinary portrait. The Frick Collection, of all places, gave Hendricks a fantastic exhibit while it was in the Breuer Building.

I visited the new Studio Museum in Harlem back before Christmas. This re-review has taken a while to write, but I figured I had better get it in before the end of Black History Month, so here it is, barely beating my deadline. My 2017 review of the old Studio Museum is here.

Studio Museum in Harlem Facade

The Studio Museum in Harlem is an art museum in, yes, Harlem in Manhattan. Its mission statement says the museum serves as “the nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally and for work that has been inspired and influenced by Black culture.”

I joked in my original take on the Studio Museum that, like Chief Brody said in Jaws, they’re gonna need a bigger boat. Well, they got one.

The museum formerly occupied lovingly converted, quirky, too-small space in an old building on 125th Street. It closed in 2018, tore the old building down, and finally re-opened in November of 2025 in a spiffy new building created just for it. Was it worth waiting seven years and a pandemic for a new version of the museum? Maybe.

Continue reading “Studio Museum in Harlem”

August 17, 2025August 18, 2025

The Frick Collection

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	210 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	I want to break my rule and say that the whole building is my favorite thing about the Frick, but if I had to pick just one thing, I’m so happy to get to visit the Garden Court again. It’s lovely, green, and a respite when you need a minute away from the art.

My second-favorite museum in New York City

The Frick Collection has re-opened in its Fifth Avenue mansion after a multi-year, zillion-dollar expansion and renovation project. My pithy original review from 2017 is here, and my review of The Frick’s temporary home-away-from-home in the brutalist former Whitney, former Met Breuer building on Madison Avenue is here.

I loved the original Frick Collection for its extraordinary good taste, and for succeeding as simultaneously one of the best house museums and art museums in the City. I loved it for bucking museum trends and norms:

Minimal wall text – just look at the art!
No cafe
No photos allowed (take that, Instagram!)

I worried when the big renovation project was announced. Would The Frick sacrifice the things that made it special?

Then, once the museum moved to its temporary space, I found I loved The Frick Madison. I thought the recontextualization of the collection was brilliant and I appreciated (though I did not always love) the opportunities that having the collection there created to let Mr. Frick’s art commune and converse with contemporary art. I was sad when it shut down.

But now The Frick is back, and the question on my mind is, is it still my second favorite museum in New York City? (If you’re curious, The Cloisters is number one..)

Short answer, if you’d rather not read this whole essay, is yes. And luckily enough, during the member previews for the new-old Frick this spring the museum waived its no-photo policy, so I can pepper this review with pictures.

Nothing but the best for Mr. Frick

I try to be careful about superlatives. If I like or dislike a thing subjectively, that’s not the same as something being objectively whatever. So, when I claim that The Frick Collection boasts not one but two of the very best roomfuls of art in New York City, that’s very conscious.

The first room is Mr. Frick’s Living Hall, which is home to an astounding set of pictures. Hans Holbein’s St. Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, forever glaring at one another from opposite sides of the mantel. El Greco’s St. Jerome in between them. The monumental St. Francis by Giovanni Bellini on the opposite wall, flanked by two literal Renaissance Men. I imagine what Mr. Frick’s ego must’ve been like, that he could sit with this group of guys around him, and not be intimidated beyond all ability to work, live, think, converse.

The second room is the West Gallery, which is, I sincerely believe, painting for painting, the best single roomful of art in New York. What a flex this particular collection of masterpieces is. The Rembrandts. The Turners. The Velazquez. The Titians. The Vermeers, plural. There’s not a miss in the room. Any of them merit looking at for hours, for days.

And the thing is, The Frick has always had many other rooms that, depending on artistic tastes and preferences, could easily rank on a “best rooms” list. And the new Frick has a lot more of those rooms to love.

The new Frick takes it to the next level

The ground floor of The Frick Collection includes the public, formal spaces the Frick family dined and entertained in back in the day, with plus dedicated gallery space, a lovely glassed-over garden court, and an entry foyer added in the 1970s.

One reason for the renovation was to address a fairly major need for more space, for many reasons. The collection continues to grow, and The Frick was stuck hosting lovely little temporary exhibits in very inadequate basement space. The gift shop was possibly literally located in Mrs. Frick’s former broom closet. The Frick held concerts in a room that decidedly did not live up to the rest of the building. All these issues are now addressed, and then some.

The biggest change from the old Frick is the second floor. Formerly offices of the museum staff, and before that the family’s private living spaces, the Frick has reclaimed a series of upstairs rooms for art. Everything about them is fantastic, although I do worry that they’re so intimate that crowd control will prove a challenge.

Frick newbies will take it in stride, but for Frick veterans there’s a fun frisson of trespassing when you go up that grand staircase the first time. While the Frick was in previews, they discovered the low risers and carpeting make the mansion’s staircase a little treacherous to descend, so they are up-only. Fortunately, there’s an awesome marble stairway in the new addition that safely returns you to earth again.

Addressing all The Frick’s former problems, the new addition also offers:

Much bigger and better space for temporary exhibits
A fancy cafe
New space to show drawings and works on paper
A beautiful subterranean theater (I can’t wait to hear a concert there)
A gift shop that definitely does not resemble a broom closet.

The Shape of Fricks to Come

We don’t live in a world where things get better. Entropy is the rule, change inspires skepticism rather than hope. But sometimes, against the odds, change improves, reinvents, opens new doors, or new floors. At least in museums. The new-old Frick Collection is better than it used to be.

Perhaps my biggest surprise — shock even — at the new Frick was a bowl of buttons at the member preview. Some bore the classy old-school “HCF” monogram logo, which, thankfully, The Frick has not thrown out in favor of some sort of superflat sans serif font. But the other buttons read, “FRICK YEAH!” If I’d been wearing pearls I would’ve immediately clutched them. Kudos to the marketing team for making a joke I never thought I’d see The Frick willingly make about its august founder’s surname.

I do have one reservation. I was excited about the restoration of the old gallery spaces, putting the collection back “exactly as it was.” Except, it isn’t. Not quite. The Frick has pulled off a super subtle intervention throughout, a temporary installation of dazzlingly realistic porcelain flowers by Vladimir Kanevsky, a Ukrainian-born contemporary artist. These play off The Frick’s art, sometimes too well. They reflect The Frick’s own amazing porcelain collection. AND they offer a nod to beleaguered Ukraine. Well played, curators.

But. But but but. That’s some new art snuck into in the old spaces. And a bit of me raises a skeptical eyebrow, reaches for my metaphorical pearls again. Just because this sneaky, subtle art intervention succeeds (really well!), that doesn’t mean the next one will. And I bet in this edgy, brave new Frick, there will be others. So, we’ll see.

Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland, 1871, plus flowers — James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland, 1871 Plus flowers by Vladimir Kanevsky

That off my chest, I refuse to end pessimistically. Everyone should go to The Frick Collection. It’s both wonderful and essential. And now it’s a whole new Frick, and yet it’s also the old Frick, and I can’t wait to see what it does next. “Frick yeah,” indeed.

The Frick Collection, Henry Clay Frick — Henry Clay Frick, in his collection

For Reference:

Address	1 East 70th Street (between 5th and Madison), Manhattan
Website	frick.org
Cost	General Admission: $30, advance timed tickets essential
Other Relevant Links	Cromwell and More hating each other reminds me of Wolf Hall, where Hans Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell makes a cameo appearance Vladimir Kanevsky’s delicate porcelain work

August 8, 2025August 8, 2025

Vilcek Foundation

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	55 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	It’s lame to pick the obvious crowd-pleaser, but I loved the centerpiece picture in the Il Lee show. IW-2201, 2012 is a big oil and acrylic work. Here’s a detail, a larger picture is in the review, below. Photos do not do it justice, though.

Of all the things I love about New York, the best is how there is always more to it. There are so many bars, restaurants, cultural institutions, jazz clubs, whatever, that it’s virtually impossible for any one person to know them all. No matter how good your radar, on whatever the subject, New York City always has something flying under it. Waiting to be discovered.

For example, say you’re someone who has been going to New York City museums. You’ve been cataloging them and writing about them for nearly a decade. And you (well, me) think, arrogantly, that you’ve got the best database of museums, extant and closed, in the City. And then you discover a nonprofit that’s quietly been hosting art exhibitions since before you started your museum quest. That’s just a thing that happens.

A few weeks ago, I was walking on East 70th Street from the Frick Collection (re-review badly overdue) to Madison to catch the M4 bus when I stumbled on the Vilcek Foundation.

To be fair to me, the Vilcek Foundation has only been on 70th since 2018. Also, based on the foundation’s website the Vilcek Foundation didn’t do any art exhibitions between 2013 and 2019. So maybe I didn’t actually miss them, as much as they restarted a part of the mission that was on hiatus before they moved to the East 70th Street location.

Finally, in my defense, the only way to see Vilcek Foundation exhibits is to make an appointment and get a tour. However, that’s an easy process, and it’s hardly the hardest museum space to gain access to in the City.

All that said, I’m very happy to add a new-old place to my list.

Vilcek it out

The Vilcek Foundation exists to “raise awareness of immigrant contributions in the United States and fosters appreciation of the arts and sciences.” So, that’s not exactly a fashionable thing to do these days. It makes it akin to, among other places, the Ellis Island Museum. The Foundation gives out grants and prizes, and, across two floors of long, narrow gallery space, holds exhibits showcasing the work of immigrant, something-American artists.

The Foundation website opens with a nice, very unfashionable, tribute to the value of diversity: how it propels innovation and sparks new ideas and strengthens America’s cultural and scientific community. Perhaps, then, it’s better that it’s a bit of an under-the-radar institution, at least until the political winds change.

The Vilcek Foundation’s building, down the block from The Frick, is a landmark, 1910s-era townhouse, understatedly renovated. The gallery spaces aren’t huge, but they are decent in a stark white kind of way, consisting of two levels connected by a staircase of the type that seems required for upscale duplex art galleries and museums.

Who is Il Lee?

The current show at the Vilcek Foundation showcases the work of Il Lee, a Korean-American artist. Born in Korea in 1952, he moved to New York City in 1977 to go to Pratt. Impressively, a large part of his practice is done with ballpoint pen. Which leads to questions of whether it can be called “painting” (which the show catalog does). His work is mesmerizing, a mix of control and randomness, of planning and freedom. And effort. It’s a ton of work. I can only imagine the hours and hours it takes to cover a large-scale sheet of paper or canvas with so many ballpoint lines that they blur together into solid blocks of color. How many attempts end with a piece that doesn’t quite work, where one errant line throws everything into disarray.

The Vilcek Show offers a strong cross-section of Il Lee’s work, showing how his practice has evolved over the years. It highlights several of his loopy, swirly, ballpoint pen pieces and a selection of his prints. It also includes work he’s done in paint. Rather than painting per se, he layers oil over acrylic. He then uses a dry ballpoint pen as a stylus for dragging his signature swirly, swooping curvy lines into the layers of paint. It’s spectacular, tactile stuff, reminding me of the world’s most precise finger-paintings.

Funnily enough, Il Lee also loaned the Vilcek Foundation several bags of pens. Apparently he keeps every one he’s ever worked with. Those are on display in a plexiglas box in the middle of the ground floor gallery space. I’m a big fan of art that elevates humble materials, and there are few more humble than a Bic pen.

It was a beautifully curated show, fun and edifying at the same time, and it had the incredibly beneficial effect of introducing me to an artist who was not formerly on my radar. My bad for that. I can’t imagine how Il Lee does what he does, even though the work is essentially a “how to” for itself. The lines are the lines, there’s no concealing what he’s done. But the amount of time and patience, work and practice required to make them look just so boggles my mind.

Should you visit the Vilcek Foundation?

My guide to the Il Lee exhibit was a curatorial fellow named Olivia. I really appreciated her willingness to spend an nearly an hour with me, talking about Mr. Lee and his practice and his work. Seeing the show, and Olivia’s insights into it, were well worth the (tiny) effort it took to email to get a date and time scheduled.

Confusingly to me, the Vilcek show prior to this one was on Pueblo Pottery, which, would seem antithetical to the mission statement of celebrating immigrants, but I’m always down for some creative cognitive dissonance. I’m sure not every artist the Foundation features would be as in sync with my personal aesthetic as Il Lee turns out to be, but I’m looking forward to keeping an eye on what they show next, and to visiting again.

In the current political climate, I appreciate any organization that tries to remind the world that some of the greatest contributions to American art, science, culture, and society came from people who were not born here. If you’re the sort of person who disagrees with that, no harm, no foul, just skip this place, it’s totally fine.

But if you’re anyone other than that kind of person, I strongly recommend a visit, Il Lee is on until the end of May 2026, definitely go see that if you can. And after that? Check out what’s on, and if you have the luxury of planning in advance, book visit to the Vilcek Foundation as a chaser to a visit to The Frick Collection.

For Reference:

Address	21 E 70th Street (between 5th and Madison), Manhattan
Website	vilcek.org
Cost	General Admission: Free, but must make an appointment in advance by emailing info@vilcek.org
Other Relevant Links	Il Lee on Art Projects International Il Lee on Rembrandt, video from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

June 19, 2024June 19, 2024

Louis Armstrong House Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	82 minutes + 45 minutes at the Louis Armstrong Center (see update below)
Best thing I saw or learned	This place feels so real. It’s like Louis and Lucille Armstrong just left the room to get you an iced tea, and they’ll be back in a jiffy. Nothing is labeled, no velvet ropes. The Armstrongs’ iron (or very good facsimile) still sits in their closet. I strongly suspect their air conditioners cool some of the rooms. More than any other house museum I’ve visited so far, this place still feels like a home.

UPDATE: JUNE 2024

I first visited the Louis Armstrong House in July of 2017. As I mentioned in my 2017 review (below), the Louis Armstrong House had plans to build a new visitor center on a vacant lot across the street from Louis and Lucille’s house. That finally came to fruition in 2023 and so I recently returned to see the Louis Armstrong Center. I also re-took the tour, but rather than rewrite the whole review I’m tacking on this addendum (pre-dendum? fore-dendum?) to say a few words about the new exhibit, and how it goes with the house.

The new building is modern, fit to the low-rise residential neighborhood but with an exuberant glass facade. It houses the Louis Armstrong Archive, and has spaces for performance and instruction (I peeked in on a couple of kids practicing the trumpet), as well as a gift shop. The main thing visitors will care about, though, is an exhibit titled “Here to Stay” that summarizes Louis Armstrong’s life and times through selected artifacts and video and audio clips. This replaces the small exhibit in the former Armstrong rec room that I describe in the original review.

“Here to Stay” includes sections with titles like “Roots,” “Tools,” “Ambassador,” and “On Film.” Each display combines some artifacts and photos and wall texts telling the relevant story. Most surprising to me was a section called “Armstrong the Artist.” I mean, obviously he was one of the greatest artists of all time. But this section refers to Louis Armstrong as a visual artist. He made collages, in both scrapbooks and on the covers of the hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes he recorded. Is collage the visual arts equivalent to jazz? Maybe. Taking bits and pieces, remixing and matching them, putting them into surprising new orders, improvisationally. It makes sense, and showed me a side to Armstrong I had no idea about before.

Louis Armstrong's OTHER art, collage (on tape cases)

Interactive table at Louis Armstrong Center The exhibit also features an circular interactive table with multiple touchscreens. This gadget, designed to look like a record, that lets visitors explore in huge detail Louis Armstrong’s music, his collaborations with other artists, his travels, his life and the neighborhood, and more, all with stills, video, and audio. You could spend a long time exploring there.

The opening of the Louis Armstrong Center has provided a welcome opportunity to re-visit both the Armstrong’s house and my original review of it from seven years (!) ago.

In the years since my first visit, my love of the place has only grown. Whenever someone asks me for examples of unusual New York museums they should visit, it’s near the top of my list. And I regularly refer to it as my favorite house museum in New York. The addition of the new Louis Armstrong Center only strengthens the overall experience. I’m really glad they didn’t try to change the house itself to pack in more museum-type bits. So I’m taking advantage of this addendum to update my former rating (it was 3-4-4 before). This is absolutely one of the best museums in New York City, a wonderful tribute to a wonderful pair of people, and everyone should go.

With that, I’ll pass you off to Joe from seven years ago to give hist impressions of the house part of the Louis Armstrong House, dating from June of 2017. Having just taken the tour again, I can vouch for it being just as good this time around. You still can’t take pictures inside, though.

ORIGINAL POST: JUNE, 2017

A riddle: If Louis Armstrong were a superhero (and I’m not saying he wasn’t), what would he call his souped up vehicle for patrolling the streets of Gotham?

A: The SATCHMOBILE.

Actually the Satchmobile is the name of the official van of the Louis Armstrong House Museum.

Satchmobile, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens — Quick, Dizzy, to the Satchmobile!

Louis Armstrong practically invented jazz. He played all over the world, made a bajillion records, sang songs that everyone knows. And when he wasn’t doing all that, from 1943 until the day he died he and his wife Lucille lived in a modest three-story brick house in the Corona area of Queens. They entertained generations of neighborhood kids, Louis made tape recordings of himself (he was sort of a tape diarist), and generally lived far more quietly than you’d expect from a jazz superhero.

Louis Armstrong House Museum, Corona, Queens

Louis Armstrong died in 1971. Lucille lived for another 12 years, until 1983. They never had kids. And the house, pretty much exactly as it was when Lucille died, passed into the hands of the city. Queens College manages the place, and they lovingly restored and opened it in 2003 as the best house museum I’ve seen so far.

You can only enter the house on guided tours, but my gods, it feels just like you’re visiting the Armstrongs. The group (nine people joined my tour on a random Saturday afternoon) goes right up the front steps, rings the musical door chime, and proceeds on their visit, which explores every room in the house, down to the breakfast nook.

Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens, New York

The House

The management frowns on photos. I cheated once, to take a picture of Louis Armstrong’s infinitely mirrored bathroom. I wondered if Yayoi Kusama ever visited the Armstrongs. Or took this tour…

Bathroom, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens

Here are some of the things I managed to resist photographing:

Louis’s wood paneled den with its fabulous bar (there is still alcohol in his bar. Drambuie.) and fabulous reel-to-reel tape recorders.
The Armstrongs’ bedroom with its wild silver wallpaper.
The amazing 50s kitchen. Bright blue, enameled, curvy cabinetry, custom sub-zero fridge, everything built in. Paper towels stored in their own wall cubby. They even had a blender built into their countertop. Lucille and her kitchen designer were geniuses!
Their white upright piano, which neither of them could play, but looked good in the living room.
Four green ashtrays shaped like the suits from a deck of cards.
Art from a lifetime of world travels.
Okay, I wanted to take pictures of everything.

But I could not resist the bathroom. I apologize, Louis Armstrong House Museum folks.

The Louis Armstrong House uses sound, but unexpectedly it doesn’t play a lot of music. Rather, during the tour, the guide periodically plays bits of recordings of Armstrong talking about the house and his life. In his den, there’s a portrait of him by Tony Bennett (!), and Louis talks about that–how he signed it “Benedetto.” Letting the man speak for himself in his own home works incredibly well.

A Few Other Things

The entry to the Louis Armstrong House and its gift shop is in their former garage.

From the garage you proceed to a small exhibit area, in what used to be his rec room. Where he played poker with Dizzy Gillespie. (His poker table is on display upstairs.) I like to think of it as the Satch-cave.

Look at these stairs! And the wallpaper!

Exhibit Room, with inevitable brief DVD introduction

Currently there’s a display commemorating the 50th anniversary of the inescapable, somewhat saccharin (to my taste) “What a Wonderful World.” Not a hit when first released, the film “Good Morning Vietnam” rediscovered the song and set it on its path toward ubiquity. But Louis said whenever he sang it, it reminded him of Corona.

You can also see Armstrong’s bathrobe and slippers, life mask, and suitcases. And one of his trumpets. And three pages he wrote about his joy living in the neighborhood. I got the sense that even if someone had offered them, say, Andrew Carnegie’s mansion, he and Lucille would’ve stayed right where they were.

Koi pond, Louis Armstrong House The most unexpected thing about the house is the Armstrongs bought the lot next door and made it into an expansive garden, with pine trees, a little lawn, a tiny koi pond, and a bar and barbecue. In this one place, I felt a legendary musician exerting some star power. They only built the garden in 1970, so just a year before Armstrong died. Better late than never.

Garden, Louis Armstrong House

I sat there for a while playing in my head what I’ll get to say when someone asks me what I was up to today. “Oh, not much. Sat in Louis Armstrong’s garden reading a magazine for a bit.”

Changes Coming

The Louis Armstrong House experience will soon change significantly. A vacant lot across the street (where they currently park the Satchmobile) is going to get a spiffy new building that will greatly increase the museum’s ability to tell Louis and Lucille’s story. I think that’s wonderful — though I wonder if the neighbors on this quiet block agree.

But even as they’re able to show off more of their collection, I sincerely hope that the house stays just exactly the way it is. It is an amazing monument to the talent, humility, and soul of one of the great figures in the history of music.

You can build museums to jazz (not saying you can succeed, but you can try). You can memorialize great concert performances in museum form. You can digitize music and tell its story through touchscreens and headphones. But nothing you can possibly do will bring you closer to Louis Armstrong than visiting his house in Corona, Queens.

Meanwhile, somebody please write a Justice League-style comic book featuring the Superheroes of Jazz battling the forces of squareness.

Trumpet, Louis Armstrong House — Steiner trumpet, gift to Armstrong from King George V, July 1934.

For Reference:

Address	34-56 107th Street, Flushing, Queens
Website	louisarmstronghouse.org
Cost	General Admission: $10, with tour

May 4, 2024May 4, 2024

Statue of Liberty Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	37 minutes (in the museum; far longer getting to and wandering around Liberty Island)
Best thing I saw or learned	I keep coming back to a pair of quotations. One was from an editorial from the Black-owned Cleveland Gazette from Nov. 27, 1886, that read, “Shove the Bartholdi Statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country [exists for the] colored man.” Alongside that was a quote from Lillie Devereux Blake, president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, who said, “In erecting a Statue of Liberty embodied as a woman in a land where no woman has political liberty, men have shown a delightful inconsistency.” Cheers to this museum for celebrating the statue and what she means, while acknowledging that not everyone agreed, even back in 1886, that liberty was a done deal.

Note: This review updates my review of the old Statue of Liberty Museum, dating from 2018, when the museum was located inside the Liberty’s pedestal.

Why Liberty?

We do not live in terribly allegorical times. Alas, this era rewards bluntness over allusion, and literalism rather than metaphor. How, then, can can one explain the enduring popularity of “Liberty Enlightening the World,” a very allegorical and symbolic symbol indeed, standing on an island in New York Harbor?

Because, judging from the insane queues of people who had journeyed from every corner of the world to go visit her inconvenient island, Lady Liberty remains exceedingly popular.

It’s stranger still because, when you think about it, “Liberty Enlightening the World” is a particularly 19th century sort of idea, obsolete in times where many both in the United States and outside it would question the mission statement.

With those thoughts on my mind, I semi-patiently queued, scrummed, went through airport-style security and boarded a ferry to cross the harbor to visit her, and the museum that tells her story.

The Statue’s Story

Surely everyone knows the story of the Statue of Liberty. Gift from France, colossal, New York Harbor. Immigrants. Lifting her lamp beside the golden door. Yadda yadda yadda.

The museum highlights five instrumental people, also immortalized in statues on Liberty Island:

Edouard de Laboulaye: who dreamed her
Auguste Bartholdi: who designed her
Gustav Eiffel: who engineered her
Joseph Pulitzer: who raised the money to give her a place to stand
Emma Lazarus: who gave her her soul

Statues of the key figures in the creation of the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island

Old Statue, New-ish Museum

The Statue of Liberty Museum occupies a purpose-built, very modern building on the northern edge of Liberty Island, as far from the statue as one can get without plunging into the harbor. Opened in 2019, it boasts a green roof, ample space for accommodating the huddled masses from the ferry, and fantastic views toward Manhattan, as well as of Lady Liberty’s rear.

Statue of Liberty Museum, Liberty Island, New York

The museum tells the story of the genesis, engineering, construction, and gifting of the statue, as well as her absolutely iconic role as a symbol of freedom, democracy, New York City, and the United States. Among other treasures, it includes the statue’s original lit-from-within torch, replaced during the 1986 rehabilitation of the Statue.

Continue reading “Statue of Liberty Museum”